City attorney candidate continues criticism of RV proposal

Ever since Seattle Councilmember Mike O’Brien began crafting new parking rules for homeless RVs, Scott Lindsay has countered the proposal.

“I agree with Councilmember O’Brien,” Lindsay told KIRO Radio’s Rantz and Burns. “We clearly need to do something serious to tackle the growth of people living in their RVs, living in their vehicles in the City of Seattle.”

“But there are smart ways to make investments to tackle that, and then there are ineffective and inefficient ways to make those investments,” he added. “Part of the track that Councilmember O’Brien seems to be leading us on takes us down a more expensive and less effective route.”

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O’Brien has pushed back against criticism like Lindsay’s and news reports about his RV parking proposal.

Lindsay is familiar with the workings of city hall. He’s a current candidate for city attorney, challenging Pete Holmes. He spent the past few years as an adviser to Mayor Ed Murray. He was around when the city tried to create RV lots to take people off the street. That plan failed, Lindsay notes. It was too expensive and could not benefit from the economy of scale that homeless shelters do.

O’Brien’s proposal would create a program for RV residents to enroll in. In the program, an RV would not be held to normal parking laws. The people living in them would be put on a path toward permanent housing. But Lindsay says it would also create more RV lots and it wouldn’t adequately address the homeless issue. To do that, the city, police, prosecutors, and behavioral health providers would have to work together to tackle a range of causes. They currently don’t, he said. And many of those problems stem from drug addiction.

“There is a very real interconnectedness of these problems right now,” Lindsay said. “It doesn’t help those living outside to not talk about that. That was my frustration working in city hall. We kept pulling the homelessness lever, but we weren’t actually delivering services specifically tailored to people living with addiction.”

“Really, what we are talking about most commonly right now is heroin addiction and meth addiction,” he said. “Those are really driving a lot of the population. The Navigation Team found out … the folks living in the most hazardous situations — the unauthorized encampments, the RVs – this isn’t the whole homeless population. Eighty percent were living with addiction.”

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