Artist Michelle Angela Ortiz's mural "Together We Bloom" adorns the walls of Las Adelitas, a new afforbale housing project in Portland's Cully neighborhood.
Courtesy Michelle Angela Ortiz
An ombudsman investigation in Portland found potential evidence of predatory towing at a group of apartment complexes in the Cully neighborhood. The report says towing practices financially and emotionally harmed residents, most of whom identify as low-income and Latino. It also found that the influx of towing impacted clients and staff at a nearby county-run health clinic and community center.
Tony Green is a deputy ombudsman for the city of Portland. He conducted the investigation and joins us with more details.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. A recent investigation in Portland found evidence of predatory towing at a group of apartment complexes in the Cully neighborhood. The ombudsman report says that towing practices financially and emotionally harmed residents, most of whom are low income and Latino. It also found that the towing impacted clients and staff at a nearby county-run health clinic and community center.
Tony Green is a deputy ombudsman for the city of Portland. He conducted the investigation and joins us with more details. Tony, welcome to the show.
Tony Green: Thank you for having me.
Miller: What prompted this investigation?
Green: We received some complaints from members of the community, people who were living in the apartments. And I did some initial research. Then we held a community meeting in January and spoke with a number of residents and heard their stories firsthand.
Miller: What stood out at that listening session, that community meeting?
Green: Well, some of the details were pretty jarring – abusive and unprofessional behavior, illegal conduct or overcharging, towing vehicles that weren’t actually parked illegally. But I think I was also struck by the financial and emotional harm. People really struggled to come up with the money to get their vehicles out.
And I think just a sense of being under siege when they’re trying to get their feet on the ground. As you mentioned, many of these folks are immigrants and I had the sense that all the efforts that the city and others were putting in to help stabilize them was being undermined by the aggressive towing practices.
Miller: This is a key point here and I think one of the big reasons that you did this in the first place. So what resources has the city put in in this area?
Green: They put in more than $16 million, specifically, in two of the five complexes. So this is a big part of the city’s commitment and investment in affordable housing.
Miller: Can you describe this area, this complex of apartment buildings and other buildings?
Green: The area is an intersection of Cully and Killingsworth. And it’s on both sides of Killingsworth and both sides of Cully. There are multiple apartment complexes. Really what ties them together is the county community center and health clinic, which is available for residents and others. So there’s a lot of connections between them even though there are streets that separate them.
Miller: You mentioned that you were struck by the financial piece here, among other things. How much might it cost somebody whose car was towed?
Green: Well, within a few hours of your vehicle being towed, you owe at least $300. It takes less than a week for that amount to double. We also were dealing with people with multiple tows. One person said their vehicle had been towed three times and they had to pay over $1,000. A very back of the napkin calculation of the tows, if everybody had recovered their tows, within a day, we would have been talking about over $50,000 in costs to those residents in just six months. A $300 tow is half the monthly rent of a studio in one of the complexes. $300 and more is really a hardship.
Miller: So that’s largely residents. What did you hear about how towing issues have impacted clients or staff at the county clinic or community center?
Green: Even before the community meeting, when I was looking into this, I got a report that the physician who works there, her vehicle was towed – it turned out, illegally. And we were able to help her appeal it and win. But the clients, like women who are going to domestic violence classes, others seeking other services, we are hearing that because of the aggressiveness of the towing, some of them were dropping out and not willing to take advantage of these services because of fear of being towed.
Miller: So you did this community meeting. You also reviewed city towing data. What stood out to you about this particular group of properties?
Green: State law, generally speaking, prohibits towing without a prior written and signed request. There is an exception for apartment complexes where there are fewer spaces than units. We found that about half the tows were in apartment buildings where there were as many spaces as units. So there would have needed to have been a signed, written authorization. Almost all of those tows occurred in the middle of the night. I was unable to get any confirmation that such required written confirmation was ever sent.
Miller: Confirmation would have had to come from the property owner or property manager?
Green: Correct.
Miller: And if that doesn’t happen, that goes against state law.
Green: It goes against the law that went into effect in 2018, which is designed to stop predatory patrolling, which is where tow truck companies just drive around, looking for people to tow. This legislature sought to put a stop to that. And what seemed pretty clear to me was, in this case, they were continuing to operate illegally. At least the evidence was strong and I was unable to get the documentation to confirm or not. But neither the tow company nor the property manager would respond to me when I inquired about this.
Miller: So you instead … in the absence of actually getting that documentation that they didn’t provide to you, and knowing that so many of these tows happened between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., it seems like a pretty safe assumption to say that it’s very unlikely that they are getting specific written authorization at 2:00 in the morning for a tow.
Green: It is unlikely. And the purpose of my flagging this was to point out that this kind of predatory behavior has real costs to the residents of these complexes and to use that to point out that there are alternatives to towing. Whether it’s predatory and illegal or whether it’s simply aggressive, the result is the same. It’s a big cost for the residents.
One of the recommendations we had was to look into companies that use much less costly ticketing because we thought that could reinforce the rules and address the scarcity of parking there but not be such a financial burden.
Miller: I want to turn to that in a second. But an important piece here is that according to your report, towing was paused in 2022 and then restarted last year, in 2023, after some tenants themselves complained that people without permits were taking up the resident’s parking spaces. So even though you found that towing recently has been hurting some tenants, it seems it happened because other tenants asked for it. What is the level of parking space shortage in this area?
Green: There were enough spaces for at least one vehicle per unit up until the newest of the units came online. That one has significantly fewer spaces. And part of the confusion there is that everybody in that apartment complex gets a parking pass. But there are not nearly enough spaces for everybody. This is something we found that residents were unaware of. There is widespread confusion that just because you have a parking pass doesn’t mean you get to park.
One of the ways that the county attempted to address this was to tell people that they could park in the county lot overnight. But they were towed as well, even though that, on its face, would also have required the written requests ahead of time. So it is a complicated situation. There are not enough spaces for everybody. But there is not enough education. People are confused and towing is a very harsh way to deal with the situation.
Miller: And so as you were saying, one of your recommendations is to deemphasize towing and to go, instead, to some kind of ticketing system which should be less costly for people parking their cars. What would it mean financially for the property owners or property managers to go away from towing and go towards some kind of ticketing system?
Green: The towing generally costs the property managers nothing. The tow company keeps the profits. But the towing companies don’t show up every week. They don’t show up every day. They don’t tow every vehicle that’s parked illegally. They tow what their capacity allows. Ticketing can be essentially whatever they want. Certainly, it could be at least once a day. I got one estimate that would be $500 a month.
Miller: So $6,000 a year to have a less aggressive or punitive way of responding to the parking problems. What other recommendations did you make to the Portland Housing Bureau about these properties?
Green: One of the most glaring problems is that for many of the residents of these complexes, English is not their first language. And in some cases they are not fluent in it. And yet all of the signs, with one exception, were in English. The only place where there was a Spanish sign was in the county parking lot. So one of the recommendations is that the signs, at least bilingual signs, be put up so that everybody at least can read them and know that they’ll get towed if they park where they’re not supposed to.
Miller: One of the things that stands out to me here, as you’ve been describing this, is that there are two overlapping, but, in some ways, legally really distinct issues of illegal towing practices. For example, not getting prior written or signed authorization from the property manager. And then on the other side, aggressive towing, which is maybe unpleasant but does not go against the letter of the law.
Specifically on the illegal side, as a member of the Ombudsman’s Office with investigative powers and some kind of city authority, if you couldn’t get answers about whether this really went against the law or not, how would somebody whose car is towed ever be able to even argue that?
Green: I think it’s worse than that. If they got a lawyer and sued, all they’d be able to get is their tow overturned. All they’d be able to get is the money back. So there’s not even a built-in system that makes litigation possible. I think it adds to the problem that there is no good way, or no easy way, for an individual to get justice if they’ve been towed illegally.
Miller: Are there other areas in the city that you might turn to next, that have also raised concerns about similar styles of predatory towing?
Green: I don’t think this is even slightly unique to this area. There’s no reason to believe that towing companies are treating this group of apartment complexes any differently than any others. We’re continuing to look at this. I think this is a problem throughout the city.
Miller: Tony Green, thanks very much.
Green: Thank you for having me.
Miller: That’s Tony Green, deputy ombudsman for the city of Portland. He put out a recent investigation that found evidence of predatory towing in Portland’s Cully neighborhood.
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