StarTribune.com
Bill would give those living in cars right to last few possessions
By NICK COLEMAN, Star Tribune
March 12, 2008
They let Tony Ruston take a shoe. One shoe. Ruston, 47, is homeless. Everything he owned was in a 1977 pickup with a camper on top, which is where he began living in 2006 after he lost his job as a truck driver. He wasn't alone in his choice of four-wheeled domiciles.
A growing number of people live in cars these days, forced out of their homes by foreclosures, too poor to find a place to sleep other than their back seat. But when you live on the street, or park your life on one, you can lose everything to a tow truck. That's why advocates for the homeless are hoping to win passage of a law in the Legislature that would let the homeless retrieve their belongings from vehicles in impound lots, even if they can't pay to get the car back. The House author, Rep. Frank Hornstein, DFL-Minneapolis, calls it, "The Let-people-get-their-stuff Bill."
Hornstein says it is a matter of "simple human dignity" and says the current law, which allows impound lots to auction vehicles with all their contents, does not take into account the fact that people living in their cars can suddenly find themselves deprived of their records, their medications, their keepsakes and sometimes even their children's homework. It's a throwback to feudal times when the king could take your cow, burn down your hut and throw you into the ditch.
That's pretty much how Ruston felt in December. His truck held his tools, his clothes, his papers, his mother's funeral program -- the only photo he had of his late mom, Lois, and a souvenir bell she had kept since she was 13. It's all gone now, except for one shoe that workers at the St. Paul city impound lot let Ruston take before his truck was auctioned off. The truck, which was licensed and insured, was worth about $2,500, Ruston says. But when it was towed from a St. Paul street (Ruston admits he had accumulated a number of unpaid parking tickets), the charge to get it released started at more than $200, and grew by $30 a day.
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"Most of these things are valuable to nobody but their owners, but they are all just destroyed," says Ron Elwood, a legal aid lawyer who is one of the advocates arguing for a law change. "It's idiotic: Pictures of grandparents, keepsakes, Christmas presents. We even heard of a case where they wouldn't give a wheelchair back. We want the law changed so that if you're poor, or you're homeless -- and you can prove it -- you can get your stuff.".. Ruston, who has lived in a shelter since losing his pickup, sees it all from the perspective of a person who has almost nothing left to him. "They didn't give me nothing except my shoe," he says. "I was angry. That truck was my only connection to any kind of independence. They took it away from me. They even took my mother's picture."
http://www.startribune.com/politics/state/16628686.html
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