Mary Lovelace was living in Brentwood, California, and working as an interior designer. As a home-improvement specialist, she would drive a minimum of 365 miles every day in her car, carrying samples including doors, windows, and hardware in the trunk and backseat.
“Then the recession hit, between 2007 and 2009,” Lovelace recalls. “It kept getting worse and worse.” Fewer people were hiring interior designers, and eventually Lovelace was laid off. She received unemployment, which wasn’t enough to cover her rent after other expenses. She tried without success to find other work. She was eventually evicted from her rented house. A friend in nearby San Francisco let her stay in his garage. She parked her car across the street.
Parking tickets began to accumulate on the car. Some tickets, she says, listed the wrong address, a block and a half from where the vehicle was parked; sometimes the dates did not match. After a while, the car was “booted”—a metal device clamped on the wheel to render it immobile.
Nearly 50,000 towing businesses operate in the U.S., and they have already generated more than $8 billion in revenue so far this year.
…Mike Herald, director of policy advocacy for the Western Center on Law & Poverty, a California-based public interest law firm and contributor to the report, points to revelations from Ferguson, Missouri, as an example of what has been happening elsewhere.
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