Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Looming Tower
About ten years ago, I was moving from Los Angeles to Lexington, Kentucky. As one of my final stops before leaving, I visited two friends of mine at their apartment that Saturday night. Their place was in an enormous, sprawling complex with at least a hundred units and — as I recall — about three or four designated parking spots for guests. With those spots taken and no street parking available, I parked my car in the business lot across the street (which was, as I recall, a bank).
The three of us stayed up far too late and I’d had a few drinks. Given the hour, my slight inebriation, and the fact that their couch was at least as comfortable as the air mattress I’d been using since selling my bed, I asked if I could crash with them and was heartily told I should. The next morning, I woke at something resembling a reasonable hour — before 9AM, I believe — and went to collect my Jeep. As should surprise no one reading this, it’d been towed during the wee hours.
Getting it back proved an ordeal. If I remember correctly, I called the tow number posted in the lot and was told that I would not be able to pick up my Jeep, as the lot was closed to customers on Sunday (smart aleck comments regarding the lot apparently being open to towers did not aid my cause), and I was told that I could collect my Jeep on Monday after being charged a holder’s fee for its Sunday confinement. My subsequent effort to pay the tow lot employee in cash in exchange for my vehicle’s release was similarly fruitless. In all, it took $250 cash and multiple free — and much-appreciated — rides from my friends and roommate to ransom and restore my beloved Cherokee.
I hadn’t thought of this in years, but reading Linda Tirado’s Slate piece reminded me of just how miserable that experience was and how lucky I was that I had the means and resources to get through it with nothing worse than a hole in my wallet and a singed ego. Stipulating, of course, that I had violated the bank’s property rights, kidnapping and ransoming my vehicle seemed a wildly inappropriate remedy.
As Tirado argues, it’s easy to forget the luxury most of us enjoy in having a social and financial cushion to protect us from our mistakes and bad luck. People with fewer means — especially those with integrity — can’t afford to make the kind of bone-headed mistakes that others can solve with a credit card, a day off, or a phone call.
Pulling one’s self up from the bootstraps is, rightly, the American ideal and something always in need of championing. In doing so however, we should always be realistic about how difficult that can be — and how easily bootstraps can break.
Published in General
Great post. I’ve had my car towed twice. I can’t believe this is legal. Horrible experience.
And great food for thought.
The poor are a gold mine.
Linda Tirado’s back? At best, she’s an unreliable narrator of her own poverty woes. A year ago, the patient Cathy Young sorted out the fact from the exaggerations in Tirado’s earlier work. Ms. Young’s conclusion still holds up:
Thanks for this post. It’s important to remember this “count your blessings” message.
At least, once I figured out that “looming tower” was not a tall building…
It’s expensive to be poor.
Many of the poor consistently make bad financial choices which keep them in poverty. I had an employee who was a month behind in her mortgage payment and so paid a $280 late fee every month, which is over $3,000 a year. Evidently she’d been doing this for years. She made over $40k working for me – which isn’t exactly poor – and her husband had a job but they just couldn’t take the steps to catch up and save themselves that $280 mo.
It’s the same thing when people pay thousands in credit card interest each year – they can’t discipline themselves enough to stop this waste of money so they cycle deeper into poverty.
Inside this post is a punch line about “faulty towers” trying to claw its way out.
What Mike Hubbard said.
Plus this: Even if Tirado were as poor as she claimed, most of the problems she describes are the result of her own fecklessness. One example — Tirado eschews saving as useless. She points out even if she saved $5/week at the end of a year she would only have $260. What good is that small an amount of money, she asks?
However, if she had done that – and made it a regular habit to put a little bit of money aside in a cookie jar each week – when her car got towed, she would have had $260 in her cookie jar. Then she would have had the cash on hand to rescue her truck.
Or she could have taken out a payday loan or borrowed money from her rich parents. Or her poor parents and relatives. (Cannot count the number of times I have lent money to a sibling in a jam.)
Quilter and I have been through patches were we lacked income. But we always got by because no matter how little we were making we had put some of it aside when we were making money.
Tirado has made a career out of being feckless and poor. (Or maybe pretending she is.)
Seawriter
Absolutely. At the same time, it’s much easier to fall into those kind of mistakes (and harder to claw your way back out of them) when you lack resources.
If I hadn’t had the cash available — admittedly, not that much — and friends with the time and means to haul me around, what was a minor financial stumble could have turned into a full-fledged fall.
Is it? The woman in Frozen Chosen’s story had resources. I can think of acquaintances from high school who had enough money to live a comfortable life (typically through inheritance) when they were young adults who went through every penny in less than ten years. (For that matter, think of the pro football players with multi-year million plus contracts who burn through what they earned shortly after leaving the game — or in some cases while still playing football.)
Money may serve as a cushion, but double-down on stupid, and you rip a hole in the cushion.
Ever consider why you have friends available and cash available to help you while Tirado does not? Especially the friends. (My bet is she never has considered that question.) I’ll bet it is not just dumb luck and that you are one of the winners in life’s lottery.
Seawriter
I just hope no one concludes from all this that towing and impound fees should be indexed to income. Then you would see rusting hulks left alone for days while the brand new Jaguar gets towed for being 5 minutes overdue.
Yeech. I get shutters just thinking of that.
I’m actually curious as to what market solutions there are to bad towing practices. The main problem is that the people procuring and providing the service have such different incentives than those who end up paying for the car’s retrieval. And since the likelihood of my ever interacting with the tower again are minuscule, they’ve little incentive to change their behavior based on my objections.
Oh, it’s absolutely not just luck and it should go without saying that people are, ultimately, responsible for their own circumstances, and those circumstances are largely within the control of individuals. Even in matters of luck, we’ve some control.
I’m just pushing back very gently on the tendency — which I’m guilty of sometimes — of over-stating that position.
This is totally off-topic but it reminded me that I had a dream about you a couple nights ago, Tom. I’ve never met you or seen a photo of you but in the dream you looked just like the British scientist who got into hot water for wearing the purple shirt that featured pictures of empowered women. You were serving on a four-person jury and decided to host a Ricochet Meetup during a trial. I just wish I could remember who the other Ricochetti were who showed up for the meetup. I know, people think I’m weird for having dreams about other Ricochet members, but I can’t help it.
The cause is the bank’s outsourcing the job to people who profit from causing misery regardless of the circumstances, if you abused the bank by parking all day during banking hours, that would be one thing, but I’m sure no one called to complain that you were taking up a spot in an empty lot overnight on a weekend.
On the planet Manhattan, at least it used to be that the pier where you have to retrieve your car is naturally in a sketchy neighborhood and of course only cash is accepted. As an additional humiliation the only hole in the bulletproof glass is at waist level so each supplicant has to walk up and essentially bow or genuflect in order to pay the extortion….er…conduct business.
Yeah, I get that a lot. Used to drive my wife nuts, but she’s used to it now. ;)
Seriously, I’ve had dreams every bit as specific and weird as that.
Exactly. My problem is that I can’t think of a good market solution.
I’m not sure, not knowing exactly how towing services work. (Do they get special crony privileges from the cities they work in, for example?)
I do think that benefit or mutual aid societies have historically been an effective way for poorer people to provide each other with social insurance beyond the bounds of church and genetic family – and with more structure and risk-pooling that what you might get from in-family transfers, so that there’s less risk of individuals dissipating their own capital in helping each other out:
Unfortunately
Being able to fuse social and economic capital in an orderly and mutually-supportive manner is especially important when you’re poor.
Nah…That’s not weird at all.
I thought that this post was going to be about something else entirely.
It would seem to me that the practice of towing vehicles and allowing their owners to pay and readily retrieve them when they have been parked some place where they are not permitted to be, is an effective market solution. Broadly speaking ones who brings their vehicle onto a private property that is clearly marked against the practice or limiting this practice are likely committing the crime of trespassing. Trespass may be a relatively minor misdemeanor in some states such as in Ohio (Class IV misdemeanor, see Ohio Revised Code 2921.11) or may be as dear Joe Biden might say, a big f-ing deal, such as in Virginia where it could get you 12 months in jail and a big fine (Class 1 misdemeanor, see Code of Virginia 18.2-119). Serving any jail time or paying a large fine is its own hassle, without even mentioning the fact that a trespassing conviction would bring a mark against a person’s criminal record which could stand in the way of future or even present employment.
However, the process that allows you to retrieve your vehicle after trespassing upon the property of another against posted warnings avoids the hassle of interactions with the police, interactions with a judge, and possibly interactions with a jailer. For this tradeoff you may be asked to pay the fee to retrieve your vehicle without all of the additional hassle.
For myself, I’d be content to pay the towing and storage fees while escaping the additional hassle of dealing with a trespassing charge or conviction. “You want $250 to release my car? Here you go, and thank you for keeping the police out of the mess.”
In the People’s Republic of New Jersey, if a registered, insured vehicle is parked on an area of the street where parking is legal for more than three days, it can be towed, and held hostage, just as Mr. Meyer’s was.
Ummm….don’t park in posted private lots, even if you think it’s unreasonable for the owner to object?
[Note: this assumes a fact not in evidence, that the bank parking lot was in fact posted that “unauthorized vehicles will be towed”.]
If you want to talk about a market failure, it’s not the bank, it’s the apartment complex. Why did it have only three or four guest parking spots for three or four hundred residents? Because home-shopping is an incredibly complex project where a consideration like “guest parking” is pretty far down people’s priority lists. Because it’s not something people care much about at the moment they’re making the purchase, the apartment complex has little incentive to provide more guest parking, which after all is expensive real estate.
My objection is not to some kind of punishment but that the punishment is way out of proportion to the ‘crime’. How about placing an invoice on the vehicle for say $25 and then treat non payment the way a business would treat any other bill non-payment with credit repercussions etc.
Have you ever tried to collect a small amount of money from somebody? Without “leverage”?
The thing to remember here is that you are not the tow company’s customer, the bank is. And while you’re right that it’s unlikely the bank needs customer parking overnight on the weekends, they still have an interest in policing unauthorized usage of their lot. Just ask anyone who owns a business near a bar district – if you don’t enforce by towing, you’ll come in on a Monday to find your parking lot littered with trash, empty bottles, urine, vomit, used condoms, etc.
If there is a market-based solution, it would probably be for the bank to lease their parking lot after hours to a parking-management company that would provide an attendant and parking fees, etc. to allow the public to use the lot when the bank isn’t.
Also wanted to compliment you on the cleverness of your post title. :)
An obvious solution is to drive a car that’s so cheap you can afford to abandon it to the towing company.