SPS asked city's homelessness team for help. The solution is illegal
Last summer, a Seattle Public Schools official emailed the city team that responds to homeless encampments about a revolving cast of people in RVs and tents that lined the street leading to the district's Sodo headquarters.
He said the RVs and homeless people forced staff and families to walk by scenes of drug use and panhandling and returned no matter how often the city's Unified Care Team targeted the area to be cleared. Ted Howard, the schools' accountability officer, asked for "lasting solutions."
Emails obtained by The Seattle Times show they landed on a popular one in Sodo: large rectangular concrete barriers, often called ecology blocks or eco-blocks. Private businesses and residents have installed them throughout the industrial district to take up parking spaces and right-of-ways used by people living in RVs.
But they are illegal.
The city requires a permit to interfere with a public street. The emails included members from the city's parks and human services departments, along with leadership at Seattle Public Schools. Absent was the agency that does the permitting: the Seattle Department of Transportation.
The transportation department confirmed the school district did not get a permit, nor was it aware of the effort to place the eco-blocks. The school district, under the guidance of the Unified Care Team, used public money to buy and place them anyway, in violation of city law. The total project cost the school system $26,400, the district said.
The Unified Care Team official coordinating the effort was an employee of Seattle Parks and Recreation, and the department didn't respond to a request for comment.
Staff for Mayor Katie Wilson also didn't answer specific questions asking whether the Unified Care Team's actions, which took place under her predecessor Bruce Harrell, aligned with her own policies.
It's a glaring example of the disproportionate enforcement of Seattle's laws governing public streets. For years, the city has allowed eco-blocks to spread illegally. A recent University of Washington study found the number of eco-blocks in Georgetown, just south of Sodo, now totals 2,400 - an average of 892 blocks per square mile.
The Seattle Department of Transportation has done little to find or fine those responsible, even though it's in charge of enforcing rules in the right of way.
A spokesperson said the department was reaching out to the school district to understand its role in the eco-blocks after The Seattle Times asked about the emails. The enforcement process would start with a warning.
A spokesperson for the school district said it placed the eco-blocks following the advice of the city's Unified Care Team and would follow the city's advice about removing them.
Advocates say these barriers don't reduce the number of people in RVs - a solution that requires services or housing. The barriers, they argue, just push people elsewhere.
And sometimes they barely do that. A year later, the eco-blocks outside the school headquarters along Third Avenue South are still there, in a jumble of shapes past a barbed wire fence that protects a district parking lot. The RVs are fewer, but people continue to set up tents around the blocks.
Bill Kirlin-Hackett, the former director of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, who has long criticized the city for ignoring eco-blocks, said public officials should also face consequences for skirting the law.
"I think they should all be fined."
Spike of eco-blocks
Sodo has been a hot spot for people in RVs because Seattle only allows oversized vehicles to park overnight in industrial areas. And where RVs park, businesses and neighbors have responded with eco-blocks, although they almost never advertise responsibility.
The number of people placing eco-blocks spiked when the pandemic hit. The city stopped enforcing its rule limiting parking on any street to 72 hours, and the number of RVs multiplied. Then people continued putting them out even after the city resumed enforcing parking rules and the number of tows and tickets skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, people who put eco-blocks in the street without a permit could also face fines - $250 for the first violation, $500 for the second and $1,000 for further violations under city code. But the city has never done much to enforce these fines or any rules around the barriers.
The transportation department, which oversees the right of way on most public streets, said it won't approve permits for eco-blocks because "the desire to prevent others from using a public space is not a valid reason for seeking a permit in and of itself," as a spokesperson stated in a 2021 letter. When the blocks have appeared, however, the department has said it's difficult to cite anyone unless they find out who's responsible.
Members of the city's Unified Care Team knew where to start, according to the emails with the school district.
Tom Van Bronkhorst, a parks employee who acts as a strategic adviser with the Unified Care Team, provided phone numbers to the school district for acquiring the barriers and renting a truck. The district arranged them on the street.
Scott Crain, advocacy director for legal aid nonprofit Northwest Justice Project, said this collaboration raises questions about the city's hands-off approach to eco-blocks. All cities may have enforcement priorities, he said. It may even make sense for Seattle not to use time and staff to investigate the barriers.
"It's a totally different story to say we're going to put them out to address the homelessness issue," Crain said.
No Seattle mayor has publicly endorsed eco-blocks as a strategy to resolve RV encampments. Wilson's spokesperson Sage Wilson said in a statement the mayor believes public space should be accessible to everyone.
"This is a core public responsibility that should be managed by the city for the benefit of all," he said.
It doesn't feel that way to some. The records confirmed what Graham Pruss, now director of the National Vehicle Residency Coalition, already suspected - that the city has been silently consenting to eco-blocks as a tool to prevent RV encampments. When he was doing outreach in Seattle before the pandemic, the correlation between the city's encampment clearings and the concrete barriers was hard to miss.
"As soon as that sweep would come," he said, "you would see this rapid installation of eco-blocks."
Shifting the problem
A Seattle Public Schools spokesperson emphasized the need to create a safe environment for staff when saying why they placed the eco-blocks. Beverly Redmond said the schools try to balance safety with "compassion for our broader community."
But the records show the school official who originally emailed the Unified Care Team also had another concern: that homeless encampments outside the headquarters created a bad public image.
"Each time families and staff are greeted by scenes of panhandling, open drug use, yelling, and instability, it communicates, intentionally or not, that the area is unsafe, and by extension, that our schools and city are not doing enough," Howard, the school official, said.
At the same time the eco-blocks went in, the Seattle Department of Transportation also made roughly $50,000 of its own changes to the street. Its staff blocked off parking - legally - in the middle portion of Third Avenue South, adding a curb and more than a dozen "no parking" signs. A spokesperson said this was "a small-scale project" to make the sidewalk there usable. Additional emails obtained by The Seattle Times show the Unified Care Team official reached out to transportation staff to initiate the walkway project - with no mention of the eco-blocks.
The sidewalk is now well protected, but it ends abruptly, followed by the rows of concrete barriers.
Taken together, the changes to the street have largely insulated the school district headquarters from RVs in the area.
They are still on surrounding streets.
Jonah Silverstein, an outreach worker in Sodo for the nonprofit Vehicle Resident Outreach - UHeights, said eco-blocks aren't the answer to limiting RVs and encampments in the neighborhood.
"The answer is giving people access to resources like an RV safe lot, where they can actually stay, live, have some dignity, and work towards housing," Silverstein said.
Seattle has been in the process of opening an RV safe lot in West Seattle, where people can park legally, after a previous location had to close last year. But the city has not made this type of resource consistently available.
People in RVs said the city seems more focused on chasing them around.
On a hot afternoon in Georgetown, Andrew Edwards was fixing his radiator, so the city wouldn't tow his RV when its workers cleared the area the next day.
He said he was told he had overstayed parking rules. But that's hard for him to believe when there are eco-blocks along the street indefinitely. The city's real problem, he said, is with them.
"We're not wanted," he said.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Scott Crain, advocacy director for Northwest Justice Project.
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This story was originally published July 6, 2026 at 4:48 PM.