Project Overview 

Our project concerns the proliferation of “eco blocks” that are illegally obstructing parking spaces across Seattle, with particularly negative impacts for homeless residents living in vehicles. An eco block is a large, roughly two ton block made of recycled concrete that can be used for various construction purposes. Corresponding with the spike in the unsheltered homeless population in Seattle during the first year of the pandemic, business owners began installing eco blocks on streets surrounding their premises to prevent residents living in RVs and other large vehicles from parking there. 

The city has chosen not to write citations for eco blocks and regularly advises businesses on where to purchase the blocks and how to install them. The proliferation of the blocks is continuing apace, increasingly choking out much of the available parking in certain neighborhoods, impacting both housed and unhoused residents. According to one local community member who regularly helps tow inoperable RVs, at least 3 miles of parking have been eliminated from the South Seattle neighborhoods of Georgetown and SODO in the past two years alone, a figure that doesn’t include the majority of Georgetown’s eco blocks which were installed even earlier. This process, accomplished variously through eco block placement, official city redesignation of parking zones to no parking zones, the re-marking of streets to eliminate parking margins, installation of infrastructure such as bike paths, and other business and taxpayer-funded means has led to a proportionate decline of vehicles in industrial South Seattle. There remains only approximately 1.25 miles of parking for homeless vehicles across Georgetown and SODO, with approximately 3/4th of the vehicles in these neighborhoods having been lost since 2024. 

The aforementioned community member had the following to say about the importance of parking availability for homeless residents: “Vehicles are a stepping stone out of homelessness, providing a safer and more securable environment than tents or even many city shelters offer. When vehicles are lost, which happens at an increased rate when available space is limited and people have to try their luck in places that are inevitably more populated than the preferred quiet industrial backroads that are now off limits, people are set back in their path to getting back inside, often losing critical IDs, papers, and other elements that are not easy to replace.”

While the city has argued that the reason they have not written any citations to businesses is because it is difficult to identify who installed any given set of eco blocks, many business owners have both contacted the city directly for guidance on eco block installation and openly admitted in local outlets to installing blocks around their premises. As one Magnolia business owner told KOMO News, “It’s now part of doing business in the city of Seattle…We are at a point now where we are on our own. If the city’s not going to do anything about [the unsheltered population], what are we to do?” (Choe, 2022) In the absence of a coherent, ambitious response from city government to get the unsheltered homeless into permanent housing, business owners are taking desperate, illegal measures to keep homeless residents away from their properties. 

To demonstrate the scale of the issue, we counted and mapped all of the eco blocks that were obstructing public parking in Georgetown in February and March of 2026, part of an area that has been cited by the Low Income Housing Institute as having the largest concentration of RVs on streets in the city (Komo News, 2026). Our findings indicate that during this period there were approximately 2,400 illegal eco blocks in the neighborhood, a rate of 892 eco blocks per square mile. This staggering figure elucidates how so much parking has vanished from Georgetown in only a couple of years. While businesses increasingly install the blocks spaced far enough apart so that medium sized vehicles can parallel park between them, they are still a hazardous presence for all motorists, situated as they are low to the ground, making it easy for a motorist to forget their presence and drive directly into them. 

For homeless residents, the consequences are far greater than a dinged-up fender. Losing an RV is equivalent to losing a home. One former Georgetown resident who lost the bus she lived in for four years during a street sweep and subsequently moved into a tiny home run by the Low Income Housing Institute had the following to say: “[When I was living in the bus] I could be there whenever I wanted, I didn’t have to worry about getting kicked out any second. I had to move often but at least I wasn’t being scrutinized and penalized for having too much stuff or whatever.” While this resident said the vast majority of people living in vehicles would prefer to live in permanent housing, the choice between a vehicle and city shelter was obvious: “People prefer to live in their vehicle because they have their freedom.”

We hope our project can be part of a broader effort to get the city to take the eco blocks crisis seriously. Consistent citation for the installation of blocks on city streets and the coordinated removal of currently illegal blocks would go a long way towards making the city more livable for its most vulnerable residents.

References

Choe, J. (2022, February 16). In some Seattle neighborhoods, residents, businesses take steps on 

their own to block RVs. Komo News. Retrieved May 8, 2026, from https://komonews.com/news/project-seattle/in-some-seattle-neighborhoods-residents-businesses-take-steps-on-their-own-to-block-rvz

Komo News Staff. (2026, February 17). New Seattle RV village aims to move people to safe 

housing, remove vehicles from street. Komo News. Retrieved May 8, 2026, from https://komonews.com/news/local/new-seattle-rv-village-aims-to-move-people-to-safe-housing-remove-vehicles-from-street-homeless-housing-shelter-benefits-help-food-taxes-taxpayer-safety-drugs-addiction-camping-ban-sweep-south-park-wilson