It starts with a lapsed vehicle registration or a few unpaid parking tickets, resulting in a city-ordered tow.

But the effects cascade from there. Debts pile up. The car owner has no way to get to work. Meanwhile, the car sits for months in a lot — a burden for the towing company that has to move it around.

Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, has a solution for what he sees as a pernicious towing debt spiral. He’ll announce a bill on Monday that bans three forms of tows: for a car registration that’s more than six months out of date; for five or more unpaid parking tickets; or for a vehicle parked on a public street for more than 72 hours.

Such “poverty-related” tows “have a devastating economic impact on tens of thousands of low-income Californians every year,” Chiu said. Cities and counties typically charge $500 to collect a vehicle from a tow yard, tacked onto the cost of the unpaid parking tickets or late registration. These fees easily swell to $1,500 or more once owners start paying for daily storage.

A representative of the California Tow Truck Association, a statewide industry group, was not available for comment Friday.

Chiu said the seizures benefit no one: They don’t generate much profit for towing companies who sell the abandoned vehicles at auctions. They don’t encourage people to pay tickets. And they’re devastating for people who lose their jobs because they lack reliable transportation.

That’s what happened to 58-year-old Dana Robinson, who was trying to survive on bartending and stagehand jobs when police towed her broken-down work truck in Richmond.

At the time, Robinson had been evicted from an artist warehouse and was struggling to find housing. She lived in a scruffy Volkswagen Beetle and occasionally used the truck for odd gigs until its clutch broke.

Robinson was on the verge of selling the truck when police towed it for sitting on the street for three days.

“I couldn’t pay the fee, so I had to sign over the title,” she said. After that she remained homeless for several years, still working as a stagehand and panicking when she walked back to the Beetle at night. After the first tow, Robinson always feared her second car would disappear, too.

“I’d just be like, ‘please be there, please be there,’” said Robinson, who now lives in a cottage in West Oakland.

Elisa Della-Piana, legal director for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, said a steady stream of people have approached her organization for help retrieving a towed car or contesting the fees that pile up.

“We just had person after person coming into our clinic with this issue,” Della-Piana said, adding that the lawyers quickly saw the unintended consequences. People who lost their cars might lose their jobs, which would force them to seek public benefits.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan