When is a Home a Home? The Need for Legal Car Camping Spaces

 

Despite the image of the average houseless person as being out on the streets or in a tent, the reality is that there are hundreds of thousands of Americans that use their cars and mobile homes as both temporary and permanent shelters, a reality that is both at times glamorized, demonized and frequently misunderstood. What defines a “home” becomes a little more complicated when looking at mobile homes, as they have a structure to live in yet no legal space to park it in. This is where the problems start for those looking for a safe place to live off the street; they simply are running out of places to stay in spite of their shelter. With a growing number of mobile parks simply vanishing and not being replaced by local governments, people have no choice to park their vehicles in public parking spaces and lots, often drawing the ire of the local communities and leading to punitive punishments, like impounding, ticketing, and auctioning, as ways to further push these people into poverty. In this post I will look at how these situations are created directly by greater societal elements, like rent prices and job security, and how punishing people for living in their car only serves to make the homelessness crisis worse.

 

These issues become much clearer when you look at the statistics around citizens living in their vehicles. This information is from Seattle, Washington, but they reflect a wider trend throughout the United States that has only gotten worse since the COVID-19 outbreak and governmental shutdowns that resulted. Additionally, by looking at these graphs we see the cause of homelessness for these people lies deeper among other societal problems, largely job insecurity and raising housing prices. When compared to non-Vehicle residents, there is an average of ten percent of causes of homelessness attributed to greater societal issues like income equality and unreasonable rent prices, highlighting that the issue of people being forced to live in their car cannot be solved with punitive measures without addressing the greater issues first. As these graphs on rent prices show, there is a direct correlation between how much a city charges for rent on average and how many homeless people exist in that community. The cities may treat things like unsanctioned RV camps as nuisances that must be squashed, but it’s hard to deny that they are the ones that sowed the seeds that made these camps necessary in the first place.

 

These tickets issued to vehicles are not harmless financial measures, but rather legal traps that eventually lead to vehicle impoundment, as well as long term damage to credit ratings and the ability to receive financial help in the future. Whether they are auctioned off for fifty dollars or destroyed by the city using thousands of taxpayer dollars, the system directly exists to ensure that the people affected are further pushed into poverty with no hope of ever recovering. As we can see from the data, thousands of people are living in their cars and see it as a viable form of shelter, but it’s the government and wealthy local communities that are working overtime to make sure that they have one less safe space to sleep in. For us to combat this, we need to create a vast number of legal spaces for these vehicles to exist in, and to have a legitimate way of supporting a plan that makes up for our lack of public parking. Not only will this help the communities that want to clean up their streets from public car camping, but more importantly, it will provide the thousands of people who live in their car every night with a place of legitimate security that they currently do not have.

To read more about safe parking programs and learn about programs that currently exist, click on the links below. While the amount offered is not nearly enough for the amount of people in need, it shows that there are examples of this system working, and how we can build this into something that offers security to everyone who needs it.

 

https://www.beavertonoregon.gov/378/Safe-Parking-Program

https://www.cityofvancouver.us/community/homelessness/vancouver-safe-parking-zone/