I talked with a guy living in a motorhome in Mountain View California, he works for Google. He could certainly afford an apartment but said his payments on the motorhome are about $600 a month, and an apartment close to Google would be $2500 a month at least, so he feels like its a free $2000 a month to save or spend. He's fortunate that Google also has nice showers, free food, and laundry. Things he might otherwise have to find other options for.
I can't argue with the logic. It means $24,000 a year to apply toward student loans or what have you isn't a bad deal. And he will eventually pay off the motorhome giving him some security there.
Sadly, most people won't talk about their situation (I tried by walking down a road and knocking on doors) I was hoping to get a sense of how many people were living in motorhomes because they wanted to (like the guy I talked to) and how many were there because they felt they had no choice. I don't have any good ideas on how to get that information.
I did enough research to know that building a small lifestyle business out of offering black/grey water pumping and garbage collection services for the folks who were doing this by choice was probably viable. You would need a couple of custom trucks[1] that were capable of being mobile RV dumping stations and a business with sewer rights to dump (the City of Sunnyvale will license a business to have an RV dumping station on site, so starting there would work.) I think it would be a "pump and dump" scheme that would be both good for the neighborhood and probably make enough money to employ a few folks.
[1] To be full service you'd probably want a fresh water tank, a propane tank, and a sewage collection tank. Then you could dump the grey/black tanks, refill fresh water and refill propane. Personally I think it makes way more sense than these companies that were sending trucks out to refill your gas tank.
There's a pretty strong notion in this thread that parking is valued at $0 and this is a great social injustice, but this is not the case. Try getting a permit from just about any city to reserve a parking spot for occupying (for construction, moving, etc.). The cost will likely be comparable to renting an apartment of similar area for a similar amount of time. More, if the parking spot is in a high density area (multi-story buildings).
Parking is only "free" if you share it. Perma-parking a motorhome or "building a studio on it" is not that.
If you reclaim a parking space for another use (such as building accommodation for families or an animal shelter), you're not depriving the car of anything, it's an expensive, large piece of metal and is not sentient.
Next, you'll say that you're depriving car owners from the practicality of parking their vehicles anywhere they like. I'm perfectly fine with depriving car owners from this convenience to allow a human being to have a roof over their head. (speaking from direct experience as I've just minutes ago had to park my car 1km away from home because the city is currently building housing and has restricted parking space nearby)
Then, some might argue that one should be ashamed of helping animals while humans are suffering. That's the exact same train of thought with «we can't allow more migrants in, we have to take care of our "own" homeless people».
This is a false dichotomy. Western societies inequalities are growing larger and larger. Me trying to do my part is insignificant. Me donating to human or animal causes is a small dent into the mountains of inequalities we live on top of. Us collectively, we do make a difference, by donating, voting and generally keeping our eyes open about the world we live in...
Finally, an entirely anecdotal pov: I've witnessed several times extremely poor people going out of their ways to show solidarity to animals or humans. I've also witnessed an awful lot of extremely wealthy individuals complaining about the poor inconveniencing them by just being there, whose wealth was a direct consequences of their ancestors exploiting whose very same poor people.
So we should never have parking lots, because they could be repurposed into homes for homeless people?
I feel this is only really relevant to high-density cities that are being underdeveloped because of local regulations and NIMBY. Most of America has plenty of space when it comes down to it.
And aren't the parking lots this article is talking about basically public access parking for beaches? Do ya'll really think it's reasonable to say we need to remove public beach parking because it could be better used for condos? Because that's dumb, and that quote I responded to was said as if parking is a violation of human rights because it takes away room for shelter.
In all honesty, I'm not sure I understand your train of thought[0]: why would re-purposing beach parking into housing be dumb as an absolute?
There are probably places where that would be dumb and others where the community as a whole would benefit from increased housing availability?
Most of America has plenty of space but why would anyone agree to live in bumfuck nowhere? How could they make a living out of nowhere (remote jobs are, in the grand scheme of things, a drop in the bucket)? Why should they forego access to health services, community & the fabric of society? Some human beings enjoying being solitary but we all crave to various degrees of social interaction.
To answer your comment in a too simplistic way: if parking does take room away from shelter, yes, absolutely, that's very bad urban planning & if done on purpose is a "violation" of the rights of those who needed that shelter. Except that life & urban planning aren't always that cut and dry and we need parking space, shops, warehouses, factories, housing & animal shelters and a myriad other things, as well as stop urban sprawling as much as possible.
[0]there might be a cultural/language bias generated by me having english as a 2nd language
No, we should let people willing to pay market price for the land live on it if they wish. Or park. Or garden. Whatever. Just not make taxpayers subsidize car storage.
It is meaningful, if you choose to think about it. Most people choose to ignore it, because it brings up a lot of thoughts that are inconvenient or uncomfortable. Effective Altruism asks these questions.
It's a pretty easy decision for me whether to support a pet charity (including the wildly inefficient service of personally rescuing a dog or cat) or a humanitarian charity. It's different if you have pets for your own enjoyment.
I really would like straightforward answers. I'm surprised there isn't more things like this: https://causeprioritization.org/Cause_prioritization It gets very complicated and turns into three dimensional chess. Well I guess I answered my own question of why it's a small niche.
As a consequentialist I'm a bit noncommital. I would hate to spend 40 hours in a month helping an acquaintance to find a job when I could spend that same 40 hours saving a life by making more money and using it to buy mosquito nets for Against Malaria.
Uh, "People give pets free food and shelter while letting the homeless starve, what's wrong with our society" is ... meaningfull, "telling" but not insightful.
Misery and poverty in the midst of plenty is symptom of a serious problem, it's signal we should be thinking about the situation. The non-insightful part is that this, by itself, doesn't point the way out of the problem.
>>The insanity, here, is that you can't take the land the motorhome is on and build a studio on it.
apple and oranges. The permit to built the studio makes that building legit, kinda forever. A motor home, they can chase out with a new law, or just by enforcing existing laws.
Actually a better business is to start having more RV parks in the SV. The last 5 years has been record breaking sales history for RVs. Yet the rest of the industry (RV parks specifically) isn't catching up. Most of the people buying RVs are now surprised that no RV parks have availability. I've watched for the past 5 years bay area periphery cities go from having tons of space any time of the year, to being completely full all the time, no matter what they do to their monthly price. It's kinda crazy.
Sort of, sort of not. I agree that it would be better to create more RV parks but the zoning issues are pretty extreme in that most cities are not big fans of RV parks for more historical reasons than actual ones. Sunnyvale, as a city, has preserved its mobile home parks in an effort to keep housing more affordable.
I have an inquiry out to a developer on the cost of building a 'multi-story' RV park. Not trying to recreate the "stacks" here (if you're a Ready Player One fan), but wondering if you could increase the available parking spots while not consuming additional acreage. It has to be a better use than 'public storage' buildings.
Most california cities are under extreme pressure to increase housing supply, an RV lot isn't going to house as many people as a condo/apartment building. (I honestly don't even know if an RV park counts towards overall housing supply)
Though the stacks idea is interesting ;-)
There's a few buildings going up in the Oakland Temescal by Rad Urban which are modular its been cool seeing units with kitchens etc already installed getting stacked up into a larger complex.
Sunnyvale, as a city, has preserved its mobile home parks in an effort to keep housing more affordable.
Um, what? Is there a single surviving RV park in Sunnyvale south of the train tracks?
In the past year, the last two I know of (Blue Bonnet and the one on ECR near Poplar) shut down, with everybody ejected. Several of the mobile homes at the latter were outright abandoned, since there was no place to move to.
These fifth wheels and class As can weigh up to 24000 pounds (even if they where never legally allowed to). A moving object at that weight would make a multi-story RV park an architecture/safety nightmare.
I'm talking about east-bay area that still has space. Not sunnyvale.
- Just checked out the ready player one images - holy mother of guacamole.
I agree they are heavy, and even more heavy than the bus chassis they are built on top of, but I see that as an engineering problem right? There are bus depot parking structures where unused commercial buses are parked. And my civil engineering friends are fond of saying that with enough steel and concrete you can hold up anything :-). So as a mental exercise in scaling density by going vertical, in my sketchbook using lot "sizes" that were similar to a KOA RV campground as a baseline (about 30' x 60' per space), an 8 story parking complex on a 5 acre lot could hold 250+ spaces.
It's certainly possible, but with a lot less steel and concrete you could just build walls and have, you know, apartments. My guess is it's easier to find investors for that, too.
The only reason I can imagine a multi-storey RV park making sense would be to take advantage of some weird zoning quirk or something. But that's a lot of money to throw at what's effectively a legal vulnerability that will probably quickly be fixed.
I don't disagree, the changes that a multi-level RV park bring are a more flexible pricing structure, a lower cost facilities budget, and perhaps a lower cost maintenance load.
From a cash flow perspective I started with parking garages as a business model. The typical 'monthly parking' type garage is a concrete and steel affair with sprinklers and elevators as its biggest operational expense, a bit more if you add an on-site office for an attendant to capture additional revenue from special events.
All the space that requires maintenance in an apartment building that is 'non-apartment' doesn't exist in an RV park. You don't repaint or re-carpet, you don't send HVAC dollars on cooling or heating, Etc.
My assumption (and I'm open minded about missing things) are that using the ratio of comparing of a traditional RV park to a one story apartment complex is a valid way to estimate expenses and cash flow. Then to extrapolate by adding additional layers to the RV park. There are also different tax treatments but I suspect that if the difference there appears to exploitable that it will be quickly changed.
The biggest complaint about RV parks are that they are RV parks and they are an "eyesore". By enclosing the park you can improve the optics, and by increasing the density you grow the ROI relative to an apartment by the cost ratio. But is it a $5M project, a $10M project, or a $25M project that I don't know yet. And while a casual polling of city folks about which would they prefer, RV's parked on the street or parked in an externally attractive structure set aside for them, polls favorably, it isn't clear that is enough to get final approval.
Put the apartment buildings above ground, and RV parks underground with fresh air pumped in and fiber-optic lighting carrying natural light down from the surface. Have elevators going from below ground, and from the apartments, to ground-level retail complexes and terrestrial activities.
Then have underground hyperloop tunnels to connect the RV parks, so that you can go to sleep in your home and move it from city to city, and pop up above ground to enjoy local tourism.
From an engineering perspective, cars and trucks aren’t that heavy, because their weight is spread over a large area, and they can’t squish together like humans.
Roughly, you’re not going to get over 60psf with vehicle traffic or storage.
People jammed together can be 200psf, as can library stacks, and indoor pools are potentially even worse.
Uh, the non-existence of RV parks in SV is hardly an oversight. The social stigma of the "trailer park" is high but that's ultimately a marker for trailer and RV parks reducing home values. And why that reduced value? Sure, perception are a big thing but these funnel into increased supply means reduced prices.
Even in situation of hardship, “I would have bought my house next to a trailer park if I wanted that — but I didn’t," becomes the ultimate reaction [1].
If you fixed the zoning issues preventing you from building an RV park you're 80% of the way to solving the housing issue entirely. So, go for it I guess!
I know for a while there was a guy living in his camper in the Google parking lot (and was an employee). They were even nice enough to allow him to hook up to their power, and he was in range of the wifi. He basically just went inside to shower and eat (and work of course). Not a bad deal. Not sure if they allow that anymore though.
There have been many such people. You have to do it stealthily though, because if Google finds out, it has to kick you off campus due to zoning issues.
Any support the company gave is in the long past now.
I wonder, can you get away with it at the Mountain View Walmart? In most of the country Walmart is ok with letting people sleep in their cars/rvs there. But I could see the Mountain View location having different rules
Walmart generally allows it, but if local ordinances don't, you can't. You can't in the Mountain View Walmart, I assume for that reason. I ended up there once on an 8 month road trip and they asked me to leave.
But there are so few good places in the valley that they may have had to disallow it in order to not become an RV lot.
Many Walmart’s have banned this type of activity due to people dumping raw sewage and trash everywhere. A few stealth camping YouTube channels talk about stuff like this.
Wal-Mart likely intended for you to stay in the lot overnight after some shopping during your trip, not live there. Which is why a lot of Wal-Marts (or by new city ordinance) don’t allow it anymore.
One of my friends lives in a shipping container in Oakland in a trailer park. She loves it and pays around $250/month for the space.
When I was visiting, the people there are so nice. It’s a community in which people help each other, not like the upper class neighborhoods of my youth. In a span of one day, I got some weed, some beer, and an popsicle.
A far cry from many upper class neighborhoods in which no one is willing to talk to each other.
Your experience is the opposite of most people's experience. I am from a poor rural area full of trailer parks. My experience with them is a place with heavy drug use, domestic abuse, extremely frequent robberies and violence. Definitely not a place most people would like to live given the choice.
Depends pretty heavily on the place. South Dakota has some really good ones and some really bad ones. Checking the light poles generally tells the tale.
There are plenty of middle and upper income neighborhoods where there is community. There are plenty of low income neighborhoods where everyone treats everyone like an enemy.
As a heavy introvert, I'm happy not to live in such a situation. I say "hi" to my neighbors, chat a bit sometimes, and other than that we live entirely independent lives. And that's what I like. Even living with close friends can be exhausting to me.
Our public policy often chooses to subsidize free parking by making large chunks of land available for free use by automobiles.
Modern technology allows permanent structures to be much more space-efficient for housing by building many stories high. However, the use of such technology is often banned and structures are limited to one or two stories. Also, even for one-story structures, rules often require eg. 6000 sqft of land to be used for a 1500 sqft house. These rules all result in significant surplus land wealth being required (or expensively rented) for people to obtain permanent housing.
Is it any wonder that, faced with these constraints, people are choosing to live in one-story homes on free land? Government policy is practically begging for it.
The down side is that retail stores suffer because customers are less likely to visit when they have to pay for parking. It's one more factor driving consumers away from brick-and-mortar stores to online ordering.
I've seen this argument used against turning roads into pedestrian only and it's been the complete opposite effect. The moment you remove cars foot traffic increases by huge amounts.
Struggling to see how a car space that can be taken with no charge results in more customers either, surely it increases the amount of time used by individual cars instead and reduces potential customers.
Very few retail stores charge by the hour. Getting people in and out as quickly as possible is the ideal.
> It is demonstrably harmful to the enviroment, physical and mind health and the society in general.
I'm having trouble understanding how single-family housing is less harmful to the environment, relying on this statement and my back-of-the-envelope calculations alone. Likewise, what are the effects on physical and mental well-being for people who have to live in the street, because affordable housing is "banned", and they can't afford a suburban house?
Slums constructed to hide the poor are not the same thing developers trying to sell units would choose to build. Initially developers would target the high-end (this is what they do now with supply limits in place), then when demand in the high-end is exhausted they would build for the middle class. When the middle class upgrades into newer units, older homes they leave behind will become available to those lower on the ladder.
This can be supplemented to benefit the poor sooner by eg. requiring a subset of units in high-end developments to be subsidized for people with lower incomes.
Do you have a source for that? Not disagreeing, but I'd be very interested in reading up on how a high-rise might negatively impact my health seeing as I live in one right now.
I lived most of it in the high-rises, and not slums at all. "Respectable neighbourhoods".
I'm not talking about slums.
I pity the people who choose to live in those anthills.
I hate people who advocate to force other people to live in those.
I'm talking about overcrowding. Not enough private space, not enough public space, not enough transport. And it's a death trap if something goes just slightly wrong with the infrastructure. Have you witnessed shit fountains out of you r toilet? I did. Have you seen what a gas explosion does to those? A section or three just collapses, top to bottom, and everyone there is dead. What if water mains gets cut off because the electricity cut off and so there are no lifts? What if it's 15F outsite and the heaters die?
Brotherman, if you had all of those problems you didn't live anywhere respectable. I've lived twenty years worth in high and mid rises in three continents across a variety of incomes and not only never faced that but none of my neighbours did and none of us even expected it to happen. We'd have been outraged.
Listen, I'm not going to disrespect you for growing up in the projects or whatever. Those things are usually out of our control. But you got to let other people live the way they want to live, man.
Nobody is trying to force someone to live in a high-rise. If more people are in high-rises, that leaves more room for everyone else who doesn’t live in one.
> In December, Cheatham, her children and their father qualified for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Mountain View.
> The couple isn’t completely reconciled, but they came together to provide a roof — one that’s not welded to a chassis — over their children’s heads.
> “We’re working things out,” said Cheatham, 37. “The most important thing is to have a stable place for our kids.”
It's amazing to me to see / hear of parents, who even after disagreeing badly enough to divorce, are able to come together to care for their children. It's hard for me to even fathom how much work and humility that would take. That they were willing to talk to each other at all is, in its own right, remarkable.
I have been fortunate enough to have always lived in a secure home, and I've never needed to sleep in a car out of necessity- the only times I've gone camping are as a Boy Scout (okay, Scouts BSA member), when a warm shower was only a day or two away. As for the policies: Cars are, besides being a little awkward to sleep in, a lot more secure than a tent is (and more fireproof, to boot). With the understanding that all it takes is one mistake for a poor family to become an even poorer, homeless family, I feel like a lot of these "parking overnight, or being homeless = vagrance = illegal = fines" laws can be a little out of touch- they're generally written by college-educated politicians, many of whom have never had to do anything of the like, and who don't understand that a $50 fine when you can't even pay rent is really bad.
Why does it seem to be that we, at least in America, punish the poor for being poor, instead of, or even at the same time that we try to help them up?
>Why does it seem to be that we, at least in America, punish the poor for being poor, instead of, or even at the same time that we try to help them up?
I think that's the natural consequence of having spent years pushing the idea that being poor is a personal choice or a lack of character. Once you make the connection that it's directly linked to a lack of character, you can be punitive instead of providing a safety net, and punitive is much cheaper for those of us with high moral character.
It takes less energy to kick a man that's down, or to step over him, than to hoist him to his feet and keep him standing.
I read "high moral character" as sarcastic equivalence to "not poor". I presume that it is very common for people who have never been poor, or even at risk for being poor, to attribute their good fortunes to an imagined causal factor within their own sense of identity, rather than being entirely due to random chance. They reason that they are rich because they are good, and then, though back-formation, also reason that poor people are, if not entirely bad, then at least less good.
Thus, "people of low moral character" becomes a euphemism for poor people. It is shot through with fallacies of reasoning and circular argument, but based on the statistics, many rich people didn't get rich by being smart, either.
To someone with this type of worldview, poor people deserve to be punished. And since it's less effort than helping them to be less poor anyway, everybody wins. Nobody who deserves wealth has to become less rich in order for other people who don't deserve anything to be less poor.
I can't say for certain whether or not this is a real thing, but the hypothesis does fit a lot of observations.
I think s/he's being sarcastic about saying that moneyed people have "high moral character".
To expand in what was said, when meritocracy teaches you that hard work will always bring success (ignoring luck), then the opposite must be true: if you're poor, it must be because you're lazy.
And rich trustfund kids/lucky startup bros need to believe they have moral character instead of just rich parents/luck, so they think they're righteous people when in reality maybe they're dicks.
You could read it as “It’s cheaper for the not poor”. Parent comment mentions that in their country, being poor has come be seen as a choice and the poor as lacking in character. So being not poor means you have high moral character.
The amount of social services available to the poor has no impact on the fact that many people look at (and treat) the poor horribly, and act as if it is their own fault they are poor.
Why does it seem to be that we, at least in America, punish the poor for being poor, instead of, or even at the same time that we try to help them up?
You could just say "authorities punish the poor for being poor while pretending to help them up". We have reached the point where courts demands that when police move homeless people on that these police offer them a place in shelters. So, you wind-up with a situation where phantom shelter-beds are created. The (mostly) fiction of attempting to help people has to be maintained while the primary intention to remove them as annoyance, knowing they'll reappear elsewhere.
And yeah, allow tiny house camps on private land and you'll reduce the incredible pressure towards higher rents (or build public high rises like the old days or whatever). But then a whole lot of land value is threatened and so the concerned, naive homeowner becomes the threatened homeowner.
I had a stint of about six months when I lived in a camper and worked full-time as an engineer. I was amazed at the kinds of places I could get away with staying for free (coast in oregon, ski resorts, national forests). I would drive around public lands looking for LTE on verizon/AT&T and then post up for days.
It wasn't without its precarity. Sometimes I'd get woken up by sheriffs at 2AM, have mechanical issues, and generally struggled to conform and relate to friends and coworkers. Also, sleeping in SF was terrible. Buses waking you up at 2am, and after meeting others living living in their vans on Division due to hardship, I couldn't help but feel guilty and privileged in my solar paneled, cassette toiled equipped, expedition vehicle. People would joke that I was gentrifying the streets.
Eventually I sold it and moved on. Worthwhile experience though.
I rented one of those expensive Ocean Beach ocean-view houses right by the parking lot they are talking about for a few months once. I've also lived out of a van in San Diego for some range of years (I used to do Oceanographic research and traveled 3-5 months a year). I quite literally have lived both sides of this story -- although I never once stayed in the parking lot in question in my van. I honestly can't imagine why anyone would want to stay in a van in that parking lot -- it is much too exposed and intrusive both in terms of the outside world coming in and in your inside world going out. It would also be very annoying to comply with the parking requirements ...
I think regulation to provide a path to legality for people to van dwell should happen but it should also take into account the needs of the communities and home-dwellers in an area. I never parked overnight in residential areas -- it seems to me a strange van parked overnight in a neighborhood could easily impact somebody who lived nearby, especially if they saw someone climbing in or out. Making someone nervous when they go for a walk in their own neighborhood is more than high enough cost to be worth avoiding.
The reality though is that there is a _lot_ of space in a most American cities that _nobody uses at night_ -- and its often not far from desirable places to be. Opening up small pockets of space sufficiently close to desirable locations for legal and safe use by van dwellers, in conjunction with other regulatory approaches (special vehicle registration, possibly even innovation via things like ODBC-gps appliances to allow local municipalities to collect van-dwelling taxes) could really curtail the negative effects residents experience while also enabling people the freedom to pursue the lifestyles they are already pursuing ...
Its possible to do all of (1) limit impact of van dwellers on communities (2) make van dwelling safer and more convenient (3) keep costs of van-dwelling lower than traditional housing and viable for people on a range of incomes
1) They are targetting EU users and serving to EU users and thus the block is pointless
2) They aren't targetting EU users and thus the block is pointless
Or (1) they aren't sure if they would count as targeting EU users, because the rules are fuzzy and might be interpreted differently by each country's regulators, and (2) they don't have any need to target EU users since their content, and their monetization, is mostly of interest to non-EU users.
In that situation, there are two cautious ways to proceed.
One approach is to assume that you might be targeting EU users and so comply with GDPR. Even if you aren't doing anything with data that would make compliance hard, this is somewhat annoying because GDPR requires that you have a representative in the Union as a point of contact for users and regulators.
The other approach is to make a good faith effort to block EU users.
If you have little or no income directly or indirectly from EU users, the second approach has a lot to recommend it, especially until there is a good body of regulatory rulings on what GDPR actually means.
I'm against live-in vehicles and this life-style choice. On paper it sounds fine but in reality horrible for many reasons. For the most part, people in this situation are in a challenging state and the least of their worries is the environment around them. Is a mother of 2 living in a small RV who relies on donations going to pay for disposal service?
I live in Portland, a city that used to known for being a clean city. In the last 8 years we have had a large increase of car live-in residents and homeless population. I would not call Portland a clean city anymore. In-fact it's far from it. Homeless make up about 3% of the population, but according to a recent article they make up half of the arrests. Personally I've had car camping people outside of my house and we've been afraid of retaliation for call them in and try not to make contact.
I understand that these people have nowhere to go, but cities should create a homeless car shelter of sorts or some other solution other than just hoping for the best of people living on the edge.
The rise of this lifestyle is a direct result of rising inequality in our society. Yeah, that mother of 2 living in a vehicle probably has way bigger problems than paying for disposal service. But people utilizing services they can't pay for is what concerns you, not the fact that so many people are in such dire financial straits that living in a car makes economic sense.
Use of the word "NIMBY", which is clearly a pejorative, is not an argument. I don't see why that diminishes the parent comment at all.
The rise of this lifestyle is a direct result of people feeling entitled. Take the musician in the article ("Lily"). She's trying to make a career in indie rock, playing local gigs. That can't be your full-time job unless you are exceptionally talented, to a degree where others value your creation/contributions enough to pay you a lot for it. This takes more than just musical talent - it requires experience, marketing, networking, business, and other skills. And it is of course, a highly-competitive line of work - after all, who wouldn't want their work to also be their passion.
Lily lived in Nashville before, which is a lot more affordable than California cities like San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. San Diego is a full 55% pricier than Nashville (https://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-...). So in effect, Lily made a conscious choice to move to a pricier area without having a plan for how to live there. A responsible way of making that move would be to work for a few years in Nashville, build up savings, identify jobs in your destination that pay enough, and then make the move.
What gives Lily the right to expect she'd be accommodated in whatever city she moves to? If her work is not producing enough earning to pay for housing locally, it is because her work is not valued by society to a great enough extent to live in a very desirable (and thus expensive) area. I don't think the local community is obligated to provide lower-cost housing (either through subsidy or greater supply) to enable her choices, which squarely fall under the realm of "personal responsibility".
Citations of arrest statistics do not distinguish whether the homeless are actually more criminally inclined than the homed, or more targeted by police who may also have some political motivation to encourage them to go exist in someone else's jurisdiction.
As with the lessons learned from public housing projects in big cities, it is better to spread the poverty out more thinly across a larger area of the city than to concentrate it all in one place. A homeless car shelter would be a disaster of epic proportions. Double the number of reserved parking spaces, spread more uniformly throughout the city, would still be burdensome, but far less so.
One Randy Griswold in Clark's driveway is more tolerable than row after row of them, for as far as the eye can see.
It's been a bit of a problem in parts of Sydney too. A lot of it is just backpackers camping or car-camping in parks. It's one thing to not want to crack down on the homeless or destitute but when it's tourists it seems like plain old freeloading - especially when we're talking about residential neighborhoods not remote areas.
I've been living in a shuttle bus I converted for almost two years. I'm fortunate enough for it to be a choice, many aren't as fortunate. I'm better equipped than an RV, hot and cold water, toilet, shower, 1600W of solar, AC, standing desk workstation.
I'm very respectful of others. I never park overnight in front of a house and don't like parking in one street spot for more than 12h. I often pick up trash in the area I park.
For those who complain about us, keep in mind there is a minority of assholes in every population. Don't judge everyone by the assholes.
It seems like most van conversions are optimized to be inconspicuous. It's no schoolie, but a shuttle bus is certainly more eye-catching than an Econoline. Do you have issues blending in or getting additional (unwanted) attention?
My bus is very obvious. In general it hasn't been a problem. I had someone complain once when I was parked somewhere I shouldn't have been but didn't know.
It's great that this law has been struck down as unconstitutional.
I've slept in my car numerous times along the PCH in the past, and in SoCal it's particularly irritating how much CHP harrasses folks just trying to get some shut-eye on a road trip.
I've had CHP wake me at 3AM then force me to drive half asleep down a winding cliff-top road I had pulled over specifically to avoid driving sleepily down.
But I fully expect there to be new laws introduced to prevent these streets from becoming trailer parks. The judge already criticized the vagueness, they'll just get more specific targeting persistent occupancies.
The concern for sanitation is very legitimate. Especially for folks in cars and vans, there's no holding tank infrastructure in these vehicles. A person spending a day somewhere in a car with no public restrooms nearby is either urinating in a bottle or on the ground. And if in a bottle, the bottle is very likely getting emptied on the ground nearby.
Even people in RVs and campers have fairly limited holding capacity. It doesn't take much laziness to exhaust the capacity and regress into the same pattern of a car/van-dweller. Not to mention those systems are failure-prone and often neglected because who wants to do maintenance on a sewage system?
It's amazing how little I truly need. I haven't paid rent since 2015 by choice. I can afford it, but see no reason to. I went to a camping store and bought the most comfortable air sleeping pad and other gear. My 4" thick sleeping pad is more comfortable than my bed. My total spend was less than $500.
While working on my software, I make money as a field engineer. I drive to my next client and just park nearby overnight. To the rest of the world, my minivan looks like any other parked vehicle. It's not an RV, so it's completely invisible. There are no signs I am there after I convert the interior into sleep mode. Since I have no commute, I don't waste fuel or time in rush hour traffic.
You would never know I do this unless I told you. :)
I met many others like me, usually by fixing their car.
Gym membership to 24hour fitness. I have another $20/mo membership for Planet Fitness, for its massage chairs and in case I am in a state like Arizona without 24, but 24 is everywhere in California. 2 years for $650 at Costco. That's 2000+ options nationwide. Do a workout, go for a swim at 24 and chill in a massage chair at PF while my equipment recharges. :)
Van Life is becoming super popular, not just for the homeless, but for a generation of people who want to live on a limited income and travel. Theres people building out buses/vans and living in california, working tech, banking their money to retire early. About 20 years ago, I was working at ATT and we had contractors living in their travel trailers parked in the work parking lot at our datacenters, so its not a new occurance.
The big thing I found interesting was the lawsuit angle that it discrimination for disabled homeless, that living in a tent is legal, but living in an RV is illegal. RV's and Tents are spreading all around major cities, its getting quite bad up here in Seattle, tourists are mentioning it all the time, its visibile from the highways.
I'm as intrigued as the next outdoors-loving fellow, but is it actually "super popular"? Do that many people, proportionately, take up van life? I suspect in the big picture it's still extremely niche, especially if you drill down to just people who are voluntary van dwellers.
I read Nomadland by Jessica Bruder earlier this year. A significant number of baby-boomers have taken to the road, often because of a lack of retirement funds.
Having gotten a travel trailer 18 mos ago and travelled a bit in CAlifornia, it's amazing what you see when your eyes are tuned to it a bit.
Forget about the views for a second, even sq footage isn't lacking that much. Million dollar homes (that need to be demolished) with that sq footage cost probably millions in that area. So call it renting a small house with a $15 million view. Kinda. Oh, and you can move it.
This whole camping trend, whether on beaches or in parks or on other public property, makes no sense to me. Society is built on the expectation of protected property (reserved for certain uses), enforcement of laws (such as litter laws), and earning of privileges (rather than feeling entitled to live wherever one wants). I don't think it is fair that law-abiding residents who pay taxes and have worked to earn those pricey homes can have their public amenities, which are meant for day-use, instead crowded-up by transient residents. It just defies common sense.
In Seattle, we see the effects of similar permissive laws all around us. Property crime has gone up significantly alongside our recent lax enforcement of littering laws and due to the allowance of "urban camping". We have induced a large homeless population from elsewhere due to our permissiveness - even from cities immediately next door (https://q13fox.com/2019/02/26/did-federal-way-bus-its-homele...). The rise of RVs taking up parking spaces is another problem - it is essentially freeloading off of spaces meant for use by residents of that neighborhood and for temporary day-use. And of course, these RVs are a blight - they are often in shoddy condition, they make the neighborhood look less safe, and they leave trash all around them (or worse, sewage runoff). Many have needles around them and are clearly used to deal drugs. With burglaries happening often, I can't tell you how anxiety-inducing it can be to have someone pitch a tent on the sidewalk in front of your home, camping there all day everyday, watching all residents' movements, etc. This city used to be beautiful and it is trended towards a trashy Mad Max like situation.
I don't agree with arguments that this is due to cost of housing or supply issues. This is due to people feeling entitled. If one can't afford to live in some area, then they should consider finding a different area to live in, or a different line of work that enables them to live in that area. No one is entitled to live wherever they want, doing whatever job they want (e.g. the musician quoted in the article), at whatever wages they are able to earn in that job. That's simply not tenable. There are plenty of affordable places in America where people can make a living and thrive. And yes, it may require that you look outside of the most-desirable locations, or that you do work that isn't your "passion", but that type of compromise is simply a part of life.
I have a lot of sympathy for your argument that this problem is making it worse for everyone. I live in SOMA in San Francisco and regularly encounter many of the issues you describe. It makes the quality of living worse for the whole neighborhood, and I do think it is in part caused by very lax rules about what is acceptable in public spaces.
That said, I think you under-estimate how hard it is for someone to move once they are experiencing homelessness. I doubt the majority of people in this situation are doing to to pursue a music career...
This isn't about entitlement.
If your only option is to live in a van, your day to day existence is going to be very stress-full trying to scratch out enough income for your basic needs, and parking tickets, impound, etc could put you into an even worse spot that you can't recover from.
The idea that you should just up and move to a cheaper place to live sounds reasonable on the surface. But imagine all you have is that Van, you don't have enough money for any major repairs, let alone hundreds of dollars in gas to get to some cheaper place. You don't have a network there, and you don't know your way around, so what are your job prospects?
The reality is that when you're living this close to the edge, you're only thinking day to day, because you're always one problem away from ending up in an even worse situation. Packing up and going some place cheaper is far from a viable option.
Finally, most people who are now homeless in an area were previously housed in that area, so they probably know people there. They may also have some kind of public benefit, and have some clue about how to navigate that system. Packing up and leaving, especially to another state, starts them back at zero.
Why are some of these people staying in California? These people have cars and jobs. Why would they stay in a place they can’t afford to live? There are plenty of places in the US that have lower costs of living or better services for the impoverished and disabled.
Not to mention the mother was going to college for acting while her 3 kids were living in a cockroach and bugbed infested car. Talk about priorities, there are plenty of majors people can take that actually have the prospect of a positive income.
I lived in a van I converted for about 18 months, purely by choice. I had been living in luxury high rises in SF for many years before , excepting the 6 months I spent living in a house in South Bay while converting the van, and afterwards in on campus housing when I went back to graduate school afterwards.
My van was nicer than may of the places one could rent around the bay area. Oak floors, oak countertops, modern high end sink and faucet, designer light switches, high gloss push open cabinets (with electromagnetic locks when in motion).
I did it because I wanted to build something and I had the time to do it nights and weekends while working. There's nothing like learning multiple disciplines from woodworking to electrical, from insulation to plumbing, and applying it all to create something physical and comprehensive.
I parked mostly in my company parking lot during the weekdays. On the weekends, I parked in the Mission, where many others in vans did as well. In SF, it was clear that I was abusing a public good, but couldn't easily find a way around it. I would have happily paid for a monthly parking spot if there was one around the area, but there was no monthly surface parking available in the area.
I don't think van life is an answer to the untenable housing situation in california. It's a niche lifestyle, unsuitable and undesirable for most. However, I do think we need to get over this obsession with space. Space efficiency is something so entirely foreign to most Americans. Having excess space is culturally desired and fetishized. This is a cultural phenomenon, not necessarily good or bad. In a less densely populated region, having extra space is not a luxury. However, when space is so sparse, I do think we could, as a culture, benefit from a shift towards loving space efficiency more.
Looks like it's a story that came in from a wire service, particularly since the writer and story are both from San Diego, but this is an LA publication.
I guess that's the risk of just mindlessly hooking up your CMS to someone else's feed.
I don't need to live in a van, but I have thought about building out a van that I could drive around the country to different cities and then leave there and fly home. This way, if I ever wanted to fly out to that city on a whim I'd already have a place to stay. Might even be useful to have two such vehicles on opposite ends of the country.
I'd probably keep some cameras hooked up so I could drop in and see what's going on around the van remotely, and maybe a server I could ssh into and run some commands for the vehicle.
Only question is finding suitable places to park it that don't require a long commitment.
I think anywhere you could park a vehicle unattended for extended periods without fees/fines you could probably afford to buy a small plot of undeveloped land in cash instead. Then just build some small utility structures on your properties, they'll be more comfortable than a vehicle (and you could park vehicles on them if desired, without concerns for tickets).
It's a far better investment IMHO, and as the years go by you may find yourself slowly adding infrastructure and before you know it you have multiple small off-grid homes.
Also keep in mind a small shed requires a lot less maintenance than an automobile to serve its purpose. Leaving automobiles unused for months or years tends to break them. A shed needs a coat of paint or shingles replaced occasionally (corrugated metal roofs last > 50 years).
I know a guy (who has plenty of spare money) who lives in NJ but keeps cars in various garages around Manhattan, so that wherever he happens to be (he spends lots of time out late in the city) he can hop to his nearest car.
Even back in 1999, rents were already high in the are compared to the rest of country. When I got my first job, rents for a 1br place were about $1,000/mo near Emeryville, where my job was. But it turns out boat payments were only about $525/mo. I did serious research and almost bought a boat, until I found out you aren't allowed to sleep on your boat in the dock without a special permit, and the waitlist for that permit was 10 years.
I supposed I could have floated out in the Bay every night, but I suspect that would have made my costs go up significantly from the extra maintenance and fuel.
But the point is, California seems to be very against alternate forms of housing, and this isn't a new thing.
It seems like an organized approach to homelessness that allowed vehicle camping but put systematic restrictions on it could be fairly effective. There could even be something like a "white list" where people could apply for a camping permit and have it revoked for bad behavior.
Of course, you could also allow camps on private property with provisions to meet basic health and conditions.
Both these measures would undermine the scarcity of housing itself, which goes against the interests of both landlords and homeowners. So I doubt either will happen soon.
People living in cars isn't so bad if they run on electricity. But having people heating their "homes" with a size-optimized ICE burning gasoline is terrible for air quality. Car engines aren't designed to be heaters.
I had imagined at one point having parking garages constructed for this very purpose to be used as homeless shelters.
Obviously, if you were allowing camping in a regulated fashion, you would want to require motorhomes designed for the purpose of camping. These usually have propane furnaces.
There would be quite a few considerations. I would pretty say that these hypothetically could be worked but in reality those who just didn't want this at all would object and the situation could never happen in modern reality.
Just an idea that popped up. One could probably develop a couchsurfing/airbnd style app so to speak where people with rvs/motorhomes could find rental spots to go hook up for the night. That probably wouldn't do much for people short on money, but it could be helpful for people traveling around the country and finding that RV parks have no vacancy. Just a thought.
Neat. Thanks for sharing. If you look at airbnd, vrbo was around before just wasnt marketed the same way. So there probably is room for an additional competitor etc. Especially if done right.
Living in Berkeley/Oakland area I'm torn on this one we have a growing problem with tent encampments (in SF too) I don't know if this is anything but a cosmetic solution but its an interesting tact allowing people to overnight in vehicles.
Was just down in that area last week for vacation, and some areas just south of University Village (B) were amazingly packed with RVs. My daughter (who works near there) said that it's a mix of people sometimes - from the conscientious good (temporary) neighbors to the ones that leave a lot of trash and crap.
sucks for your property value. No one with a $million home wants a camp near it, lets be honest. The govt can move the hot potatoes around until someone gets stuck with it. I wonder what this does for crime rates?
Well maybe if the people with their million dollar homes let some more housing be built in the general area (shock & horror) there wouldn't be this problem.
This is largely a self inflicted problem that California has caused for itself.
my wife and i ran the numbers on living out of a van in Silicon Valley but found with a gym membership and the temptation to eat out all the time, we probably wouldn’t save as much as we thought. Van life is tempting though, the thought of saving an extra 24k per year sounds like the right path to eventual home ownership (obviously not anywhere near the valley).
> We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact webmaster@bakersfield.com or call (661) 395-7500.
Only when the politicians have a low enough average age that they actually use computers themselves (and find out how unusable the web is already) will they possible revise or eliminate the restrictions.
One big problem with tech regulation right now, particular that which involves the internet, is that the old farts making the rules are barely skilled enough to send emails. Not only do they have no concept of how they're ruining things, but they don't have to suffer the consequences.
Imagine if every time they changed the channel on their TV, they had to stop and drive a cursor to _somewhere_ on the screen to find the correct button to press to get past the popup and watch the channel they were hoping to watch.
Yep, there is a divide between the old people in power who know economics, markets and regulation but have no idea how "technology" works, and the young voters who understand the technology, but without an understanding of how the economics work.
I think you're much too generous. You can look at political decisions in most countries and see that politicians don't, on average, understand economics. For that matter, a great many economic theories (which are often presented as facts) don't hold up when tested.
In summary, economics is hard. But making something (internet/web) increasingly unusable is just pure ignorance.
451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact webmaster@bakersfield.com or call (661) 395-7500.
I respect their (bakersfield.com) right to piss all over the regulation of 500 million people, and respectfully decide to ignore them and equally blacklist them.
GDOR is the mitigating effor after years of abusing Safe Harbor both by state agents as well as from private companies. Instead of fixing their deal, they prefer to black list EU? Seriously?
Go .... yourself, and I am returning the favor of black listing you 'dear' bakersfield.com. I know that this is not the first site to do this, but to give us this really shitty behaviour is just plain rude and arrogant.
Can you blame them? EU traffic probably accounts for a tiny fraction of their overall traffic. Rather than pay their (probably minuscule) engineering team to fix it, bakersfield.com probably ran the numbers are realized it would cost much less to just not serve traffic to the EU.
I'm sure this is hugely annoying and unexpected for EU visitors, but you gotta understand that you are not obligated to use their website, and the website is not obligated to serve its content to you.
451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging
to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be
granted at this time. For any issues, contact webmaster@bakersfield.com
or call (661) 395-7500.
> “If you allow people to sleep in their vehicles, you will eventually have open camping all along our view corridors“
Reminds me of the whole Vinod Khosla drama up in NorCal [1]. Seems like muscling in on access to a beautiful view / beach and trying to gatekeep it is a common pastime for more than one wealthy Californian.
I can't argue with the logic. It means $24,000 a year to apply toward student loans or what have you isn't a bad deal. And he will eventually pay off the motorhome giving him some security there.
Sadly, most people won't talk about their situation (I tried by walking down a road and knocking on doors) I was hoping to get a sense of how many people were living in motorhomes because they wanted to (like the guy I talked to) and how many were there because they felt they had no choice. I don't have any good ideas on how to get that information.
I did enough research to know that building a small lifestyle business out of offering black/grey water pumping and garbage collection services for the folks who were doing this by choice was probably viable. You would need a couple of custom trucks[1] that were capable of being mobile RV dumping stations and a business with sewer rights to dump (the City of Sunnyvale will license a business to have an RV dumping station on site, so starting there would work.) I think it would be a "pump and dump" scheme that would be both good for the neighborhood and probably make enough money to employ a few folks.
[1] To be full service you'd probably want a fresh water tank, a propane tank, and a sewage collection tank. Then you could dump the grey/black tanks, refill fresh water and refill propane. Personally I think it makes way more sense than these companies that were sending trucks out to refill your gas tank.