My friends and close family members know that I follow car camping content on Facebook and like to share the information that I have discovered with others. Over the last two years, I have observed that many of the online posts about car campingare written by women who are not camping – they live in their cars full time. A lot of the conversations online are about how to build out your car and live your best life free from harm and problems. Some of these women are living this way because they want to travel around the USA. Many are doing so because rent has become prohibitively expensive, their circumstances took a turn for the worse, or they are saving up for a tiny home or to buy an apartment. You can often find reels on Facebook that show young-adult Caucasian men and women living in SUVs and vans with all the latest gadgets and build out designs. Their income is derived from vlogging and TikToking about their experiences. They could be defined by some of these Why Do It categories; however, there is much more diversity in this community in terms of age, ethnicity and lifestyle circumstances.
The video linked below features an interview with Lanette – a U.S. Navy Veteran who served in the US Marines in Iraq. During her time in Iraq, she witnessed her fellow marines being killed and developed PTSD as a result of her experiences working for the US military. The Invisible People account sometimes publishes videos on their Facebook page that are a few years old. This video is from eight years ago. Four years ago, an update was published under this video (on YouTube) to say that Lanette is no longer living in her car, is living in a home and is reunited with her children.
The face of homelessness is changing rapidly in our societies and the people who are homeless have unique needs and unique stories to share. One branch of my family were homeless for five years due to war – while living as refugees – in Siberia. Two of those years were spent walking from Siberia back to their home town in north western present day Ukraine. They were forceably evicted from their home and village and transported to Siberia in cold box car trains, with no food other than donated potato peels. Two young children in the family died from exposure to the cold and malnutrition. You could say that I am personally pre-disposed to notice stories of survival in adverse conditions – especially when someone is forced to be on the road and survive without a home.
My first encounter with someone who was living in their vehicle happened during my Generation X early adulthood years. I had recently moved to Vancouver during the second worst recession after the Thacker era recession of the early 80s. McJobs were the most common opportunity for recent university graduates. Internships and easy access to scholarship money for graduate school or further training was not a thing back then. Despite the challenges, I soon managed to secure a job and find an affordable bachelor apartment on Haro street, in the west end of downtown. While today’s rents are notoriously expensive, this rent was equally so. The only advantage I had was that I could live in a central location and had the bachelor suite to myself rather than spending the same amount of money to share a place with two or three other people. Since my rent, food , MSP, hydro and transit costs (I couldn’t afford a car) took up so much of my salary, the MBNA credit car associated with my university declined to give me a credit card. They said that my expensives took up too much of my salary every month.
One day, while taking part in a Greenpeace protest against the use of drift nets, I sat on the grass next to one of the participants. He introduced himself and told me that his main activity during his waking hours was traveling around the US and Canada while taking part in protests against nuclear vessels. This work involved scaling the side of US Navy vessels. He told me that he lived in his van full time and seemed very impressed that I had a job and lived in an apartment by myself. Scaling the side of nuclear vessels? Working in a dead end clerical job? I knew who was winning in the “living life to the fullest” challenge. Looking back on it, I wonder how he coped with cooking and basic tasks. These were the days before you had the option to go to a Planet Fitness and take a shower.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to spend time visiting family members who kept a large RV on a full time camp site in Langley. They had their RV on the site for about two years. During that time, I had the opportunity to meet people who live at the camp site full time in their RVs. It was a new experience for me to hear that a couple with a young child were choosing to live in an RV on a fulltime rental pad for 800 a month rather than paying high rental fees. I also met a woman in her 50s on Vancouver Island who was building a tiny home for her and her husband. After retiring as a priest (her husband was a school teacher), they had the tiny home placed on a property that is owned by family friends. It was the first time that I had met anyone who was planning to live in this way. In both of these cases ,the people involved were not forced into homelessness and were not homeless. They were chosing to living using a smaller footprint for specific reasons.
During the last provincial election, I returned to my car during a lunch break while working as an election official and found that a young man had parked his small sedan next to my car. He had just returned from voting . After seeing the inside of his car, I could tell that he lived in his car full time. He must have maintained some kind of address so that he could vote during the election. This was the first time that I could say, for certain, that I was looking at a car that was being lived in full time. Prior to this experience, I had seen vans by Spanish banks that were being lived in full time. I have also heard that due to a housing crisis in Victoria, there are University of Victoria students who live in their vehicles full time.
The next time you see someone with covers on all of their car windows during the evening and a car full of personal effects – someone who seem to be living out of their ca – please view them with an open and non judgmental mind and show them compassion, even if you didn’t have a chance to interact with them. There can be many moments of loneliness and worry when you live in your car full time. There are concerns about personal safety; challenges related to hot and cold weather (especially in relation to pets); challenges finding a place to park for the night; problems related to a car breaking down or getting into an accident; and, challenges related to finding employment.
Life is hard for many in these economically uncertain times when costs are high and jobs are increasingly hard to come by. People are doing the best that they can with what the resources they have at hand, while endeavouring to remain independent and live the best life possible.