Tag: homelessness

Oregon a hellish RV epicenter

A perfect storm of bad ideas with potentially catastrophic consequences is shaping up in central Oregon, where the already struggling Family Motor Coach Association plans to have a four-day international convention and RV expo. The association, which has been hemorrhaging members for years but still advertises itself as “the world’s largest nonprofit association for recreational vehicle owners,” said it expects more than 700 RVs to converge on the Deschutes County fairgrounds in Redmond on Aug. 14.

Well, maybe.

Such events are planned months and even years ahead of time, so FMCA’s leadership might be excused for not knowing it would be hosting a party in a pizza oven. Then again, this is hardly unexpected. California is getting the most wildfire press at the moment, principally because its Park Fire has grown to more than 400,000 acres and is now the fourth largest in that state’s history. But Oregon is even more of a wildfire hotspot, with twice as many large active fires as its southern neighbor (25 versus 13), and this year already has had more than 973,000 acres scorched. Only two of those wildfires have been contained. The convention’s theme, “Adventure Peaks,” may have more of a dark meaning than originally intended.

You might argue that a million acres is only a small fraction of Oregon’s total land mass of roughly 61 million acres, so what are the odds that your campground will be next to go up in flames? But of course it’s not just a question of whether RVers will have a direct encounter with a fire, but whether they’ll also have to breathe its exhaust. Wildfire smoke has become an annual scourge across all of the western U.S. and Canada, and as it becomes more common, its effects on human health are getting closer scrutiny—with dismaying early findings. One recent study, for example, attributed more than 50,000 premature deaths to wildfire smoke exposure; the risk of cardiac arrests for people who have cardiovascular issues increases 70% during days with heavy smoke.

And here’s a truly sobering warning for the RVing demographic most prone to attend FMCA get-togethers: according to a decade-long study involving more than one million southern California residents, released just a few days ago, exposure to wildfire smoke poses a 21% increase in the risk of being diagnosed with dementia compared with other types of air pollution. The dangers, in other words, aren’t just respiratory or cardiac. Wildfires that tear through manmade structures, vehicles and other non-wild fuel emit smoke that contains a toxic brew of chemical compounds; its aerosolized particles, meanwhile, enable those poisons to infiltrate every part of a human body.

Nor is this sort of hazard something unusual—just the opposite. A much-publicized report this past week from The Dyrt, an online camping reservation platform, disclosed that 18% of campers reported that wildfires or other natural disasters disrupted their camping plans last year, or triple the rate of 2019. Such disruptions are even more common on the West Coast, where fully one-third of campers had their plans interrupted in 2023—as did an even larger 42% in Oregon and Washington. Ironically, The Dyrt is headquartered in Oregon, “so we’ve seen firsthand the toll wildfires have taken on the Pacific Northwest,” The Dyrt’s chief executive, Kevin Long, wrote in releasing the study. “It’s scary and tragic for so many reasons.”

For all that, however, Oregon in general and Deschutes County in particular have been grappling with proposals for several new RV parks as well as rules to allow RVs to be used as permanent rental housing. Those efforts have been given additional impetus by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June upholding an Oregon town’s ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors, which among its unintended consequences has increased the pressure on elected officials to find housing alternatives—and what’s cheaper (and more flammable) than an RV? The unresolved problem, of course, is finding a home for those RVs that’s not a city street or highway underpass.

None of this is going down well with Deschutes County residents, many of whom turned out this past week for a county commissioners’ meeting to excoriate a proposed 300-site RV campground that the county wants to build just north of Bend, at least in part as a low-cost housing solution. In addition to the standard worries about water, sewage and roads, objections also centered on growing concerns about an influx of the homeless and of an increasingly volatile natural landscape. “We need to start controlling sources of combustion out there, whether it be the homeless, people in campgrounds or fireworks,” one attendee told the board, summing up the powder-keg nature of the RVing phenomenon.

Meanwhile, a luxury RV resort being built on the other side of town, southwest of Bend, was originally scheduled to open this past spring but has been delayed repeatedly. A soft-opening of the 176-site property, the Bend RV Resort, is now projected for later this month, just in time for Labor Day—and well into the fire season. At $120 a night, this clearly is not an RV park that’s targeting the homeless as its customer base. Given current events, however, it’s also an RV park with an uncertain future—as, indeed, is true of summer camping overall.

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RVs as ‘housing’ a recipe for slums

Squeezed by a housing crisis that is approaching Great Depression dimensions, state and local governments have started turning their backs on “decent, safe and sanitary” standards that long guided the home-building and mortgage-lending industries. The scale of the problem they face is daunting: half of all renters nationwide were “rent burdened” in 2022, spending more than 30% of their income for housing; a record 635,000 Americans were homeless last year. But faced with such overwhelming need, elected officials are grasping at a most primitive “solution”—RVs as permanent housing—and in doing so are laying the groundwork for even bigger problems a few years hence.

A case history of such declining standards is on display in Oregon, generally, and in Deschutes County specifically. Having already amended state law a few years ago to give its counties the option of allowing accessory dwelling units (AUDs), Oregon’s legislative assembly last summer took the additional step of allowing RVs to be used as rental dwellings in rural areas. Opponents argued that the state had yet to see whether allowing AUDs would make a significant difference in the housing supply, but supporters noted that Oregon needs more than half-a-million new housing units across all income levels within the next 20 years. All possibilities should be considered. Recreational vehicles, it was argued, could take up the slack, presumably because they’re cheaper and mobile, and therefore relatively quick and easy to set up.

The “ayes” had it, producing a law that is remarkably free of restraints on allowing “vehicles . . . designed for use as temporary living quarters” to be used as permanent housing. The law does require that such RVs not be “rendered structurally immobile,” presumably so they can be removed more readily when “dilapidated or abandoned”—one of the drawbacks of “a limited useful life” cited in a legislative analysis. But the law does not require “fire hardening requirements,” as was included in the law authorizing ADUs. And it explicitly declares that RVs used as housing are “not subject to the state building code.” Indeed, virtually the only state restrictions are on which properties can be used for this new housing option, with any additional regulations left up to each county.

While Oregon’s new RV law did not go into effect until Jan. 1 of this year, Deschutes County was all over it months ago. Located in the rural middle of the state and coping with a homeless population of approximately 1,300, the county had its planning staff draft new rules last October to put some flesh on the legislative bones. The result couldn’t get more basic. For example, Oregon defines “vehicles used as temporary living quarters” as having, “at minimum, cooking and sleeping facilities that may be permanently set up or connected to the vehicle, or may be stored within or upon the vehicle with the intent to use within or upon the vehicle”—a definition, alert readers will note, that makes no reference to toilet facilities. Planning staff therefore included, as “additional standards under consideration,” a requirement that “the RV must have an operable toilet and sink.”

That’s what you call a low bar. Meanwhile, the “additional standards under consideration” make no mention of the clear allowance for outdoor kitchens, don’t set a minimum square-foot-per-occupant standard, don’t address what kind of utility hookups will be required, don’t even call for fire extinguishers or smoke alarms—and certainly don’t set up an inspection protocol to ensure the standards are being met.

Planning commissioners met Jan. 11, and again Jan. 25, to review the staff’s proposals as well as three dozen or so written public comments, almost all opposed to the whole idea. Many commenters took issue with the basic rationale for the RV initiative, pointing out that increased housing density on rural land won’t help people who need jobs and social services that tend to be located in urban areas. Many also noted that new RV dwellers would place additional demands on infrastructure and municipal services, such as fire protection, police, and ambulance services, without any offsetting increase in tax revenues. And others expressed concerns about increased demand on ground water supplies, the greater fire hazard associated with growth in the urban-wildland interface, and the loss of a rural lifestyle caused by a potential doubling of the population.

But perhaps the most telling criticism, echoing a concern raised by the legislative analysis last summer, is that counties like Deschutes simply don’t have the resources to enforce whatever rules they adopt. RVs on private property are already becoming prevalent, many complained, in defiance of existing zoning restrictions and without any enforcement by an overburdened county government. “We have lots here that look like homeless encampments, with not enough code enforcement now,” wrote Mark and Jane Odegard, reflecting a common observation. “We are a residential community, not a campground.”

Craig Heaton echoed the sentiment, complaining of “several RVs, campers, fifth wheels and small sheds ” on nearby properties. “It is quite common to smell the sewage. Extension cords from the house to these makeshift quarters are present. Year after year I’ve filed complaints with Deschutes County” to no avail, he added.

Apparently taking these and other concerns to heart, the planning commission rejected its staff’s proposals—but only by the narrowest of margins, voting 4-3 against permitting use of RVs as supplemental housing. But it also left the door open for further consideration, via a work session with the county’s commissioners on Feb. 28 to determine whether to hold a public hearing on the matter. Should that happen, it will be interesting to see who in the RV industry will step up and point out all the truly horrific reasons why this is a bad idea—ha-ha-ha! Just kidding!

The problems of exorbitant housing prices and exploding homelessness are real and tragic, and cry out for effective intervention—but putting people into firetraps with scarcely more floor space than a prison cell is not it. All that will accomplish is a dispersed slum of rapidly deteriorating eyesores, transforming Deschutes County into an Oregon version of the worst of West Virginia, also a once truly magnificent landscape.

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RVer dilemma: death by fire or cold

The site of a fatal RV fire in Windsor, Maine, in early November. Note the multiple extension cords criss-crossing the area, indicative of the jury-rigged nature of this encampment.

Now that we’re well into meteorological winter, one sure-fire prediction is that we’re going to see a rising crescendo of reported RV fires. A Google search for “RV fires,” for example, turned up the following news reports over just the past 24 hours:

  • “Putnam County Fire Rescue responded to a 30-foot RV fire off Mackey Avenue,” but were unable to save two family dogs.
  • “Firefighters are investigating what caused an RV to go up in flames in northwest Fresno.”
  • “An investigation is underway after a RV fire briefly threatened a home in Sparks Tuesday night. “

Expand the time frame and you’ll encounter some truly chilling headlines, such as the following from a week ago: “Mom listens to baby scream in burning RV until he falls silent, Arkansas cops say.”

It’s hard to ascertain, in the first three examples, how many of the immolated RVs were being used as full-time housing, but it’s a pretty good guess that such was the case in the older story. Such incidents have become commonplace, and will become more so as time goes by: more than 650,000 people nationwide are sleeping outside or in shelters, according to the latest snapshot census (another will be conducted next month), thanks in no small part to a critical shortage of affordable housing. The real estate group Redfin reported last week that just 15.5% of homes for sale are affordable for the typical U.S. household, the lowest share in at least a decade.

For those unable to afford a home, the opportunity to live in an RV must seem immeasurably better than joining the army of pavement dwellers. A roof and four walls, a door that can be locked, possibly functioning electrical outlets—even the shabbiest travel trailer can be a refuge against rain, prying eyes and human predators. Indeed, if first occupied during summer months, such an RV can seem like a godsend, allowing fantasies of outdoor vacationing and only temporary inconvenience, a pitstop on the road back to “normal.” And then harsh winter intrudes.

Last month the Waldoboro, Maine, Select Board heard about people living in RVs without appropriate hookups. Sewage was being dumped on the ground. In at least one instance, an RV dweller had cut a hole through the roof for a chimney pipe so he could heat the interior with a wood stove. Referring to an RV fire in nearby Windsor the previous week, in which a 25-year-old man had been killed, Waldoboro’s code enforcement officer, Mark Stults, observed that existing ordinances were insufficient to deal with such conditions. “I would rather be the bad guy in town, forcing people to find safe places to reside,” he said, urging adoption of more stringent regulations.

A month later he got his wish, as the Select Board proposed an ordinance that for the first time will set “limitations on the use of RVs and other non-permanent structures for permanent habitation,” including a maximum stay of 120 days and required installation of smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. More action is expected. Yet even as the Waldoboro town fathers attempt to limit the deaths and health hazards resulting from full-time RV residency, they remain flummoxed by the economic factors that contribute to the problem.

As recently as last August, for example, the Waldoboro Economic Development Committee conceded that the town had been “remarkably bad at having affordable housing for people to work and live here.” The area’s affordability index had gone from 75% to 51% in just two years—considerably better than the 15% national figure cited by Redfin, but still leaving half of the area’s workers with less than the $48 hourly wage they would need to afford a home. All of which makes Mark Stults’s preferred option of “forcing people to find safe places to reside” a non-starter.

Or as Waldoboro Select Board Member Bob Butler said, “there’s a lot of homeless people now. What are we going to do with them? They could die from the cold or they could die from the fire, but they’re still dead.”

Waldoboro is just a microcosm of a far larger problem that will become an ever more in-your-face national crisis, but give it credit for at least wrestling with the issues. Not so elsewhere, where it’s less common to connect the dots between low pay, astronomical rents, an inadequate housing stock and an explosion of beat-up, rattletrap RVs parked virtually anywhere. There are lots of reasons for that willful blindness, in a world that can seem irredeemably broken, from a feeling of being overwhelmed to the silent hope that someone else will fix things to a reflexive turning inward. Most can be addressed, by people of good will.

But the most difficult reaction to overcome, alas, is a hardening of the heart that objectifies and dehumanizes the unfortunate. Consider, for example, the reaction of an “I’ve got mine” RVtravel subscriber who, on reading its account of the proposed Waldoboro ordinance—an account that not once described those who were living in the town’s RVs—wrote: “I’m all for the regulations. It’s lazy, filthy people like this that screw it up for hard working RV’rs.”

That’s the Christmas spirit, Bub.

RVs as Swiss Army knives of housing

Part of a two-mile-long line of RVs parked along a frontage road for Highway 101 in Marin County, California, reflective of a growing affordability crisis in housing throughout the U.S.

Swiss Army knives have been promoted for decades as the epitome of versatile utility. Carrying one in your pocket, you can have an arsenal of handy tools at your disposal—not just a knife blade or two, but if you’re so inclined, various screwdrivers, a bottle opener, can opener, corkscrew, metal saw, metal file . . . on and on to absurd lengths, including a toothpick, tweezers and magnifying glass, depending on how much you want to spend. The scissors aren’t worth a damn, and the Leatherman multitool eventually demonstrated what a folding pair of pliers should look like, but you can still shell out more than a hundred bucks for 6.5 ounces of 33 “essential features.”

So it is with RVs, which at one time (and not so long ago, either), were little more than hard-sided tents on wheels. But as with Swiss Army knives, which “evolved” from basic tools to gussied-up toys, you can get anything from a minimalist model to one with as many extras as you care to underwrite, progressing from an ice chest and Coleman stove all the way up to house-size refrigerators, sinks and showers with running water and flush toilets, microwaves and induction cooktops, flat panel TVs, electric levelers, gas furnaces . . . on and on to absurd lengths, including heated floors and washers and dryers.

All that frippery gets sold in the name of both comfort and versatility, in the same way that Swiss Army knives are pitched as the ultimate survival tool to urban dwellers who almost never will be in a situation that puts them to the test. Thanks to the many, many “upgrades” that have gone into “improving” today’s RVs, you can “enjoy nature” without actually getting into it, much as you can enjoy the outdoors in a zoo or at an aquarium, staring at other life forms through glass or bars; just haul your metal, plastic and glass cocoon from one Eden to another, marveling at nature’s bounty from the comfort of your marvelously appointed environment.

Okay. To each his or her own, and if that’s how you choose to spend your money and time, the proper American response is to say “so be it.” Freedom! But the thing is, this isn’t just about individual choice. All those hundreds of thousands of decisions to buy an RV with bells and whistles are rapidly becoming a socially warping phenomenon. And unlike Swiss Army knives, which even in the tens of millions are an insignificant addition to the social landscape, RVs have a distortion effect more comparable to that of the automobile.

There is, first, the impact they have on the physical landscape itself, both directly—because of their increasing weight and size, as well as their consequential increased gas consumption—and indirectly, primarily through the ancillary development of campgrounds and other support services. Those two million or so RVs sold since the start of the pandemic have sparked an enormous land rush by investors looking to cash in on the next big thing, and they’re not content to build what once was considered an “average” size RV park, of 100 or so sites. As this blog has repeatedly observed, the norm now is 300, 350, 400 sites—or much, much more.

Earlier this month, for example, the Daytona Beach City Commission in Florida signed off on revised plans for an RV park it had initially approved only a few months ago. The original plan called for 480 sites, which is very big by any measure; the revision, however, boosts that to 1,200. Public opinion on the decision was split along familiar lines, with those in opposition fretting about increased traffic and the effect on local wildlife, including bears (yes, bears—in central Florida), gopher tortoises and sandhill cranes. But for those favoring the increase it all boils down to the anticipated economic boost from increased tourism, and that’s a trump card that all too often wins the day.

Or consider the Hobson’s choice confronting residents of the optimistically named New Hope, Tennessee, where the owners of a 110-acre farm have had their property on the market for two years. Land-rich and cash-poor, they’re all too ready to sell it to an RV park developer who—if all goes as proposed—eventually will create 400 or more RV sites in a town with fewer than 900 residents. Those who turned out Monday for a public meeting on the matter clearly were torn between their understanding of why the farm is up for sale and of just how thoroughly such a sale will disrupt their lives—although as one participant noted, an RV park has got to be better than a Chinese battery factory. Or a chicken plant.

A low bar, indeed.

But it’s not just their environmental impact that makes RVs so disruptive. Marketed as a complete home package, they increasingly get promoted as actual residences, resulting in blurred distinctions and legal challenges. In Baldwin County, Alabama, for instance, the owner of a mobile home park currently is arguing with local officials and the state attorney general about their refusal to permit RVs on his property because that would violate county subdivision regulations. As the aggrieved park owner points out, RVs already are a common feature in mobile home parks across the county, so why shouldn’t he allowed to add a few spots for the RVs of construction workers hired for a new aluminum and recycling plant?

Indeed, as this blog also has observed, the Alabama dispute about RVs vs. mobile homes is going on all around the country. The irony is that this changing perception, in which RVs have morphed from recreational vehicles to residential ones, is actually putting the squeeze on the RV parks themselves—or, more accurately, on the RVers who want to stay at campgrounds because they’re, you know, camping. It’s telling, in this regard, that the latest quarterly report from Sun Communities attributes its strong financial results, in part, to its “transient-to-annual RV conversions of 524 sites”—that is, to 524 RV sites that are now filled with RVers who aren’t going anywhere. That’s swell for campground owners who no longer have to fret about low occupancy rates, but not so great for RVers looking for a site for the night.

The growing acceptance of RVs as acceptable—if not exactly desirable—housing has filtered all the way down to the economic stratum in which the thought of an RV vacation is as fanciful as dreams of dining on crêpes suzette in Paris. The progression through which homeless people have gone from sleeping on steam grates or under newspapers to pitching tents to living in battered vans, travel trailers and Class Cs has proceeded with breathtaking speed, reintroducing us within a decade to a world of Hoovervilles and shanty towns once associated with the Great Depression.

Consider the picture at the top of this post, taken by a San Francisco Chronicle photographer in one of the country’s most affluent counties, where the median household income is $131,000. As one of the couples living in a trailer parked alongside the road told the newspaper’s reporter, there are times when having an RV with a bathroom and kitchen—even though without refrigeration or running water—can make them forget they’re homeless.

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Van-life mantra: Tune out, drive off

No, it’s not a van–but Fortune magazine doesn’t know that, and there’s the rub.

These days, the LSD-driven urge of another age to “turn on, tune in, drop out” is being replaced, to a significant degree, by the sound of transmissions shifting into gear and the refrain “tune out, turn on, drive off.” Many of today’s RVers are the new hippies.

Fortune magazine this past week ran a somewhat whiny article under the headline, “Van life is just ‘glorified homelessness,’ says a 33-year-old woman who tried the nomadic lifestyle and ended up broke.” The photo that topped this angst-filled account is reproduced above, and as anyone who knows anything about RVing will tell you, that ain’t no van; it’s a small class C motorhome.

A trivial point? Perhaps, but it illustrates the bigger problem of mainstream publications writing about subjects they don’t really understand. It’s not just that the reporter and her editors don’t know the difference between one kind of RV and another–a difference, for example, that might confuse a reader about the story subject’s complaints about being unable to cook or wash-up while on the road–but that their ignorance perpetuates certain stereotypes. See all those RVs rolling down the road? Just glorified homelessness, they’re saying. Bums on wheels. Vagabonds.

To be fair, that’s not entirely incorrect–but it is enormously skewed. Fortune‘s story reminds me of the ‘Sixties and mainstream media’s coverage of the counterculture, which emphasized sex, drugs and rock-and-roll and largely skated by the deeper philosophical, political and cultural rift that was opening up in American society. Sometimes it seemed like an entire generation was being dismissed as either a dopey long-haired bunch of hedonistic parasites or as an addle-brained cadre of brainwashed Marxists fantasizing about overthrowing the system. Both were readily found, but there was so much more going on, with so much more meaningful commentary about U.S. society that wasn’t nearly as sensational.

These days, the LSD-driven urge to “turn on, tune in, drop out” is being replaced, to significant degree, by the sound of engaging ignition keys and the refrain “tune out, turn on, drive off.” Untold hundreds of thousands of Americans have piled into everything from rattle-trap conversion vans to skoolies to homemade teardrop trailers–as well as $200,000 class B “vans” and 40-foot motorcoaches–in search of, well, something: new vistas, new adventures, the freedom of the open road, movement itself. Or sometimes they’re just fleeing from rather than running to, be it cold winters or an accumulated burden of too much stuff or just a sense of staleness.

In that sense, the new nomads are not too dissimilar from the psychedelic voyagers of 60 years ago. Viewed from a different perspective, however, today’s voyagers are reacting to–are resisting–a greatly more circumscribed world. The ‘Sixties were a time of social wealth and endless possibilities; the ‘Twenties are an age of growing impoverishment and diminishing horizons. Hitting the road means fleeing the crime and economic privation so many people fear will claim them as their next victims, of getting out from under the oppressive reach of the government (“the man,” again) with its mask mandates and high taxes. The cultural rift threatens to be even wider than it was those many decades ago, leaving us all with no one to rely on other than ourselves. What better way to do that than in the seemingly self-contained little world of an RV?

It’s all self-delusional, of course. Taking a trip, be it to the land inside of your mind or to a boondocking site on BLM land, can last only so long before reality intrudes. Acid trips wear off. Road trips require state-maintained byways and highways, not to mention gas stations and replacement tires. And just as some acid-trippers crashed and burned, so too some modern-day nomads will discover they’re not really equipped for this new adventure on which they’ve embarked. They’ll have a bad trip. Bummer.

The mistake Fortune made, with its simplistic glomming onto a counter-narrative to demonstrate its supposed ability to look beneath the surface of a growing cultural phenomenon, was to stop there. It’s as though it were reporting on the excesses of Haight-Ashbury as a way of dismissing a huge cultural paradigm shift without saying Whoa! What’s actually going on here? What are these people saying about cultural expectations, the disintegration of authority, the relationship between individuals and their society?

The growing tide of today’s nomads represents a new critique of today’s society that might become just as disruptive as were those other voyagers of 60 years ago. Picking at the fringes of this phenomenon without digging past the gotcha headlines not only demonstrates a lack of insight and understanding–as evidenced by that non sequitur of a picture–but creates a false impression that we are now better informed.

Nope.

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A dystopian future, if you care to look

Part of the encampment of unhoused people under a freeway and railroad overpass in Oakland, Cal. that has been the scene of numerous fires, most recently Aug. 16. Copyright, David Bacon.

“The Highwaymen,” a 2019 movie starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson as the lawmen who tracked down and ultimately killed Bonny and Clyde, is worth seeing (you can find it on Netflix), not just because it offers a less romanticized view of the outlaws than was served up by Arthur Penn’s 1967 film, but for the gritty glimpses it shows of life during the Great Depression. Among them: an almost casual drive-by of travel trailers jammed side by side in roadside woods, clearly not a vacation spot but an encampment of otherwise homeless people struggling to provide themselves with basic shelter.

Ninety years later, some things haven’t changed, as seen in the photo above. While the U.S. is not in a depression, and arguably not even in recession, its wealth gap is bigger than it’s ever been and the people at the bottom are being priced out of existence in the second-most expensive real estate market in the country. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported today, that city’s officials estimate as many as 20,000 residents “will experience homelessness” (the politically correct phrasing these days) at some point in 2022.

Some will be homeless for just a short while, even as others live on the streets for months and years at a time, but at any one moment the city can expect to be “home” to approximately 8,000 people without a home or apartment to sleep in that night. Small wonder, then, that the area also features scenes that would look remarkably familiar to Bonnie and Clyde’s contemporaries. These aren’t the homes merely of drug addicts–that’s a child’s toy in the foreground. Families live here.

In this case, “here” is an area known as the Wood Street encampment, located across from San Francisco under the Oakland approach to the Bay Bridge. More than 200 people have been camping there at any one time for the past seven years, living in an assortment of RVs, tents, plywood shacks and huts made from a mixture of straw, clay and sand called “cob.” Their hardscrabble existence is made even more precarious by the need to build fires for cooking and heat–fires that spiraled out of control more than a hundred times in 2021 and 48 times to date this year, including one just a couple of days ago.

Still, they persist, not just for lack of alternatives but because shared hardship creates a bond. “These are communities,” an encampment resident told a local reporter last month. “People stay at these places because they feel safe there.” 

Only thinly chronicled to date, such communities may start getting wider exposure through the efforts of non-traditional journalists like David Bacon, who has spent a lifetime photographing and writing about marginalized people, notably migrant workers and indigenous peoples of Central America. But from time to time he has focused elsewhere, and now he’s taken what I suspect will be the first of several extended forays into the Wood Street encampment.

More than a score of Bacon’s trademark black-and-white photos of the encampment can be seen in a photoessay on his blog, which also is an excellent introduction to an immense body of work by a passionate, principled observer of the human condition. I urge you to take a look. One can also hope–I hope–that his example will inspire others to follow suit, in the best tradition of advocacy journalism, so that the countless other Wood Street encampments around the country can be spotlighted for the rest of us to see.

Part of the reason Bonnie and Clyde were so hard to corner was because of the help they got from a public that viewed them as Robin Hood-type figures; the money they stole, after all, was held by banks–depositories for the rich–not from people just scraping to get by. These days we have a different criminal class, one that’s more politically driven, but its depredations are similarly abetted by those who have little to nothing of their own and few prospects of that changing. It’s time the rest of us started paying attention.

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First they came for the homeless . . .

No matter what metrics you examine, the national housing crisis gets only more dire with each passing month–yet the prevailing social response has been to make it ever harder for people to find a place they can call home. The predictable result: more people living on the streets, more rattletrap RVs heading for public lands and growing tension between those who own a home (or can afford rent) and those who don’t.

On the supply side, the latest news is that the average home price in the U.S. popped above $375,000 in March, a 15% increase over the past 12 months. This development came against a backdrop of mortgage rates nearly doubling in the same period, prompting headline writers to coo that an overwrought real estate market might finally be poised to cool down, as if that’s somehow meaningful. But unless they’re predicting an actual real estate downturn (they’re not), what the headline writers are saying is that housing prices will remain lodged at levels far higher than most working people can afford.

On the demand side, there simply isn’t enough affordable housing to go around, and the consequences are truly inhumane. Thomas Fuller, writing last week for the New York Times out of its San Francisco bureau, reported that Los Angeles last year averaged five homeless deaths a day, including 287 who “took their last breath on the sidewalk.” Overall, he added, “the epidemic of deaths on the streets of American cities has accelerated, as the homeless population has aged and the cumulative toll of living and sleeping outdoors has shortened lives.”

Austin, Denver, Indianapolis, Nashville and Salt Lake City are among the cities Fuller cited where officials and homeless advocates have been alarmed by the rising number of deaths–yet the public response to homelessness in these and other cities has been increasingly punitive. The Los Angeles City Council, for example, recently decided that starting May 15 it will again enforce parking restrictions for “vehicle dwellings,” which essentially means that derelict RVs will get towed away. There undoubtedly are numerous legitimate reasons for doing this–not least among them a marked upswing in RVs going up in flames on city streets–but without an offsetting effort to provide low-cost housing, this simply means the city will be pushing homeless people back onto the sidewalk.

Sidewalk living, however, is increasingly criminalized. Austin, once an affordable city, has become the national leader in rising housing costs, with rents soaring 40% over the twelve months through February. Its residents nonetheless voted last year to reinstate criminal penalties against public camping, and the Texas legislature piled on a few weeks later by banning homeless encampments statewide and fining offenders $500. That’s called “squeezing blood from a stone,” but other states–including Florida and New Hampshire–have followed suit with similarly draconian bans.

Remarkably enough, some few landowners have tried to do what their public representatives apparently can’t, opening their private property to homeless campers. Unremarkably, mostly what they get is community pushback and official slap-downs. When one such private project, Camp Haven Sanctuary, became home to 19 otherwise homeless people outside Austin, local neighbors blasted the effort in online posts that were so vitriolic they had to be taken down. A similar encampment on private land in Akron, Ohio, was shut down by city officials who said it violated zoning restrictions–as were encampments in Salt Lake City, Morganton, WV, and elsewhere.

The housing squeeze is getting worse in other ways as well. Mobile home parks, frequently cited as America’s cheapest non-subsidized housing, increasingly are being sold either to developers who want the land for other uses, or to speculators intent on raising the rents. On those rare occasions when state legislators try to enact some kind of relief–as is happening currently in Colorado, where a House bill would cap annual rent increases–the real estate industry responds with cries about “rent control” and accusations of government overreach. Those may or may not be valid points, but they’re never followed by alternative approaches for dealing with a growing human tragedy.

Elsewhere, Tennessee earlier this month enacted a law straight out of a Dickens novel, requiring renters who want to appeal an eviction to first produce a year’s worth of rent. To break that down: if you’re a renter in Tennessee and can’t afford a rent hike, your landlord can evict you–and you’ll need to show a judge $15,000 or so before you can even file an appeal. Since for many people that’s even less likely than homeless people having $500 to pay a fine in Texas, the inevitable result will be even more people on the street.

Tennessee, to be sure, may be on the kook fringe. This is the state, after all, that made national headlines this past week when it also hopped onto the criminalization bandwagon, passing legislation that makes it a felony to camp or sleep in parks or other public property. Sen. Frank Niceley (see? another Dickensian touch, if rather sardonically so) backed the bill by telling his colleagues that in 1910 Adolf Hitler “decided” to be homeless. “So for two years, Hitler lived on the streets and practiced his oratory and his body language and how to connect with the masses and then went on to lead a life that got him in the history books,” Niceley recounted.

“So a lot of these people, it’s not a dead-end,” Niceley concluded, in the ultimate perversion of a let’s-make-lemonade-out-of-lemons sermon. “They can come out of this, these homeless camps and have a productive life — or in Hitler’s case a very unproductive life.”

Hard to know just what Niceley intended with that unfortunate digression, but one reasonable interpretation is that our treatment of the homeless is breeding thousands of potential Adolf Hitlers. Maybe that suggests we should get serious about finding alternative responses. Until that happens, however, we can expect more homeless people occupying state and federal land, and more of a jaundiced attitude toward RVers and campers in general.

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RVs as homes of last resort

I was a reporter in Phoenix, several decades ago (!), when I first heard the term “SRO” while interviewing an anthropologist-turned-housing-advocate about the city’s sharply increasing homeless population. The growing number of people living on the streets, she said, was a direct result of the demise of Single Room Occupancy facilities–sometimes boarding houses, but more often aging hotels that had been converted into bare-bones living quarters at affordable rents. Now, she said, those faded properties were being bulldozed out of existence in response to the city’s exploding real estate market. Those who ended up being evicted? Collateral damage.

Phoenix was hardly unique. The U.S. once had enough SROs to house millions, but by the mid-twentieth century these cheap living quarters had become increasingly targeted by developers, by more stringent fire and building codes and by the moral rectitude of those living in more comfortable circumstances. Between 1955 and 2013, nearly one million SROs in the country were done in by regulation, demolition or conversion to condos. In Chicago, 81% of all SROs disappeared between 1960 and 1980. San Francisco, which today has one of the most expensive real estate markets in the U.S. coupled with one of its highest homeless populations, lost approximately 15,000 SROs between 1970 and 2000.

As SROs declined, however, an alternative form of cheap housing was on the rise, as mobile home parks swiftly became home to millions of mostly lower-income people. Tucked out of sight in the countryside or within industrial areas, such “parks” had the advantage of keeping the underclass out of the urban centers that had been home to SRO occupants. By 2001, more than 7 million mobile homes dotted the American countryside, with more than a third of them concentrated in mobile home parks–until the same forces that whittled away the SROs started working on them, as well. Earlier this month, Forbes magazine commented on how the number of mobile home parks has been “drastically reduced” each passing year, albeit without providing any hard numbers.

Rising real estate values are partly behind that reduction: many trailer parks that once were on the margins of metropolitan areas have become engulfed by urban sprawl, making the land more valuable for other uses. But there’s also the “loss-leader” problem for municipalities, as mobile home parks typically pay much less in local taxes than they soak up in public resources, particularly for local schools. And underlying all the financial dynamics is the whole class issue: with SROs, it was their depiction as “welfare hotels”–even though residents were predominantly unsubsidized. With mobile home parks, it’s the “trailer trash” perception. There is, unfortunately, little tolerance in a society that measures value in dollars for those who don’t have many.

The bad news today, as we head into a year in which remaining pandemic-driven moratoria on evictions are about to expire, is that the number of housing refugees–the people once most likely to need SROs or trailer parks–is about to soar. Meanwhile, low-rent housing–defined as $800 a month or less–declined by 4 million units between 2011 and 2017 and is in chronic short-supply. More than 20 million renters are paying more than 30% of their income for housing, and half of those are paying more than half–a level housing experts call “severely burdened.” Many of those people will soon find themselves on the streets.

What’s all that have to do with RVing and the splendid pursuit of camping in the great outdoors? Nothing, unless one realizes that “camping” isn’t only recreational–that it also defines one extreme of a housing continuum that stretches from gated communities at one end to improvised tents on the sidewalk on the other. And with SROs and mobile home parks increasingly squeezed at the bottom end of the spectrum, the dwindling number of cheap alternatives is making RVs look ever more attractive–for all their shortcomings as long-term housing–to people without other options.

What will be the social consequences? I’ll predict more friction within the RVing community itself, as those who spend big bucks for big fancy rigs used primarily for vacationing start bitching about the low-lifes in the battered travel trailer or class C next door. Look for more and more RV encampments to spring up next to tenting communities on city streets, parks and abandoned strip malls. And expect rising tensions between those who already own homes and those who want to build or expand existing campgrounds that will bring in more of the new transient class, regardless of how much money some of them might have.

History repeats

Public perception is a fickle thing, buffeted by changing circumstances and shallow emotions, and the RVing world is not exempt from its vagaries.

Back in the 1920s, for example, the growing affordability of automobiles resulted–among other things–in an explosion of car camping among the middle class. Unfortunately, the democratization of a previously elite pastime grated on the more affluent, who did their best to tamp down this encroachment on their turf. As quoted by Terence Young in his book Heading Out, from a widely circulated camping publication of the time, efforts to exclude “obnoxious” campers included instituting campground fees, “not because the camp managers need to raise any more money, but to keep out the ‘cheap camper,’ called by the Forest Service men a ‘white gypsy.'”

A decade later, car-camping as the epitome of camping convenience was surpassed by the size and amenities of camping trailers, which did away with the nuisance of having to set up a tent. But those same features also opened up the possibility of other uses, and as camping trailers became more affordable (as had automobiles before them), the Great Depression recast them as housing alternatives for those with no other options. With public perception of trailers shifting from cushy camping to inexpensive housing, officials overseeing the still fledgling supply of public campgrounds became increasingly alarmed. Camping trailers were “a highly objectionable and dangerous feature” in campgrounds, warned Emilio P. Meinecke, perhaps the nation’s preeminent architect of campground design. If not regulated closely, he warned, the trailers would create “a new type of city slum or suburban village with a floating population.”

Fast-forward nearly eighty years, and Meinecke’s fears–at that time on behalf of national forests and parks–are now applicable to the cities and suburbs themselves. Not just cars, vans and travel trailers, but tents and motor coaches have all become fixtures on streets throughout the United States, and especially in the warmer parts of the country. What just a few years ago was a “stealth” mode of creating shelter has become increasingly overt, culminating last month in the owner of a Class C parked on a Seattle street building a wooden second floor on top of his motorhome. (City authorities eventually made him remove the superstructure.)

City officials everywhere are struggling to cope with these incursions, which over the past 18 months have grown more pervasive due to the impact of Covid-19 on homeless shelters. Their efforts range from adopting draconian restrictions on who can park what kind of vehicle where and for how long, which doesn’t address root causes, to creating designated parking lots for RVs, which when underfunded and under-serviced simply concentrate the problem–again, without addressing root causes.

The general public, meanwhile, may end up viewing RVs with the same skepticism it had in the run-up to World War II. And that, in turn, may tarnish RVs as déclassé affectations, bastard children that are neither home nor vehicle, more public blight than private luxury.