Tag: RVs as permanent homes

Deschutes dithering about RV homes

There’s a lot of dithering these days in Deschutes County, Oregon, about whether it’s a good idea to give a government stamp of approval to people living in RVs as permanent residences. No other county in Oregon has yet taken that step. And as county commissioner Phil Chang noted in today’s commission meeting, there’s a difference between “the bleeding edge” and “the leading edge” of innovation, with no telling what the consequences may be for those leading the charge.

Or as plaintively asked by commissioner Patti Adair, “For once, do we need to be first?”

Occasioning such angst has been a will-they-won’t-they struggle by the three-member board to decide whether to include RVs as permissible dwellings under an Oregon law that allows accessory dwelling units on single-family rural lots. Although two public hearings last fall elicited strongly negative comments about the whole idea, the Deschutes planning commission only narrowly shot it down, on a 4-3 vote—close enough for the county’s board of commissioners, after discussing the planning board’s decision at a Feb. 28 meeting, to decide it should keep talking. Because, as Adair also noted, “it could have gone either way.”

Today’s upshot? A vague decision—no date has been set yet—to hold another public hearing on the matter. Maybe before Memorial Day—or maybe in the fall, with a thinly expressed hope that some other county (Tillamook and Clackamas were prominently mentioned) will bite the bullet first, “allowing for an assessment of those programs and the lessons learned therein.” After you, my dear Gaston. No, no—after you, Alphonse.

To be fair, today’s meeting was called in part to get answers to questions that were raised at the Feb. 28 meeting, principally having to do with wastewater management. But those answers weren’t encouraging: RV wastewater characteristics are significantly different from a regular household’s, according to Todd Cleveland, onsite wastewater manager. It’s more concentrated, and the chemicals that RV owners add to reduce odors are not septic-system friendly, regardless of what the label may say. Among the most frequent complaints fielded by county enforcement officers about RV tenants are surface wastewater discharges, presumably because their septic systems are over-burdened. And soil quality in Deschutes County is such that adding an RV to a single-home site will require at least a one-acre lot for adequate percolation—and even that’s a guess because “we haven’t evaluated RVs for permanent use.”

No matter. Despite all the uncertainties, not to mention abundant other reasons why legitimizing RVs as suitable year-round housing is an enormously woeful idea, the pressure is on to provide some kind of alternatives in a state—like much of the U.S.—desperately in need of affordable homes. The Source, a county weekly newspaper, pressed the issue late last month in an editorial headlined, “With Affordable Housing, Why Are Deschutes County And The City Of Bend Ignoring The Low-Hanging Fruit?” as though the only difference between an RV and a bungalow is its placement on a tree of housing options.

In that respect, however, Deschutes County and the concessions it seems prepared to make are far from unique. Earlier this week, for example, RVtravel reported on “good news for RVers in the U.S. Navy!” Navy families may now “choose to live in an RV park for up to a year as they await availability of base housing when reporting to a new duty station.” The new policy, “an initiative of the U.S. Navy Morale, Welfare and Recreation Program,” is “aimed at reducing the stressors that come with a military lifestyle.”

The best way to reduce such stress, it should go without saying, would be to provide military families with something other than an aluminum or fiberglass band-aid. Living full-time in an RV—especially for more than a couple of adults—is its own significant stressor. But as the U.S. Navy has demonstrated, and as Deschutes County—and its Oregon peers—are sure to emulate, the normalization of RVs as an acceptable housing “solution” is well underway. Codify it, regulate it, inspect it—but not too closely—and hope for the best, because at least it gets people off the streets and out of those damn tents.

Meanwhile, it’s noteworthy that the RV industry, despite years of adamant public statements about how its products are specifically not designed for full-time occupancy, has remained completely mum on this issue. Not a word has emanated from the Washington, D.C. suburbs headquarters of the RV Industry Association to deplore this misuse of its recreational vehicles. Recreational, residential—what’s the diff? The important thing is to keep those production lines moving, especially after the post-pandemic slump, and leave it up to someone else to do the policing.

That may work in the short-term. What the RVIA has yet to understand is that the long-term consequences of such a laissez-faire attitude is a growing public disdain for RVs in general. It happened with “manufactured homes,” aka house trailers, which increasingly came under attack from their better-heeled neighbors. And it’s already happening with RV parks, which likewise are being seen as a blight on the community, to the long-term detriment of the entire industry.

Next post: A look at some of the pushback against proposed new RV parks.

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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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Return of the “gasoline gypsies?”

As the number of RVs rolling off assembly lines continues to soar, the investment class has astutely noted that there’s money to be made by throwing up more RV parks and campgrounds. At the same time, a growing number of established homeowners and businesses–and the politicians representing them–are awakening to this incursion on their turf, and they’re not happy. Moreover, public perception of RVers in general is being shaped by the growing number of otherwise homeless people squatting on city streets in aging, often barely operable travel trailers, motorhomes and vans.

Many of the concerns voiced when a developer wants to build a new or expanded campground arise whenever any sizeable development is proposed, from increased noise and traffic to greater demand on municipal services. But additional resistance arises when a project specifically targets a transient population, which often is regarded suspiciously by “the locals.” Because they’re just passing through, travelers can be seen as untrustworthy, inclined to take advantage and heedless of any negative impact they may have on the environment or on their more established neighbors.

RVers, in other words, are the contemporary American version of “gypsies,” the derogatory term applied by many Europeans to the nomadic Roma people. This is not a new concept. A century ago, when the price of travel trailers first became low enough to be afforded by the middle–and lower–classes, the New Republic referred to this emerging subculture as “gasoline gypsies.” And while the gasoline gypsies initially were regarded with a somewhat bemused interest, the onset of the Great Depression and its dispossession of many people from “regular” housing soon changed that.

By 1938, the American Automobile Association estimated there were 300,000 travel trailers in the U.S., and that 10% of them were being used for full-time housing. All those RV full-timers alarmed the more established population then, as they do now. As Esther Sullivan, author of “Manufactured Insecurity,” has written, many towns and cities throughout the country passed exclusionary zoning and ordinances prohibiting the use of trailers as housing, banishing them from the city limits or to commercial trailer courts, or requiring occupied trailers to be moved every few days. Sound familiar?

It’s important to note that the “travel trailers” of the 1920s and 1930s were essentially the same size–up to 8 feet wide–as today’s models. The larger units that now populate commercial trailer courts, with single-wides ranging up to 14 feet wide, weren’t manufactured until after 1955, when changing state and federal regulations permitted the transition from “trailers” to “mobile homes.”

But while mobile homes are now recognized as just permanent housing, today’s RVs straddle two worlds, the recreational and the residential–the same split personality that was observed, and increasingly resented, a century ago. Today’s events are following a similar arc, with manufacturers and affluent buyers attempting to downplay the growing use of today’s RVs as replacement housing for the tens of thousands of Americans squeezed out of the conventional housing market. Some of the dispossessed, as mentioned, are ending up parked on the street. Others are being shoe-horned into smaller commercial RV parks by campground owners who recognize there’s less work, and steadier cash flow, in having their sites filled with permanent rather than transient campers.

That leaves anyone trying to build or expand an RV park in the unenviable position of recognizing market demand but facing ever stronger headwinds of public opposition. History is repeating–but at an unbelievable scale. Those 300,000 travel trailers that prompted such a public backlash in 1938? The U.S. will produce twice that many RVs this year alone, while the number of RVers living in their rigs full-time is estimated as upwards of 1 million, or several orders of magnitude more than shook things up all those many years ago.