Home Is Where You Park It

Your Parking Lot In Life

A car is not considered an “adequate shelter” according to Federal definitions of homelessness in the United States, social service agencies, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, or predominant understandings of what constitutes a house. Homelessness statistics in the United States are generally produced from a “count day” or a “count period” of a week or a few days. These document only the identifiable and visible homeless people, predominantly in urban centers, and people who are receiving services from a shelter or long-term transitional housing facility. Researchers at the National Coalition for the Homeless note that people who live in rural areas lack shelter facilities and are more likely to live in inadequate shelters, such as a car, rather than no shelter at all (sleeping rough), as is stereotypically associated with homelessness in urban areas (National Coalition for the Homeless, 2009). Therefore, there is not an accurate number of how many people live in their cars in the United States (nor of how many people experience homelessness in the United States). However, in 1994 a study of the generalized population asked respondents if they had ever been homeless by asking about their sleeping practices over their lifetime. Of the 1,500 people surveyed, 14% had been homeless at some time in her or his life, and of those people, 59% reported living in an automobile during the period of homelessness (Link et al., 1994).

In the United States, people live in cars as small as Porsches and as large as converted school busses (Shelley, 2006; Ye Old Rad Blog, 2007). Most live in the car because of limited financial resources and access to stable affordable housing. Moving into the car is often preceded by a health emergency, unemployment, intimate partner or family violence, or a change in family status such as divorce. Most people in the news reports and survival guides I reviewed live alone in the car, but it’s not uncommon for entire families to live in a car or a van. For example, Tiana lives in her small compact car, sleeping on top of her clothes on the back seat. She works part-time as a City of Santa Barbara parking lot attendant (Shelley, 2006, Pt. 1). The Banks, a family of six, lived in their van outside of Orlando, Florida. The oldest daughter, 13-year-old Teara, described their sleeping arrangements: “My mom and dad were in the front seat, my two younger siblings were in the two middle seats, and my younger sister was between the two middle seats, and I was in the back seat” (CBS News, 2011).

Some people have large conversion vans or VW busses that have mini fridges inside, but the majority of people interviewed and those writing about living in their cars live in a vehicle with no refrigeration or other kinds of amenity hookups that would facilitate daily bodily maintenance routines. This means that most car dwellers meet these needs through dispersed space, though survival guides provide many tips on bathing, washing clothes, and using the restroom inside of the automobile. Bodily needs are met inside the car in myriad ways: using cat litter, stadium pals, or mason jars for urination; large buckets with soap, water, and a ski pole for clothes washing; and sanitary wipes or buckets for basic cleaning and bathing needs (Archer, 1999; Heim, 2001; Mobilehomemaker, 2004).

Whatever kind of automobile a person lives in, its use differs from the use for driving. The auto is often reorganized to optimize sleeping and storage. Despite the explicitly mobile design of the vehicle, in car dwelling the auto is usually moved as infrequently as possible, serving as a hub from which a person can meet multiple needs accessing a restroom in one place, seeking food in another. When the car is moved, it is often moved in order to avoid fees or fines or to avoid drawing attention to its occupants. The mother of the Banks family described the series of motivations to move the vehicle:

“We found a place where we got our hot meal of the day. So we would get up . . . we would go there and kind of spruce up or whatever, and we would go back down to the Coco Beach area, and most of the time we would park in the Publix that’s right across the street from . . . the Cocoa Beach Pier. Most of the time we would park there until three o’clock because Cocoa Pier was free after three to park. But we kind of moved around to not kind of be conspicuous because the kids should have been in school and we did not want to get in trouble” (CBS News, 2011)

Practices of car dwelling involve negotiating a tension between siting the car in proximity to resources that can meet the person’s needs outside of the vehicle, and movement of the car from place to place so the people can remain undetected. Oftentimes movement of the car is motivated by the extent to which the car’s location produces legitimacy for being present in the “public” space of streets and parking lots.

“A Distributed Household”: Practices of Car Dwelling

The politics of movement and stillness in cities in the United States is a central tension between people who are homeless and homeless advocacy groups, on the one hand, and city officials, politicians, and the police, on the other (Beckett & Herbert, 2010; Gibson, 2012; Vitale, 2008). Sebastian Abrahamsson (2009) argues that we can understand even “still” bodies— in the case he uses cadavers on exhibit— as in constant motion. He makes sense of this still motion by paying attention to the intersubjective “intertwining of subjects and objects through space-times that are enduring and evolving.” Just as stillness can be understood as part of processes of motion, motion can also be understood to be practices of stillness. Robert Desjarlais (1997) describes how pacing is used as a coping tactic by men living in a Boston homeless shelter. While their bodies were in constant motion in the midst of other people, the pacing was experienced as a kind of aloneness and a kind of stillness. “Stretches of aloneness and stillness were fashioned into ritualized, steady-state routines, pacing as a way of moving with-out frequently brushing up against others and without stepping into any significant flow of time” (Desjarlais, 1997, 139-140). In the context of the migration of asylum seekers, Nicholas Gill (2009) argues that mobility threatens a person’s well-being, while stillness brings with it promises of social and emotion stability. In this case, stability might be more “freeing” than mobility. While car dwelling often brings with it social stability and consistency, it is also a physical requirement of a body that needs to sleep, sit, and rest. However, when still bodies are within regulated spaces, such as in a car parked on a public street or parking lot, the bodily requirement of stillness is often at odds with social and regulatory expectations of movement and space.

In regulated spaces stillness often is then interpreted into acts besides being still in the forms of sleeping or sitting, and is often turned into an act of crime or a spatial invasion. For example, a man who lived in his van gave testimony to the Eugene, Oregon, City Council that he was ticketed for camping while reading a book in his van (Archer, 1999, p. 47). Of 224 U.S. cities surveyed by the National Coalition for the Homeless, 27% prohibit sitting or lying in “certain public spaces” and 16% of cities had a citywide ban on “camping” (National Coalition for the Homeless & the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, 2006). A City of Atlanta (n.d.) ordinance that bans camping states,

“Camp” shall mean residing in or using a public street, sidewalk, or park for private living accommodations, such as erecting tents or other temporary structures or objects providing shelter; sleeping in a single place for any substantial prolonged period of time; regularly cooking or preparing meals; or other similar activities.

Camping is a term generally used in the United States for a recreational activity. In this case camping is deployed in legal code, linking rituals required for bodily survival to the site in which they occur. Sleeping, eating, or being sheltered is turned from “living” to “camping”: from requirement to recreation.

A 2006 report from the National Coalition for the Homeless includes a case in which a Hurricane Katrina evacuee

sleeping in his car with his family while seeking refuge in Atlanta, was arrested for panhandling at a mall in the affluent Buckhead neighborhood, even after he showed the police his Louisiana driver’s license, car tag, and registration as proof that he was a Katrina evacuee. (National Coalition for the Homeless & the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, 2006)

The report does not indicate that the man was panhandling, it only indicates he was sleeping in a car. The very proximity of his still, nonhoused body to a wealthy site was interpreted as siphoning resources, the act of panhandling. Legal ordinances are an expression of dominant ideologies about what practices are deemed acceptable by elected officials, police officers, and the constituents and residents whose interests they feel economically and socially motivated to serve. These ordinances naturalize an artificial linking of routines with certain structures and spaces, and discursively rearticulate a routine required for survival into an illegal act. By basing the code on the structure and space in which the body maintenance routine occurs, sleeping gets turned into panhandling, reading into camping.

Practices of car dwelling are not only constrained by social and legal expectations, however. Spatial practices also navigate interesting terrain within the restrictions posed by infrastructure and material designs. When someone spends the afternoon in his or her house, we don’t consider walking from the bedroom to the restroom to the kitchen “pedestrian,” but in the context of cars, roads, and parking lots, car dwellers often locate the car as centrally as possible to multiple resources so they can meet many needs at once. This means the movement from the auto interior as a place of stillness to the place of some other need is changed from “going” to “driving,” “walking,” or “biking.” “Mobilehomemaker (2004),” author of The Survival Guide to Homelessness, calls the use of multiple sites to meet the needs of living and dwelling in a car “a distributed household.” In his own words,

I had storage, shelter, mailbox, telephone, shower, bathroom facilities, cooking equipment, and transportation, even access to television, radio, computer equipment, and AC power. I had the essence of a home. It was simply more geographically scattered than is traditional in our culture.

A person who lives in her car does not have a bathroom or a kitchen down the hall from the space where she sleeps. This clearly informs the specificity of her routines, which are similar to a house dweller’s in the search for food, hygiene, and rest. For example, a video documents the daily routine of Tiana as she wakes up and dashes into a supermarket as soon as it opens in order to use the restroom. She buys ice for the day to keep food in a minicooler cold, soup to microwave later at a gas station for lunch, and a carton of milk for breakfast and drives to the Santa Barbara City parking lot where she works. The video shows Tiana again at night, watching a DVD on her laptop in the backseat of her small car before she goes to sleep (Shelley, 2006, Pt. 1). The car is made as fixed as possible, parked in a location that makes using the restroom, showering, and eating as walkable as possible.

Proximity and routine are developed within the dispersed sites and, as such, car dwellers often execute private routines within spaces considered public. In many cases, one must execute the public ritual in order to justify the private ritual. For example, one car dweller told a reporter that he put car keys and old utility bills on the table as he drank coffee and spent most of his day at a coffee shop, as if to show that he had a house he could return to and just chose to stay in the coffee shop a little longer (Urbina, 2006). What is important to understand here is that it is not just a strategy to stay in the coffee shop but also an attempt to pass as housed. It is being housed that then justifies his lingering at the coffee shop. If he appears “unhoused” he believes he is more likely to be considered loitering. Tiana combines her dash to the grocery store restroom in the morning with the purchasing of her food, giving her “customer” status in accordance with the “restrooms are for customers only” store policies. In this doubling up of routines (purchasing food and using the restroom, purchasing coffee and resting), acts that are generally considered private must happen in sites public. For the acts to be considered “legitimate” uses of the space the person must either appear housed or justify his or her presence through consumption. The private and public slide together, so that “I’m going to the bathroom” and “I’m going to the store” are likely to be one and the same.

To some extent, a car is able to be a site for privacy and stillness— for sleeping, reading, or watching movies—precisely because it’s a machine believed to be mobile. Passersby presume it is empty: that the owner of the car is somewhere nearby, sleeping in a sanctioned structure. The public and unoccupied presumption of the car creates the conditions of private occupation. The privacy of the auto interior moves with the car dweller when the car moves, but the person must leave the private space of the automobile to meet other bodily and social needs in public spaces. Unlike the general practice of driving, which transports a body between private and public sites, the car is not the vehicle that directly enables movement to sites of the public. It is a private space that is in proximity to the public or corporate space, and more important, it is these spaces that the car dweller visit in order to meet needs generally considered private, such as urinating, showering, and so on.

In the absence of the legitimacy obtained by integrating private consumption of goods and services with bodily needs in the corporate site, there is often significant public resistance to towards those who meet bodily maintenance needs in government-owned public sites such as park restrooms and showers. This is despite the fact that public sites are built and maintained by public monies that every car dweller contributes to through their labor, income taxes, previous homeowner taxes, sales taxes, and so on. Linda, a participant in the New Beginnings program in Santa Barbara, made a shower at the public tennis courts part of her morning routine.

“My showers are no more than five minutes long. I am in and out. Don’t really talk to anybody. I used to sit down and talk to people but I just sense that um, that that wasn’t the thing to do.” (Shelley, 2006, Pt. 1)

Shortly after Linda was filmed, the showers were completely closed to the public because of complaints about unhoused people like Linda using them. Housed people’s resistance to unhoused people in public space is, of course, more complex than purely anxiety about private rituals soiling public space. As Celine-Marie Pascale (2005) argues, capitalism and morality are discursively linked and naturalized in the United States “(t)o the extent that poverty is evidence of personal frailties and failures, the public visibility of people living in poverty is one more expression of failure: the failure to hide one’s poverty” (p. 256). To allow car dwellers to shower in public along with tennis players is, in the logics of capitalist morality, to enable and encourage failure. Next I want to understand how living in the automobile is understood by car dwellers and brick-and-mortar housed people, and how the terms “home” and “homeless” operate to articulate belonging, exclusion, and status.

Mobile Home(less)

Though to be “homeless” is generally presumed to first indicate the absence of an adequate physical structure of a house, in the accounts of car dwelling “home” and “homeless” are most often used to communicate a sense of belonging or a sense of exclusion. Pascale (259) argues, “Homelessness does not so much draw attention to a lack of housing as it does a lack of social networks and a lack of belonging” (p. 259). There is not a universal consensus among car dwellers that living in the car is a way of being at home or being homeless. The terms home and homeless oscillate between explaining the situation of one’s shelter structure and articulating one’s sense of self and status in the social hierarchy. The RV bumper sticker “Home Is Where You Park It" is echoed by many people who live in their car. One survival guide begins, “Car Living means making your car your home—including your own private sanctuary. Your car is your home in every sense of the word” (Heim, 2001, p. 7). When a man named Jess was asked by the reporter what the New Beginnings Safe Parking Program, which allows him a legal place to park his converted school bus at night, meant to him and his sons, Jess said, “Well, essentially it really means that we’ve got, ah, a stable home. We own a house, we just don’t have any place to park it.” When his son was asked, “(W)hat do you like best about living in the bus,” he answered, “(T)hat wherever we are, we have our home” (Shelley, 2006, Pt. 1). Living in the car at times transcends the tradition of attaching “home” to a specific place or arrangement of certain materials, and instead reveals the way in which practices of place-making produce sites of “home.” “Home” moves via practices and routines with the machine of the automobile or the body of the person.

However, this experience is not universal. Tiana, who had been living in her car for 3 years, said, “I believe I have aged so much since I’ve been homeless.” When showing the interviewer pictures of herself out to eat with friends and pictures of her bathroom in her former home, she said, “I’m just showing you these pictures to show that I was a part of society, and I did have a life, and I did have a home. I did have a cat” (Shelley, 2006, Pt. 1). Unlike Jess or Mobilehomemaker, she doesn’t consider her car dwelling a way of being “home.” She executes the rituals necessary for survival traditionally performed in a house, rituals similar to what other mobile-homemakers might do to survive, but her experience of these rituals does not necessarily constitute her car as the space of “home.” She attaches living in a traditional house as a prerequisite for community belonging, and considers herself outside of society because she now lives in a different structure: her car. The ideology that a house is a prerequisite to having a home (which is then central to full belonging) cycles through discourses of car dwelling and discourses of homelessness in general, and informs how Tiana understands her own self within the larger social body.

In a blog post titled “Homeless in SoCal: Rad Guide to Living Out of Your Porsche (as a Hi-Tech Hobo),” the author of Ye Old Rad Blog articulated a nuanced way of understanding himself as not-housed, not-really-homeless, and homeless all at the same time.

You could say I was homeless (and some did just that), but it wasn’t like I was eating out of garbage cans . . . wrestling hobos for fingerless gloves. I mean, how many “homeless” people do you know driving around (beautiful) Laguna Beach in a Porsche? (Ye Old Rad Blog, 2007)

Initially this author wants to make clear that his understanding of what it means to be homeless is not to be without a safe, steady, legal shelter generally comprised of walls, a kitchen, and a toilet. What constitutes being homeless requires a certain aesthetic (fingerless gloves) or practice, such as eating out of a garbage can. The writer had the practices (driving) and aesthetic artifact (Porsche) of a wealthy person in a wealthy community (Laguna Beach). What he’s distancing himself from is not homelessness per se, not without home, but chronic poverty, hunger—he is distancing himself from the stereotypical practices of homelessness. However, his blog post is titled “Homeless in SoCal,” so, despite distancing himself from “the homeless” label others identified him as, he titles the documentation of his experience on the blog as being homeless.

He distances himself from “real” homelessness, while trying to express empathy for those who are “really” homeless, who he characterizes as eating out of the trash while wearing fingerless gloves. “Note, I don’t want to make light of *real* homelessness, which is a serious problem” (Ye Old Rad Blog, 2007), yet he documents the struggles of being without home (being rained on while attempting to pitch a tent, waking up early to leave a camping area before 6am to avoid paying the charge, not being able to have everything he needs for a day in his possession). He uses his location, movement, and the expensive status marker of his vehicle as mechanisms to distance himself from the stigmatizing aspects of homelessness. These status markers reframe his auto mobility as a practice of “cruising” rather than “going”—as key indicators of his class identity and to reject the essentializing label of “homeless.” By linking identity to routines and materials that might trump or offset his without-home status—eating in a restaurant, driving an expensive car, “cruising” through town instead of “scurrying” to the bathroom—he might avoid stigmatization. He is neither “home” nor “homeless.” He ultimately expresses his identity through a qualified negative: “not really homeless” (Ye Old Rad Blog, 2007).

Routines associated with homemaking for housed people, when performed in the car, do not necessarily make a car dweller at “home,” nor does the absence of the house necessarily make a car dweller “homeless.” Practices of survival often associated with homemaking are performed within the vehicle of the car, and extend out into the tables, parks, sidewalks, and stores around an auto. These routines, combined with the material shelter of the automobile, translate into home for some car dwellers. Other car dwellers experience car dwelling as a way of being unhoused and, because of this lack, also understand themselves to be outside of society. Many brick-and-mortar housed dwellers also understand car dwellers to be without-home and therefore not part of the “community,” as expressed by a City Councilman from Venice, California. In response to an increase of car dwelling in the affluent community of Venice, the councilman said,

“The community has been going ballistic . . . They can’t park their own cars. Some of the folks who live in their cars and in campers defecate and urinate outside and create other issues of quality of life and health.” (Willon & Groves, 2009)

By “the community” Councilman Rosenthal seems to indicate only people housed in traditionally sanctioned houses, because the article also interviews a woman who said that to move outside of the city limits, where the council proposed requiring car dwellers to park, would be “a hardship because her two teenage children attend school in the area; her daughter also works at a nearby restaurant” (Willon & Groves, 2009). Generally, someone who has children in school in a town and the people who work in a town are considered part of the community. However, in the United States and other post-indutrial countries, it is common to exclude people who are inadequately housed from the collective body of the wider community (Hodgetts, et al, 2011; Kawash, 1998; Pleace, 1998). The process of merging a house into a “home” and making a home the foundational spatial and social organizing unit of the community means that people who do not have a shelter considered an adequate home are not only considered “homeless” but also not part of society, or part of “the community.” This is despite their performance of other community-based rituals—working, consuming, occupying public space, parenting, going to school, and so on—that are key parts of being in a social or political body of a town.

Conclusion

The complex identity and political negotiations of practicing place in car dwelling evidences that attempts at regulation, infrastructure development, and struggles for resource equity around car dwelling cannot be reduced to any single, fixed experience of being traditionally at “home” or being “homeless.” However, the commonalities within car dwellers’ experiences of practicing place reveal specific avenues to reduce undue burdens in bodily survival and to increase community inclusion for people living in the car. For theorists, more attention must be paid to unraveling the ways that certain material arrangements, such as the materials a shelter is built out of, not only informs but in the case of car dwelling often trumps other place-making indicators of community belonging. The linking of permanent materials such as wood, with certain normative practices, such as sleeping, has great impacts on the lives of people who cannot obtain access to those materials or the physical sites on which to place them. Debates and policy decisions about what and whom public space is for need to include consideration of nonnormative use of the space, perhaps even incorporating proactive resource design to reduce the physical strain associated with inadequate housing, such as 24-hour parking spaces near clean, unlocked, and well-maintained public restrooms. Cars are not necessarily for driving. Homes may not remain in one fixed, graphable site. Access to public space may be a bodily, not just a social, necessity for some people to survive. These ways of thinking about materials and space are not just the concerns of a minority of people who find themselves living in their car. Car dwelling is just one example of the way conceptions of space, place, materiality, and community are used to sort people into and outside of collective forms in the United States through ever-evolving physical and social regulation.