A local NPR radio station had an hour today about Americans who live in their car. Apparently there are a lot of folks who do this. They focused on one lady, full-time employed as a social worker, but who got behind on her bills. She and her daughter have been living in their car. As you might expect, her budget problems included housing costs, medical, & college expenses (for the daughter). Car repair expenses were another important factor. Is there anything that can be done about this wide-spread problem? Some local gov’ts force the car dweller to leave, but then they just drive to the adjacent community and set up camp there. One idea suggested, the gov’t could create places for people living in their cars to park. To me this seems like a band-aid, not an actual solution. The highest concentration of folks living in their cars is said to be the LA, Calif area.
We have quite a few here in NH. Housing is very very high. and thus rent is high. And many of these people have full time jobs.
I dunno but I think you have to re-evaluate your vote and all of the rules and regulations that have increased the cost of housing. In addition there are reports of corporations and not just US that are buying up properties with the intent on turning them into rentals. That will only exacerbate the problem.
Long term, the only hedge against high rental costs is ownership. Of course interest costs are a factor but still our first mortgage in 1976 was 9%. Then not to mention the explosion of single parents. There are some life conditions that simply guarantee poverty.
I have to agree w/ esteemed colleague @Bing that folks living in their cars is more likely a symptom of bigger & more diverse problems.
A problem is created by the high cost of rent and homes. Homelessness has been a problem for a long time. About 33% of all the homeless live in California. There are many reasons for those problems. California (as well as other states) politicians don’t realize how they make this problem so their solutions often make things worse.
At least living in a car is better than in a tent on the street.
High housing costs are definitely a big problem in Silicon Valley. It’s fed in part by the relatively high salaries the highly educated & skilled tech workers get. Good for the parents, but creates a problem for their kids, b/c only a small % are tech-gifted. Very hard for the kids to grow up in Silicon Valley and stay in the area as adults.
One big unexpected expense this lady faced was a $5000 engine replacement. Are engine replacement jobs needed more now than say 10 -20 years ago? Are they a lot more expensive now?
Because of inflation and the greater complexity of modern engines, yes they are much more expensive.
Housing cost is a supply and demand issue. When the supply is greatly limited due to onerous regulation, the cost goes up. That is the politicians’ fault. When the demand is high, that is caused the good things about California like weather as well as demand for workers, high and low tech.
When living there gets too expensive, dangerous or disgusting, those that can’t avoid it but can afford to, leave. That’s why there is a growing exodus from the state.
This certainly isn’t new. People have been leaving rural areas for decades. My mother left rural Western PA about 90 years ago because her prospects for a good life were minimal. A guy I used to work with grew up in a small IL town, went to college, and moved to rural Western OH. He met his wife there. She is very smart and was informally voted as the most likely to leave the county. They did and now live in Central MD. Another man I used to work with lived in the SF Bay Area. He is a well educated engineer. He and his wife recognized that if they wanted to own a home they either had to live over 100 miles from his work or they had to move. They now live in Central MD and own a home. The problems are more severe for the unemployed or those with jobs that don’t pay well enough to have money for rent and utilities. I don’t have a solution.
I am sorry mom is having to live like this and I can understand how she could get there fast in todays world…
My 1st question is, is the daughter working?? and if not why not?? My daughter just finished college with a 3.7 GPA while working full time about 50 hours a week as a manager the entire time… My daughter will work no matter what is going on and she has a bad back on top of it all, 2 - 11" rods with 18 screws in her back since she was 12yo… So I find it hard to understand why kids today don’t work… And if you can’t afford a roof over your head, I’m sorry but the college bills would be the last thing I was worried about… I can understand the Mom being in bad shape as I am too, but unless something is bad wrong with the daughter then the daughter and mom both working (or mom’s SSA check) should at least be able to drive somewhere cheaper to live and start over… I also have to wonder if either or both have smart phones??..
I’m sure that changing the oil was at the bottom of the list, but I could be wrong…
Sometimes it comes down to priority’s…
And I try to stay out of the political world on here as I don’t fit in with most (and this is an automotive forum), but a lot of this is the voters fault for voting these politicians in and voting for them over and over again or ones just like the last ones and then y’all ask why is this happening,… lol
And most of the homeless people in Nashville are crazy, drugged up or don’t want to work… I worked downtown Nashville from Feb 2011 - Dec 2018 and had to deal with them on a daily basis coming in and using our bathrooms, free water and coffee to our guest, we had to put a stop to it cause many would go in the bathroom to get there fix and pass out and others would bother our customers, we always offered hot coffee on cold days unless we had issues with them, and we got to know a bunch of them… One guy worked his butt off selling papers on the corner and made good money doing it, I remember one Christmas eve he made $600 in a few hours… Then he went and smoked and drank among other things most of it away that day… lol… So a lot of these people are doing this to themselves… And yes a lot of them have working smart phones…
Again that is here in Nashville during that time…
The going rate was they paid $0.25 cents for the paper and sold it for a $1.00, another paper cost them $0.50 and they sold it for $2.00, anybody could do it, no restrictions… And all kinds of disabled people of all ages did it, Wheelchairs, whatever, didn’t matter…
OK, I’m off my soap box, take it as you will, just little ol’ me and my point of view… I’m quite sure your views will differ greatly… 
My wife was a high school teacher. We were having breakfast at a restaurant and one of her former students was our waitress. She told me to leave her a good tip. In the car she explained the girl had been living on her own through high school and now well into college.
As the tv show naked city used to say, there are a thousand stories in the city. We do have a few homeless high school kids where the parent or parents or uncles etc are gone or in jail. In the 60s I did not know of any other fellow kid without at least one parent around. We reap what we sow if we could only learn.
I did know one kid whose parents left for Florida every winter and left the kids alone. But there were about 12 kids of various ages so they did fine. He used to say he had a brother he never met. Long gone out of the nest before he was born.
I’ve written about my son previously, he’s a master electrician and because he lives in an RV and has no problem parking it on site and he has all his certifications and multi state licenses and is in good standing with the Union, he is often a by name request for many employers as the lead electrician. He is presently working a large Solar Farm in Indiana. They just finished one phase of installations and the contract for the next phase was given to another contractor. The previous contractor laid off all the workers since the contract was finished.
My son was chosen to head up this phase too by the new contractor and offered all the laid off workers from the last phase jobs at the same wages. The new phase is laying the in-ground cable, not like the installation of the panels on the last phase.
Barely half of the laid off workers were willing to take the new positions, preferring to end the year on un-employment. They (both straight labors, apprentice and journeymen electricians) claimed they were not ditch diggers and they can just get folks who need “shovel ready jobs…”
In actuality, there is no digging, only the running of the cables in the ditches. A separate contractor was brought in to dig and cover up the cable, as was a separate contractor who was brought in to build the based and support stands for the solar panels.
So a bunch of these folks were will to give up good paying Union jobs and collect un-employment, get issued EPT and SNAP cards and all the other benefits the government is giving away…
Kind of reminiscent of the old Oprah Give-Away Shows… “You get a New Car, and You get a New Car…” But in this case, you get at New Tax Credit, and you get a New Tax Credit, and did you get your Un-Employment Check yet, and here is your EPT Card and did you get your EPT Card yet???
They are way behind schedule for the planed phase before winter sets in…
Oprah continues to show her lack of understanding. Or maybe it is all for show. Remember these unfortunate folks got a new car but then got a big tax bill from the irs. Then Oprah got caught and had to also give them money to pay the tax. Then there is Hawaii, pledging money to an organization that seems to benefit the advisors not the folks that lost everything.
I don’t pay much attention to her, just enough to know she is fake and not to be trusted. And her color matters not at all to me.
Agree 100%.
Agree 100%.
It is ridiculous how expensive housing has become, and how difficult it is for regular people to afford living expenses, even if employed full-time. From 2018 to 2022, the cost to buy or rent any type of dwelling has doubled, while incomes rose by maybe 8% to 10%.
Currently, a studio apartment here (southern AZ) costs about $1100-1300 per month, a 1-bedroom apartment costs about $1200-1600 per month, a 2-bedroom apartment costs about $1500-1800 per month, and a basic 3-bedroom/2-bathroom house costs about $1800-2400 per month to rent. Meanwhile, most career-type jobs here pay around $45k to $65k per year.
Given that you have to gross three times the monthly rent just to be allowed to move in, you can see that a large percentage of the population simply cannot afford housing anymore…hence the soaring homeless population.
So yes, people are being forced to live in their car, though a minivan with the back seats removed would be a lot more comfortable for this purpose.
It should be noted that the largest demographic being priced-out onto the street due to massive rent increases is elderly people. No one can possibly budget for a 100% (or more) rent increase in the span of just 4 years–while Social Security gives a paltry 3% cost-of-living increase each year!
Maybe the reason I cannot find an affordable used Caravan for sale is that too many people are being forced to live in them, because they can’t qualify for an apartment and/or cannot afford the asking rents!
I have no respect for Oprah either, she made out that she was “giving away” all those wonderful gifts on her Christmas Special Show… It turned out that she was not actually “giving” anything away but rather had her company Harpo contact the various business and manufacturers and told them that Oprah wanted to “give” these items away as “gifts” and the items were supplied free of charge just to get the label " Oprah’s Favorite Things"
I only quote Oprah when I am making a joke about getting something for “free.” Also I resent Oprah buying up so much private land in Hawaii for her personal use, either to have her own compound or to build her own “Oprah-Land” of high-end homes…
She also managed to purloin the creation of the expression an “Aha Moment” which is a moment of sudden realization, inspiration, insight, recognition, or comprehension.
Geoffrey Chaucer (Born 1340, Died 1400 – He wrote " The Canterbury Tales") used “aha” in this context in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” – “They crieden, out! A ha the fox! and after him thay ran” – in the year 1386 (like 600-years before Oprah…)
The Oxford English Dictionary defined the “aha experience” as: a moment of sudden insight or discovery; the sudden finding of a solution to a problem in its 1908 edition…
Even Mutual of Omaha had it registered as a “Proud sponsor of life’s aha moments,” “Official sponsor of life’s aha moments,” and “Celebrating life’s aha moments,” all as applied to the insurance field.
Nashville is similar to every other city, in that mental health problems underlie many–perhaps most–of these situations. If our country ever decides to address mental health problems among the populace, we could drastically reduce the homeless problem, along with several other interrelated issues.
A while back… I heard a historian being interviewed on NPR. The topic was the fall of empires throughout history. The historian said that while all empires seem to have fallen or declined for a variety of reasons…the common theme among all of them was a widening gap between the rich and poor. While that gap always seems to be there…when it got too “wide”, that’s when the trouble started.
I tend to think the gap between rich and poor both in our country and even worldwide is the root of all of our current problems. You can parse that statement and throw blame wherever you like. But when folks working full time at “good” jobs can’t afford housing even relatively near their job… that’s a red flag.
Did the idiots not realize that the ditch diggers use excavators and a backhoes and make great money??? 
If you ever watch a skilled excavator operator working, it can be very elegant in a way… It can be amazing watching 80K pounds of metal gracefully moving dirt around… lol
I don’t have an issue with poor people having smartphones as long as they’re cheap prepaid ones. Convenient Internet access is pretty much a necessity these days.