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Abstract
The number of people inhabiting vehicles in public parking has grown significantly during the 21st century in U.S. cities like Seattle, WA. Despite being the most frequently documented form of shelter among people who occupy public space, Seattle and the surrounding King County have few options for long-term vehicle residency and even less that are connected with social services. This article compares official annual reports on the habitation of cars, trucks, vans, or recreational vehicles (RVs) from 2006 to 2018 with an analysis of vehicle residency-oriented parking tickets, impounds, and police auctions in Seattle during this period.
Reconsidering the Mobile Home
Hundreds of thousands of Americans sleep in vehicles and mobile homes, both on and off the street. A vehicle residence frequently represents-and contains-vital remaining assets after a loss of housing from personal catastrophe, displacement, or natural disaster (Siegler, 2019). For some, a vehicle residence offers a step off the street or a way to avoid feared emergency shelters (Mendoza, 1997; Wakin, 2005, 2014). For many others, mobile homes are seen as the only available form of housing among persistent social, legal, and economic barriers to property rental or ownership (Arora, 2018; Bruder, 2017; Salamon and Mactavish, 2017; Sullivan, 2018; Talbutt, 2009).
To be clear, needs differ among millennials promoting the merits of "#VanLife" while employed in a wireless or "gig" economy (Allison, 2016; Monroe, 2017), older "snowbirds" migrating seasonally in an RV for medical purposes (Counts and Counts, 1996), single mothers with children who hide in a sedan while escaping an abusive intimate partner (Flynn, 2019), and veterans who may be "decompressing from the tribulations of service through the vicissitudes of travel" (Anderson, 2016) within a nondescript cargo van. A near-century of people inhabiting a mobile home or RV (Twitchell, 2014) seems to suggest that what defines their habitation as homelessness is less the form of shelter than its location in a public or private space. Mobile home parks, however, are reportedly "vanishing at a startling rate" (Denvir, 2015; Sullivan, 2018; Way, Fraser, and Davila, 2020), and the few parks near cities often do not accept vehicles that are more than 10 years old (Ve Ard, 2018). With limited access to off-street areas, more and more of these private mobile homes occupy...