Full‑time RV living has doubled since 2021

bobcat

bobcat

Well-known Member
Location
Northern Calif
And the primary reason isn't for fun or travel. The primary driver is the cost of housing and inflation. This is no longer a “van‑life” lifestyle trend - it’s an economic necessity for many. Many live in vehicles because they can no longer afford housing.

Some RV parks are reporting a 60% increase in RV park residency in just the last 3 years. I can't help but wonder if a fair amount of the younger population has given up on the "American dream" and decided to adopt a different lifestyle. Many earn below $75,000 a year, and making ends meet doesn't leave many options. Median home prices have risen sharply as well as rents. Those who can't afford an RV may choose to live in cars rather than on the street. Who could blame them.

I would guess that if RV space rents rise due to demand, there may be more RV's parked on streets, and in shopping centers, and on public land. Employer supported RV living is also increasing. The employer provides an RV space and hookups as part of the perks for working there. Employers know that most of the people who work for them can't afford to live in the area they need to work, so the employer either provides RV space or partners with nearby RV parks to fill spaces.

Larger cities have high housing costs, but the economy still relies on restaurant workers, retail workers, hotel staff, cashiers, and a number of other low wage jobs .... but where are they supposed to live? How this shift in workforce housing will change America or traditional views remains to be seen. Hopefully, it may be a solution to a growing problem. Maybe the term "Recreational Vehicle" will need to change.
 
In 2012, I sold my house and everything in it. Bought an RV, parked it in a very nice RV resort in the country. The rents in that park were $350-$500/month, plus electricity which for me was $50-$150/month depending on the season. Lived there until 2018 when I went back to sticks-and-bricks living.

At that time, the park was owned by a couple who had built it and lived on site. Towards the end, they sold it to a corporation and the rents have since gone up substantially, almost doubled. Two more large parks were then built across the street, not nearly as nice, like parking in a WalMart parking lot. They are now all full with waiting lists.

Everything RV was bought out by large corporations (i.e., Berkshire Hathaway), from the manufacturers to insurance companies, parks, financing, etc. The build quality went down, rents and insurance costs went up. They controlled it all and prices went crazy.

Much of home rentals are owned by these same companies who control those rents. They forced people out of the sticks-and-bricks rentals into RV's, which they also controlled. See what happened?

I have read (true or not, IDK) that those companies are beginning to sell the houses, which will cause a drop in the housing market. Many people who bought in the past few years will be upside down with their mortgage. Is another 2008 crash coming? And, if people go back to houses, when they try to sell that RV, they will be upside down on that, too.

When you think about how this all exploded during the p(l)andemic, you have to wonder how much of that was intentionally managed to panic people into making decisions that benefited the profit margins. Do I firmly believe this? No, but it would not surprise me.
 
There already are RV's often junk parked on streets.
In some cities around Seattle people put huge concrete blocks in front of home so a broke down dirty often drug magnet RV was not parked in front of their home.

The " van life" was promoted and still have people making videos.
looked up this
Feedspot lists 620 van life Instagram influencers with email contacts, plus additional creators across YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter influencers.feedspot.com.
  • Influencer Marketing Hub (cited in gitnux.org) reports 15,000 van life influencers with 500M+ combined followers gitnux.org.

had family who lived in RV in 80's saving money but was not fun as they were always in each other's way etc.
 
About 10 years ago, we saw a tv news story about how some investment companies/corporations were taking potential investors on tours of mobile home/rv parks for sale and advising them to purchase the parks. The main sales pitch for them to invest in the parks was that since the more run-down parks were usually far away from any nicer housing, more and more of the tenants were registered sex offenders who were not allowed to live anywhere near the underaged. And, it was pointed out, such tenants would not be complaining about anything going wrong in the parks since they couldn't readily move anywhere else. "So you don't have to be in a rush to fix things or worry about rent increases; it's a great investment!"
 
bobcat said:
Originally there was a book about this topic: Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty‑First Century. Then later a film was made about it, I think by the same title, and it won some awards as I recall.
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I saw that movie was very depressing. While it mostly focused on people who were barely getting by.

that movie paints a single picture of those who chose RV living..... had friends that when they retired traveled worked as campground hosts for months at a time and saw many sites in different states. They were not desperate and had retirement money but found a frugal way to see many states etc.
 
bobcat said:
Originally there was a book about this topic: Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty‑First Century. Then later a film was made about it, I think by the same title, and it won some awards as I recall.
Click to expand...
The book wasn't published all that long ago (2017). It focused on Americans who lived on the financial edge. Many migrated seasonally from one job to another, thus the title. Many (most?) were down on their luck after decades of substance abuse, divorces from which they never financially recovered, or lifetime patterns of low paying jobs. Some had owned homes and worked in remote mining or manufacturing town. The employers moved or closed down, destroying the towns economic underpinnings.

Today's RV parks that cater to vacationers are quite different from the ones described in that book and many of the posts above. Among other requirements, many stipulate stays no longer than 30 days, rigs must be in good working order, no general repairs in the parks (minor tinkering or emergency repairs by an approved RV mechanic aside), and no washing of rigs in the park unless it's a park-approved RV washing contractor.

By and large, we've found RV parks to be quite democratic.

As for people living in old junky RVs, I see far fewer on Los Angeles streets than ten years ago. More campsites on sidewalks however, especially downtown.
 
@bobcat I did see that movie.

I also saw a documentary on a mobile park in Michigan being bought by a corporation. They raised the rent so high that the people had to leave. They also did not take care of the common grounds and made no repairs.
Another documentary showed how people that worked in the tech industry in places like Palo Alto could not afford to rent a place so they lived in their cars or vans.
Those documentaries are heart-wrenching and also eye openers of the sad situation we live in.
 
Jeni said:
I saw that movie was very depressing. While it mostly focused on people who were barely getting by.

that movie paints a single picture of those who chose RV living..... had friends that when they retired traveled worked as campground hosts for months at a time and saw many sites in different states. They were not desperate and had retirement money but found a frugal way to see many states etc.
Click to expand...
Yes, I had read the book some time back, and was pretty impressed how they had formed communities and looked out for each other. There were often familiar faces wherever they went, and even a sense of freedom. I guess they were just making the best of their situation. I think many understood what the others were going through and were sympathetic to the hardships of van life.

It would probably shock us all how many people are living paycheck to paycheck with little or no savings. If you lose your job and don't find another quickly, it narrows your options rapidly.
 
from the article...

"About 486,000 people live full-time in an RV, which appears to be more than twice as many as in 2021, according to survey data from the RV Industry Association.


Even thought it doubled, it is still very very few people, when the population is 349 million.

And probable the majority are in an RV by choice, not circumstances.
 
I often see cars in park parking lots that are obviously being lived in since they're full of bedding and clothes and garbage. It amazes me that people live like that. What's their reason for living? And how do they afford insurance on their cars?

If we had a functioning government, there would be massive public housing projects to get people off the streets and provide a way for them to get on their feet. We can spend over a trillion dollars a year on the military, yet public housing isn't a high priority. Maybe homeless people should be taught how to scam the government. The classes could be taught by military contractor CEOs.

100s of billions of dollars are wasted every year by the military, and that's pretty much accepted as business as usual. Medical corporations scam the government out of billions of dollars -- especially with Medicare and Medicaid fraud, and those who are convicted, if they have the right connections, their prison sentences and fines are forgiven, and they often get to keep the money they stole from the government.

Of course, if there were massive public housing projects, fraud would run rampant because that's just human nature in the U.S. Other countries can do things like that, but in the U.S., making money or in some cases, stealing money, are all that matter.

One of the problems with our current system is, for a lot of crimes, there's no punishment, so where's the deterrent? Why not commit fraud if the worst that's going to happen to you is you'll have to pay some of the money back?
 
Before I sold my house, right after I retired, I was sucked into a van-living website/forum. I bought a used passenger van, spent the winter converting it to an RV (without plumbing or electricity), and spent 5+ months living in it while traveling all over North America. I went to Quartzite a couple of times and spent a week or two with the group on BLM land that was making headlines at that time. Some were very poor, others had $100,000+ van-based RV's with all the bells and whistles. It was a very eclectic group. There were a few "incidents" which made me pull up stakes and head home and I lost all respect for the "leader", who BTW has made a lot of money promoting van-living for the poor.

Is it a good way to live? For some, yes. For others, not so much. I saw that spectrum on both ends.

As for public housing, the little I have actually seen was a disaster. High rise, poorly built multi-story apartments where the post office refused to deliver mail because the crime was so rampant. St. Louis had one until it became so bad, they tore it down. IDK where those poor people went.

I have no answer to these problems.
 
I would argue that the primary driver for choosing the RV life is social media. There's a slew of YouTubers, Twitchers, Kickers, Tik-Tokers, and Rumblers out there glamorizing that lifestyle.

And you can bet your house that RV manufacturers are giving the most popular ones plenty of ad revenue and free camping stuff. Expensive stuff, too.

Some of the stuff I've seen them get are: a 4-person tent with solar-powered utilities, mountain bikes, solar-electric scooters, free annual passes to all national parks, smokers, cookers, canoes, and kayaks.

Yeah, that's a fun life.
 
@GoodEnuff, I sometimes see people in RV parks in the kind of van conversions you describe. They mostly use BBQs for cooking and unless the weather is unbearably cold or rainy, they spend the lion's share of their time outside in camping chairs or picnic benches. Not as much fun as they probably expected.

I also agree about the disaster that tends to be public housing.

One of the problems we have now is that many of the unhoused have become accustomed to that condition and prefer it because it comes with few (if any) rules. They turn down shelters because of the restrictions.

If they stay unhoused they keep their pets and have complete liberty to drink, drug, panhandle, etc. There's no need to work or even have a physical address for government checks because the money is directly deposited into their accounts.

In bad weather they hang for hours in libraries, malls and other AC/heated spaces.

My opinion? Society's attempts at kindness and understanding has unwittingly become large scale enabling.
 
GoodEnuff said:
In 2012, I sold my house and everything in it. Bought an RV, parked it in a very nice RV resort in the country. The rents in that park were $350-$500/month, plus electricity which for me was $50-$150/month depending on the season. Lived there until 2018 when I went back to sticks-and-bricks living.

At that time, the park was owned by a couple who had built it and lived on site. Towards the end, they sold it to a corporation and the rents have since gone up substantially, almost doubled. Two more large parks were then built across the street, not nearly as nice, like parking in a WalMart parking lot. They are now all full with waiting lists.

Everything RV was bought out by large corporations (i.e., Berkshire Hathaway), from the manufacturers to insurance companies, parks, financing, etc. The build quality went down, rents and insurance costs went up. They controlled it all and prices went crazy.

Much of home rentals are owned by these same companies who control those rents. They forced people out of the sticks-and-bricks rentals into RV's, which they also controlled. See what happened?

I have read (true or not, IDK) that those companies are beginning to sell the houses, which will cause a drop in the housing market. Many people who bought in the past few years will be upside down with their mortgage. Is another 2008 crash coming? And, if people go back to houses, when they try to sell that RV, they will be upside down on that, too.

When you think about how this all exploded during the p(l)andemic, you have to wonder how much of that was intentionally managed to panic people into making decisions that benefited the profit margins. Do I firmly believe this? No, but it would not surprise me.
Click to expand...
I'm interested to know how your RV rental space payments back then compared to what you would have paid for "sticks and bricks" living.:unsure:
I recently saw an article about mobile home tenants abandoning their homes because the rental costs for the land they occupied had gone up so much, likely by the same entities you mentioned. So heartless!

I've mentioned this before. I would have liked to experience RV living, if only for a month, but my husband and I never did. I lived that life vicariously through Howard and Linda, a couple who sold all their possessions and became full time R.V.ers. They had a very cool website on which they posted sample RV expenses and their own budgets, tips on finding RV parks and work while on the road and even a cookbook. They also provided a real time locator for their travels. I thought they were very cool. I even wrote and told them so and they featured links to my music for a little while. I used to check the site periodically but it no longer exists.

@bobcat it's sad that people have to resort to that alternate lifestyle because they don't have any other choices. Hopefully they don't have problems finding places to settle and/or have to deal with rising RV costs too, including gas now.
 
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StarSong said:
@GoodEnuff, I sometimes see people in RV parks in the kind of van conversions you describe. They mostly use BBQs for cooking and unless the weather is unbearably cold or rainy, they spend the lion's share of their time outside in camping chairs or picnic benches. Not as much fun as they probably expected.

I also agree about the disaster that tends to be public housing.

One of the problems we have now is that many of the unhoused have become accustomed to that condition and prefer it because it comes with few (if any) rules. They turn down shelters because of the restrictions.

If they stay unhoused they keep their pets and have complete liberty to drink, drug, panhandle, etc. There's no need to work or even have a physical address for government checks because the money is directly deposited into their accounts.

In bad weather they hang for hours in libraries, malls and other AC/heated spaces.

My opinion? Society's attempts at kindness and understanding has unwittingly become large scale enabling.
Click to expand...
We have the same issues and all the problems that go with it.
 
OneEyedDiva said:
I'm interested to know how your RV rental space payments back then compared to what you would have paid for "sticks and bricks" living.:unsure:
I recently saw an article about mobile home tenants abandoning their homes because the rental costs for the land they occupied had gone up so much, likely by the same entities you mentioned. So heartless!

I've mentioned this before. I would have liked to experience RV living, if only for a month, but my husband and I never did. I lived that life vicariously through Howard and Linda, a couple who sold all their possessions and became full time R.V.ers. They had a very cool website on which they posted sample RV expenses and their own budgets, tips on finding RV parks and work while on the road and even a cookbook. They also provided a real time locator for their travels. I thought they were very cool. I even wrote and told them so and they featured links to my music for a little while. I used to check the site periodically but it no longer exists.

@bobcat it's sad that people have to resort to that alternate lifestyle because they don't have any other choices. Hopefully they don't have problems finding places to settle and/or have to deal with rising RV costs too, including gas now.
Click to expand...
Yes, it's a humbling situation in life to be in, and I have been there. I have been poor, and lived in a travel trailer for a few years because it's all I could afford at the time, even though I worked full time. Nevertheless, I made it cozy and I don't regret the experience. It taught me lessons on how to make do with whatever you had, be thrifty, and learn to be happy. It also taught me to have compassion for others who are just trying to play the hand they are dealt and maintain some degree of dignity.

Many go through tough times in life, and are often faced with challenges and tough choices, but you manage to survive if you don't give up. Those experiences made me who I am today, and provided me with a perspective I may not have had otherwise. So in the end, I would rather have what I went through than to have someone hand me a pile of money at a young age and said go live it up. It wouldn't have made me a better person.
 
GoodEnuff said:
High rise, poorly built multi-story apartments where the post office refused to deliver mail because the crime was so rampant. St. Louis had one until it became so bad, they tore it down.
Click to expand...
Yep, they were poorly built, poorly maintained, and poorly designed. And a few people probably earned millions from their construction and operations. Greed is the problem, and I have no idea how to deal with that in our system. Other, more advanced countries can have successful public housing, but not the U.S.
 
OneEyedDiva said:
I'm interested to know how your RV rental space payments back then compared to what you would have paid for "sticks and bricks" living.:unsure:
Click to expand...
Up until about 2018, my brother paid from $325 to $450 a month plus $25 to $40 for water and electricity. He mainly lived in Colorado, but also spent time in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Calif. for extended periods.

Most of his spaces were in small mobile-home/RV parks and on military bases. (he was a career Air-Force veteran)

After he turned 78 or 9, he lived with his son.
 
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