It’s Home Sweet Motor Home on Streets Where They Live
James Love says he sometimes gets nasty looks from neighbors who are picking up their morning paper or leaving for work.
“And why shouldn’t they be mad?” he asks with a laugh. “They’re paying a bundle for rent or a mortgage, and I’m not paying anything.”
But the neighbors don’t have to tolerate Love for long. In a day or two he and his motor home are gone, taking up residence on another street.
Beat the Cost
Love is among a small number of people who beat the high cost of housing in Los Angeles by living in motor homes. Unlike the so-called snowbirds--retired people who live as vagabonds, migrating like birds to avoid harsh winters--these urban nomads consider themselves residents of Los Angeles. They work here and plan to stay put--stay put, that is, while moving every few days.
“We call them full-timers, but there can’t be many of them,” said Bob Livingston, editor of Agoura-based MotorHome magazine, “because it’s tough to live in an RV in Los Angeles. Most of the parks have restrictions on how long you can stay, and there are laws about parking on the street.”
Yet Love, 34, has lived in his 22 1/2-foot Dodge Fireball a little more than two years, working a variety of jobs and earning some money writing musical scores for travel videos. Since economy is a prime concern, he rarely pays the $10 to $20 a night required by RV parks. Instead, Love travels between the Silver Lake, Atwater and Hollywood Hills sections of the city, with occasional sojourns near the beach.
“You learn the ropes and it’s rare to get hassled,” he said. “At night I find a quiet street. Days I stay at a park or in an empty parking lot. Sometimes I stay outside a friend’s house and plug into their power. I was ticketed once for parking in a spot more than 72 hours, and once a policeman told me to keep moving. That’s it.”
Laws affecting motor homes vary from town to town. Technically, in Los Angeles, Section 4118 of the Municipal Code makes it a misdemeanor to “sit, lie or sleep in a sidewalk, street or public way,” meaning a person may not sleep inside a vehicle on a city street.
“But it’s not a problem,” said Sgt. Rick Walker of the LAPD’s West Los Angeles station. “These people move from night to night. Whenever the officers see one who looks like they’re settling in to stay, they ask them to leave.”
The city’s restriction against parking a vehicle on the street for more than 72 hours--the violation Love mentioned--is used to keep RV residents moving, Walker said.
In Santa Monica, a law prohibits overnight street parking of any vehicle larger than 7 feet high, 7 feet wide or 21 feet long.
“It’s not something we get a lot of complaints about,” said Sgt. Barney Melekian of the Santa Monica Police Department. “When we first had the law, the department didn’t want to issue tape measures, so the yard department cut sticks. If their vehicle was taller than the stick, they got a ticket.”
The law is so little used, Melekian said, that the sticks have vanished.
Few Problems
Other municipalities also reported few problems with people who live in RVs. The same is true of authorities who oversee beach parking lots, a favorite spot for some RV full-timers. A representative of Ampco Parking Co., which operates 17 beach lots for the state and Los Angeles County, said overnight parking is illegal, but that a vehicle usually can remain “several days” before attendants ask its owner to move on.
“Most of us don’t talk to outsiders about how we live,” said Kathy H., a word processor and publications designer who asked that her last name not be used. “We’ve got a good thing and we don’t want to attract attention or encourage other people to do the same thing.”
Kathy was willing to be interviewed “because the point I want to get across is that we have the right to live the way we want as long as we’re not bothering anyone.” She said she keeps her 19-foot motor home exclusively on the Westside, sometimes in beach parking lots, sometimes on residential streets and sometimes in front of the Westwood consulting and research firm where she works. She declined to give her age.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’re all the same age. All energy began in the universe at the same time.”
She called a home on wheels part of her “vision quest.”
“The life I’m living now is so much more honest than before,” she said. “It feels good. I’m not putting too much pressure on the land. I’m not needing to take things I don’t really want. Spiritually, I feel free. Even though I can be harassed and I’m vulnerable, I feel more in control.”
Frightening Experiences
Kathy said she has had a couple of frightening experiences during her 1 1/2 years in an RV.
“One night two men tried to break in. I threw open the curtains and I was screaming and holding this Viet Cong knife with blades on both ends. They ran. If someone thinks you’re crazier than them, they’ll leave you alone.”
She believes it was her “destiny” to live in a motor home.
“God in his wisdom kept sticking me with neighbors who were horrendous,” Kathy said. “They played their TV at 11 o’clock. The guys upstairs partied all weekend. The landlord wanted me to pay $800 a month to live in that little rabbit hole with other rabbits who are stressed out from that type of life, and I couldn’t see it.”
James Love cited similar reasons for taking up the motor-home life.
“I was living in an apartment and hated it because there was absolutely no privacy,” he said. “I could hear neighbors above me and beside me--conversations, everything. I couldn’t do my music.”
A third motor-home resident, a 70-year-old, semi-retired businessman who requested anonymity, said a concern about money and a desire for freedom figured into his decision.
‘I’d Had It’
“When my landlady hit me up for another raise--the second in a year--that’s when I’d had it,” he said. “Even with rent control, I felt at her mercy. Now I have independence.”
He stays mostly on streets in Santa Monica because he “doesn’t like to move around.” Sometimes he parks outside the home of his girlfriend, whom he calls the Contessa.
His 16 1/2-foot Dolphin motor home is small enough to be relatively inconspicuous, and neighbors rarely object to his presence, he said.
Motor-home dwellers follow a few basic guidelines to remain unnoticed. They:
- Cover windows with aluminum foil or heavy drapes so that lights and a television’s glow won’t be visible at night.
- Don’t make frequent trips in and out of their rigs.
- Don’t throw away trash in the neighborhood.
Already most of the amenities of a house or apartment, from solar panels to complete kitchens, are available to RV residents. Love said he has made “wild dinners--I’m talking lobster and duck”--with his stove and microwave oven. His power system--a generator and marine battery--runs a VCR and a synthesizer keyboard in addition to the more mundane TV, radio and the like.
However, cellular phones are too expensive in this cost-conscious life style, so Love and the semi-retired businessman use answering services. Kathy shrugs and says that anyone meant to talk to her will find a way.
None of the three is bothered by living in a small space.
“I get to change my environment by driving someplace new, so boredom never sets in,” Love said.
“It’s like the sleeping cars on trains, which I love,” the semi-retired businessman said.
“If emotionally and psychologically you’re free, you don’t feel trapped,” Kathy said. “It’s well worth it. I’m going to take an anthropology course in July in Cambridge, England, with money I didn’t have to give to a landlord.”
Though small in number, urban full-timers rely on one another. They often park close together at night to guard against intruders, and they maintain a grapevine of such information as good parking spots, RV mechanics and the like.
“If they’re anything like the snowbirds, they have an elaborate social network,” said Arizona State University geography professor Robert Ming, who has studied motor-home colonies that winter in various Southwest locales. “They find out from one another where to stay and things of that nature.”
Ming said he was unaware of any studies of urban motor-home residents, and no governmental agency in Southern California records their numbers or movements. But Louis Petway knows a thing or two about them.
Petway owns and operates Venway Storage, a Marina del Rey business that offers an RV sanitation dump among its services.
“I’ve been here 11 years and I’ve seen them come and go,” he said. “They come in once a week or so to dump. There aren’t a lot of them, but you’ll find they’re fiercely independent people. They’ve got a real camaraderie among them.”
