Nomads of the ‘80s : Living in Vehicles, Waiting for Their Lives to Pick Up

She sounds like a typical hostess: “Please excuse the mess, I didn’t have a chance to straighten up this morning.”

But Nancy’s home is not typical. She lives in a mud-streaked old Ford, and it’s difficult to imagine that tidying up the green blanket on the back seat or rearranging the toiletries and papers on the dashboard would significantly improve the decor.

Nancy, who prefers to remain anonymous because she is embarrassed by her situation, is one of more than 1,000 people in the San Fernando Valley who wake up every morning in a car, van or motor home, according to authorities. Some, like Nancy, are driven to dwell in cars because they cannot afford a rental unit. Others adopt an itinerant life style by choice.

Dan Wakem, 53, became a mobile transient more than a year ago, saying he got tired of seeing $800 a month “go down the drain” for an apartment in Van Nuys. Since then, Wakem has been parking his spacious, $60,000 motor home at various spots around the Valley. He earns $50,000 annually as a machine maintainer for a Van Nuys aluminum-can company, enough to stock his vehicle with two TVs, a VCR and 300 videocassette tapes.

“I look at living in an apartment as a self-imposed prison cell,” Wakem said. “This way, I get to drive down to the beach on my days off and watch the surf roll in.”

Parking Overnight

Known by police as “mobile transients,” people who live in their vehicles illegally park overnight throughout Los Angeles, in defiance of a city ordinance that prohibits using a vehicle parked on city streets or in city parking lots as living quarters. Many choose the Valley because they believe its many parks and residential side streets provide a safer haven than more urban areas of the city, said Vernon Windell, director of Cornerstone, a daytime drop-in shelter for the homeless in Van Nuys.

“Many of them have some kind of roots here,” Windell said. “They used to have an apartment here, or they have friends and family in the area. They feel safer here because they can find a place to park and blend in.”

The exact number of mobile transients in the Valley is unknown because no precise studies have been conducted. Estimates range from 1,400 mentioned by United Way to 5,000 by the San Fernando Valley Homeless Coalition. Officials believe mobile transients represent about half the homeless in the Valley.

Many mobile transients park overnight--sometimes for weeks or months at a time--in the Valley’s public parks. The Valley contains 86 of Los Angeles’ 385 parks, nearly a quarter of those in the city. All are closed to visitors from 10:30 p.m. to 6 a.m.

But many, such as the 2,031-acre Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area in Encino, are large and difficult to patrol, or have amenities such as restrooms that make them popular spots for car dwellers, said Hector Hernandez, chief security officer with the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department.

Minimal Patrols

The transients manage to stay overnight in the Valley’s parks because they are patrolled by only three park rangers, whose duties also include coping with vandalism, drug trafficking and gang-related problems, Hernandez said. Although the parks are monitored seven days a week, the rangers generally do not work at night, when mobile transients arrive in the parks, he said.

“We’re so pitifully understaffed that I can’t be here every night to check out some guy’s story and see if he’s really left the park,” said Tom Cotter, one of the park rangers who patrols the Valley.

John Kuhn, 24, a laborer, said he has been living in a Van Nuys park without drawing the attention of authorities since he and his wife separated in October. He said he drives around looking for work all day, showers at a friend’s house and then returns to the park to camp in the bed of his 1969 Ford.

Even Kuhn, whose brawny arms flex as he adjusts a tarp over the bed of the truck, said he prefers to park in the Valley because he feels less vulnerable than in other parts of the city.

“Welfare gave me a voucher for a hotel in Los Angeles,” Kuhn said. “But you couldn’t pay me to go down there.”

Like many mobile transients, Kuhn says he will sacrifice a meal or two to keep his vehicle running or to pay for gas.

But it would take a lot of skipped meals to pay for putting a nearby car owned by Robert (I.W.) Harper in running condition. The car, a 1977 Oldsmobile, has a dead battery, no brakes and no carburetor. Every time authorities tell Harper to move on, he has to ask a friend to tow his car.

A thin, 60-year-old man with rotting teeth, Harper began living in the car with his dog after his business manufacturing T-shirts failed four years ago. He said he was able to park for 10 months in a golf course parking lot, but that golfers complained to the management about his beloved watchdog and companion, a Doberman pinscher named Evita, during a rash of pit-bull attacks last summer. Harper said he had to have his car towed to other locations three times in the past month.

“You just have to have patience and cope with these things,” Harper said, referring to citations from park rangers.

Los Angeles Police Department officers also patrol the parks and issue citations. Under a program started by the City Council in 1986, each of the city’s 18 divisions assigns a coordinator to monitor its parks. Working closely with park rangers, the coordinators keep track of trouble spots and respond to complaints by assigning extra patrols to problem areas, said Cmdr. George Morrison.

Recently, in a successful effort to rid North Hollywood Park of transients, police patrolled the park constantly and replaced barbecues with portable models that can be removed at night. Sgt. Tom Toutant, parks coordinator for the North Hollywood division, led the fight to clean up the park.

“In general, I don’t drive around looking for people who are homeless,” Toutant said. “But I have to respond to citizens’ complaints and prevent any problems.

“One guy who doesn’t have anywhere to go is no problem. But the problem is, one vehicle attracts another, attracts another, attracts another.”

Police have the authority to rid neighborhoods of mobile transients under an ordinance introduced by Councilman Hal Bernson and enacted in 1983, which prohibits using as living quarters a vehicle parked on a city street or parking lot. It is also illegal to live in a vehicle on private property. The city also has the power to tow a vehicle that has not been moved in 72 hours.

But officers do not have the staff to comb the streets looking for mobile transients, Morrison said. With 7,100 police officers to deal with crime over 480 square miles, “our first priority is dealing with life-threatening situations,” he said. Depending on the size of the encampment and the type of activity reported there, officers may either issue warnings, write citations that require a court appearance or arrest mobile transients, Morrison said.

“Our objective is to end the activity with the least amount of police resources having to be committed,” Morrison said. “People have to remember this is a socioeconomic problem, and the police can’t be government’s only answer to the problem.”

To Nancy, a 40-year-old former telephone operator, the worst thing about living in a car is having to constantly evade the authorities. Since a hit-and-run driver struck her five years ago, she has been unable to overcome a neck injury and return to work. With no family to help out, Nancy said, she wound up living in her car after she got out of the hospital.

“I became so demoralized that my New Year’s resolution last year was to kill myself,” she said.

For years, Nancy has roamed around the Valley in her car, dressing in dark clothes at night to avoid drawing attention to herself. Shortly after being sexually assaulted one night recently by a man who had offered her shelter, Nancy said, she met the Rev. Steven Perkins, a Sun Valley minister devoted to helping mobile transients.

Perkins offered Nancy a spot in an unpaved parking lot he has rented since February so that he can provide mobile transients with a safe place to stay at night. Ten years ago, when he was 22, Perkins himself spent an Illinois winter in a broken-down Lincoln Continental. Unable to find a job because he lacked training and a permanent address, he turned to prayer for solace.

“I decided that, if God gave me one more chance, I would devote my life to helping the homeless,” he said.

Perkins has not forgotten that promise now that his circumstances have improved. Since February, he has paid $300 a month for the lot and $55 a month for a portable toilet he had placed on the property. Funds for Operation Reborn, as Perkins calls his efforts on behalf of mobile transients, are provided through private donations and from Perkins’ own pocket. His next fund-raiser is tonight at Gazzarri’s nightclub in Hollywood at 9.

Plans to Expand

Although Perkins is running out of money, he said, he continues to clear rocks from an adjacent lot, hoping to expand. He or Nancy locks the compound to ensure the safety of the occupants of six or so vehicles that park there each night. Single men are not permitted, because they are less vulnerable than other mobile transients, Perkins said.

“I get so annoyed when people put down the homeless,” Perkins said. “A lot of these people living in their cars are just down on their luck and can’t afford the rents around here.”

The cost of rental housing in the Valley has risen at a rate 50% higher than all other consumer costs over the past 10 years, said James C. Fleck, an economic analyst with the Los Angeles Community Development Department. Median rent in the Valley has risen 151%, from $198 in 1977 to $497 in 1987, while the consumer price index rose 100% during the same period, Fleck said.

Nancy Bianconi, executive director of Valley Shelter, a government-funded facility in North Hollywood that houses 125 homeless each night, said the lack of affordable housing drives some Valley residents out of their homes and into their cars--and keeps them there.

“The average person working for minimum wage grosses $600 a month and takes home $450,” Bianconi said. “He can barely afford to feed himself and his family on that, never mind put enough aside for first, last and deposit.”

But some mobile transients are not poor. Dena Mougey, 24, lives with her husband and two huge dogs in a 1946 panel truck that the couple converted two years ago into a camper, complete with wood stove and sleeping loft. Born in Encino, Mougey returns to the Valley to visit her family and earn money between sojourns to Oregon and Northern California. Her husband, Art Cohen, is a plumber, and Mougey sells hand-crafted beaded jewelry.

“We haven’t found one place we like best,” Mougey said. “In the meantime, we don’t have to worry about landlords, junk mail and bills.”

Despite their relative affluence, both Mougey and Wakem are subject to the same hassles from police and park rangers as other mobile transients. Wakem, who pays $837 a year in registration fees, believes that “for this kind of money, they ought to leave me alone.” Both Mougey and Wakem said they believe living in a vehicle should be legal.

Bob Biangella, a caretaker and gardener in Whitsett Park in North Hollywood, is not concerned with the legalities of the issue. It’s the debris left by mobile transients that irks him.

Some ‘Just Pigs’

“I try to have sympathy because some of them are nice people,” Biangella said. “But a few are just pigs. They break glass, mess up the bathrooms, urinate and defecate on the sidewalks and leave beer and whiskey bottles all over the place.”

Mougey said she frequently is treated with disdain by park personnel and Valley residents because she lives in a truck. They look at her, she said, “as if I belonged to the Charlie Manson family or something. I want everyone to know all this work on the truck was done completely alcohol- and drug-free.”

But many mobile transients do have problems with alcohol or drugs, police said.

“It’s difficult to paint a broad-brush picture of mobile transients because they’re such a mixed group,” Morrison said. “But a van or motor home does afford a place for an immediate abduction or can serve as a platform for a person who exposes himself. We have had several recent crimes in which the suspect lived in a vehicle, although that’s not to say that everyone who does engages in that kind of conduct.”

In September, two Chatsworth teen-agers were kidnaped by a couple who were living in a motor home. Wendy Masuhara, 14, was shot in the head. Her 13-year-old friend was drugged, sexually assaulted, shot and also left for dead. But she survived and identified Roland Comtois, 58, and 33-year-old Marsha Lynn Erickson as suspects.

News of the crime sparked concern about vehicle-dwellers. In a Northridge neighborhood of one-acre lots, residents complained recently to Bernson’s office about a couple living on private property in a van attached to a trailer.

“We worried about being un-Christian in our attitude, but they’ve been there so long,” said one resident, who preferred not to be identified because she feared reprisals. “Besides being a real eyesore, having them there is like an open invitation for all kinds of people to use our rural area as a campground. It advertises that the area is loose.”

Nancy said that, despite the opposition, she will continue to live in her cramped car.

“I would love to get out of here,” she said. “Except right now I don’t have anywhere else to go.”