“The other night I came home late and tried to unlock my house with my car keys. I started the house up. So I drove it around for a while. I was speeding, and a cop pulled me over. He asked where I lived. I said, “right here, officer:” Stephen Wright, 1980s comedian.
Living out of your vehicle isn’t a punchline anymore. Nor is using a platform of mental illness for comedy: ask Jerry Lewis or Chris Farley. Some comedy has become, in fact too close to home to be funny. As a matter of public policy, alternate living accommodations are increasingly relevant and the focus of court cases and legislation.
At the outset, it is important to realize that our current state of affairs with regard to housing is a result of decades of policy, some extremely prejudicial, designed to achieve outcomes that most urban policy professionals now question as being healthy for individuals or the community, yet we spend most of our efforts locally addressing symptoms, and the symptoms of our failed housing and economic equity efforts are multiplying.
On July 18th, the Summit Daily wrote, Summit County group launches overnight parking pilot program for working homeless in a story about Raychel Kelly who started “Good Bridge Community” which organized terms for working homeless like herself to pilot an overnight parking site with strict terms in partnership with the Interfaith Chapel. Good Bridge is not about finding a place for tourists to visit on the cheap. It is at core, a story about our high country service workers not being able to afford rent or find a place (now that short term rentals have further disrupted the already tight rental market), yet seeking a dignified way to transition as workers to the next foothold in the community as one with a temporary place paying rent. Too often we focus on the jump from rent to ownership, which is another challenging foothold. There are challenging steps on the upclimb and for those on the retirement side, on the downclimb. Welcome to your mobile workforce.
I was in the Town of Grand Lake recently helping them find and hire an interim manager. One candidate suggested saving the town housing costs by living in his camper. “That’s not legal in town” was the reply, which is the case in most towns in the mountains of Colorado… perhaps ironically. In that case, there were a plethora of established camping areas with amenities nearby. Many RV parks conceived for temporary visits are transitioning into long-term housing, and the postion, in any case, was well paying.
Camping in the National Forest is no longer really “dispersed” to use a USFS term. The forests are becoming inundated with working campers. June 12, I listened to Aaron Mayville, District Ranger for the Eagle/Holy Cross Ranger District of the White River National Forest share with Eagle County Mayors and Managers the success of how many tons of human waste, trash and how many live-in encampments they were now able to document now that they finally have “front country ranger” staff to keep track of the escalating problem. Those positions were funded by partnerships with local governments who foot the bill to have federal boots on the ground. Besides being a sanitation issue, this kind of intensive use of a National Forest poses a significant fire and sanitation risk with people living our highly flammable forests. Dispersed camping for 14 days in a location is still free. Campsites with bathrooms and bear proof trash services tend to be $12 – $25 per site per night. Designed as places of respite, these are often not close to town. Forests are just a harbinger of what is coming into our towns, and in spite of a few very nice exceptions, there are not many places that have established any kind of “urban camping” options–certainly not with workers in mind. We developed villages and then cities to deal with these issues centuries ago, taking care of the traveler and those visiting to sell their trade goods at market. Modern cities have not adapted to bring todays campers–unless they are an attorney staying for $120/night at a hotel back into the fold. Many workers don’t make much more than that per day.
It underscored for me that we really have not adjusted to urban camping yet when I listened to police getting coached on the subject by CIRSA in Carbondale this past month. This is the municipal insurer who holds training to try to avoid costly lawsuits. It was evident that the legal definitions applying to the 4th Amendment forbidding unlawful search and seizures are getting complicated with regard to homelessness, camping and living in a vehicle as the problem explodes in many of places. Remember “the right of people to be secure in their persons, houses… shall not be violated?” Turns out you can pass curfews, parking restrictions, but ordinances aimed just to “keep the riff-raff out” are getting thrown out. People have rights of place even if they don’t have ownership. This is a constitutional principle. And by being there, they are residents of your community like it or not. Recent case law means that the anti-camping ordinance your town has on the books is probably unconstitutional.
Frankly, it is probably time to re-think “camping” anyhow for a variety of reasons. Those campers are both your high-end visitors and your close to the edge workers. Workers who we need and want to encourage. Welcome to our new reality.
I was thinking about Raychel’s Good Bridge Community, and the evolving case law that police are adjusting to while thinking about the same government leaders who have spent years talking about our housing crisis. I’m one of them. It is easy for affordable housing to be framed as a developer and market problem but it is one we have created through a variety of public policy tools. This is a community issue.
In the NWCCOG region, we have the top visitor destinations in the World with Breckenridge, Steamboat Springs, Aspen, Vail, Winter Park, Glenwood Springs, and another 10 or so of the best state destinations; so how are responding to this challenge? Should we not be setting up seasonal work camps instead of leaving it for individuals to “figure it out.” Most employers in the high country ask if an incoming worker has housing already. HR will tell you that it isn’t supposed to be a criteria and definitely not an interview question, but we all ask it, knowing that “I’ll figure it out when I get here” is not a responsible answer for anyone. To turn a blind eye could be promoting homelessness.
This is not how we planned our retirement. Nomadland.
It sure looked cool in 1981, the post-apocalyptic The Road Warrior, a cross between Grease, West Side Story and later dystopian Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but most of us don’t want to be in a perpetual state of resource collection and self-preservation. The essential RV thing is about taking all you need with you, living in your bought experience and then returning home to remember how much you appreciate it. The RV/Van/fifth-wheel, teardrop to popup trailer industry is in an unprecedented boom. Not everyone is investing to go play on public lands. It isn’t only about being out there. It is increasingly about making a living as a gig worker.
“The last free place in America is a parking spot,” I heard while commuting this past year listening to Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder. The book gave me pause about rushing into my retirement plan to live in a customized van down by a hundred rivers across the west and reminded me throughout about how a friend of ours refused to car camp with us when the kids were young because it reminded him of growing up poor in Oregon. We were poor too, but we had family places that anchored us so it wasn’t all camping. Camping to me was novel, fun, an experience. Nomadland is primarily about retirees roving from job to job; camp host, Amazon wish-fulfilment center, visiting friends with a deal, trying to make enough money to stay adrift, not get caught…not start living under a bridge, because for many, “there is no promise of ever being able to retire,” not as wages and housing costs continue to diverge. That wasn’t so disturbing when we were talking about 20 somethings gaining life experience. Nomadland is not a pretty picture of snowbird living, leaving the farm in Minnesota to winter in Arizona as we imagined listening to Lake Wobegon not so long ago, but it haunts me just like the memory of Garrison Keillor.
Disturbingly, many are preparing for life to be more like the Road Warrior—transient, provisional and lonely. While camping across the West remains one of the safest and most serene experiences attracting people from around the world, and it fuels a growing appetite for gear, as well as internet image-building. As a “last resort” way of life, it just gets complicated and more than a little depressing. Living on the road is hard work. Can you imagine perpetual camping? Welcome back to the Great Depression, welcome back to the Stone Age.
And, please, homelessness is not just about the mentally ill. The tent-city, under the bridge homelessness is, perhaps famously made up of that, but I think this is another kind of denial about the issue. Has the opioid and alcohol crises not touched you? Have you not known someone close, in your circle who has had a series of life experiences that put them on the street? I have.
Not all of those living at the RV park in those “expensive” trailers or those driveway-surfing in a van are, in fact, living the dream. They are not Instagramming about their journey. Yeah, a Portlander, I still have my West Coast dream of camping from Alaska to Baja. Plenty do, and partake in extreme sports along the way and You Tube and Instagram about it. The truth is that many others don’t have much choice. Bruder in Nomadland explains how to identify the four-door cars with shades tucked into the windows, front seats and dashes filled with stuff, and the many ways to make a one-time work van look like it is still in service while you live there. Both young and old are riding on rubber, but it is the sheet-metal-thin-wall between us, them and poverty. Our poverty. Our inability to see them as us.
Is this the beginning of the end for our 80-year experiment with Single-Family Zoning?
Could our very zoning be contributing to our national affordable housing problem? Duh. With regard to cost, square footage matters. Tiny homes seem cool. I have a book I have not read yet about ADUs called Backdoor Revolution, by Kol Peterson. I often debated our own engineer and planner about why we don’t just allow every SF home to have an ADU (approved and with reduced tap fees). I’ve spoken before about the role trailer parks play in affordable housing, although they are inefficient with regard to density. We have limited our solutions. Now, attention is turning to the top culprit: single-family homes.
There is a revolt simmering in West Coast states with regard to the tool that seems to have put us in this mess. It is called single-family zoning. Curbed reported July 1, “Oregon just effectively banned single-family zoning as the state adds a YIMBY policy,” meaning legalizing “up-zoning to allow more density in housing developments in towns and cities where single-family zoning is contributing to a housing shortage.” Seattle took a more measured approach reported Governing Magazine, limiting their up-zoning to certain neighborhoods after the NIMBYs came out in numbers stating “the density Bolsheviks are coming to town, and their gonna burn your single-family house to the ground.” California has been considering SB-50 which seeks to address the “crisis” of homelessness and housing affordability, citing that two-thirds of California residences are SF while most of the zoned developable land is zoned strictly for single-family dwellings. It is a concept big enough to have had significant coverage from both the L.A. Times and the NY Times.
That California bill may die this year but the proposal will return. Experienced city council members will know better, but lest one think this is a clear-cut partisan issue, Curb in the Oregon article reports that up-zoning is supported by HUD director Ben Carson as well as Elizabeth Warren, as well as the CATO institute. Looks like we may need to get more comfortable with density.
Could a State end to SF zoning happen in Colorado?
Not the way it seems to be happening in Oregon or California. Lest Coloradoans worry, two factors stand in the way of the West Coast trend: an extreme, well-protected prejudice for local control in Colorado means that such decisions will likely be made town by town. The other factor being that most housing developments in Colorado are developed under a Planned Unit Development (PUD) zoning meaning each PUD would have to be amended to change the zoning, and the municipality could not unilaterally impose such an amendment. Few Metro Districts, or HOAs would come forward requesting this change. In Eagle when I was Mayor, we up-zoned much of the Central Business District to commercial and nothing happened. Lesson: there must be a market for redevelopment to make sense. That said, I am waiting for the first Colorado town to eliminate single-family zoning in the name of affordable housing, and amend their PUD regs to do the same. It would be a powerful statement to the next developer who walked through the door. When state legislatures are acting to beat down NIMBYism, we know that we are about to experience land use in a different way.
Housing policy has always suffered equity challenges. As we learned from the parable of the three little pigs, it really does matter what your house is made of, and it is a matter of biblical importance what kind of “foundation” it is built upon. There may be no more determining factor for child development or determinant of financial security, or tool to improve socio-economic status than a home. It is time again to get very deliberate about these issues and to address them in a comprehensive manner.
