Working People Live in Cars as Vacant Homes Remain Unaffordable

PLANNING WATCH - Outside my house, located in an older Los Angeles neighborhood near Wilshire Boulevard, there is a parade of people who sleep in their cars.  The cars are not there every day because people move them to nearby locations, before they return.  These are technically homeless people who keep a low profile.  They rotate from one neighborhood spot to another, before they silently return the street next to my house.  Their goal is to attract as little attention as possible to their situation.  They are asking to be left alone, and we do our part to leave to not disturb them when they park their cars on the street by our house to live, and especially to sleep.

This is a story that repeats over the entire LA metropolitan.  I am not sure that all of the people who live in their cars are part of the LA metro area’s homeless count of 73,000 people or whether their low profile means they avoid being counted.  I doubt they care, and they deliberately don’t bother the housed people like us on the other side of the sidewalk, so we have no reason to report them or make sure they are counted as homeless.

Why do the people living in their cars keep such a low profile?  Basically this is their survival technique in a top-down economy that has dealt them a bad hand.  The story repeats across the entire United Stater, but is particularly severe in the greater Los Angeles area.  Many of those sleeping in their cars also have a family and hold down a job, hiding their homeless situation from their boss and colleagues at work.

Why is this happening?  Even though there are millions of empty lots and houses in the United States, including the Los Angeles area, they are not low priced enough for the overcrowded or people living in their cars to move in.  As a result the apartments and houses sit empty, waiting for people who can afford them, sometimes for a long time.

What can be done to provide a house or apartment to the people sleeping in the cars or who are overcrowded?  There is an easy answer to this question, subsidized public housing through the Federal government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).  Unfortunately these public housing programs were shut down in the early 1970’s by both Republican and Democrat elected officials in Washington, DC, and they have never been adequately replaced with market housing.  The result is skyrocketing overcrowding and homelessness, now over 72,000 people in LA County on any given night -- including some of those lucky enough to have a car to sleep in.

What does the future have in store?  New HUD public housing was eliminated in1972 by Republican and Democratic elected officials in Washington, DC.   In LA, for example, there still is legacy public housing, but it was built earlier.   As for new, subsidized public housing, with no current public funding mechanism available, it does not exist.

What then are the options for tens of thousands of people without enough savings for first and last month’s rent, damage deposits, and related fees?  The primary options are to become homeless or, if they still have a car, to live in it.  The other option, living in overcrowded housing, is available, and over 1,000,000 people in LA County have turned to this option to keep a roof over their heads.

(Dick Platkin is a retired Los Angeles city planner who writes about planning issues, mostly in LA.   He is a board member of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA).  Previous columns are available at the CityWatchLA archives.)