The Argument for Legal Overnight Car Parking
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I recently read an article in Denverite about the city of Denver, Colorado approving a safe overnight parking space for people living in their cars. The Colorado Safe Parking Initiative “runs 10 other similar safe parking sites in the metro area, and includes sites in Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield and Jefferson counties. [Chelsey Baker-Hauck, the co-founder of the Initiative] said the organization started informally in 2019 before it was formally incorporated as a nonprofit last year. It opened its first safe outdoor parking site in Broomfield in March 2020.”
The goal of this initiative is to help people get back on their feet if they’re struggling with joblessness and homelessness, but the language about it being “the first ever” free overnight lot in Denver got me thinking about the lack of options for those of us who live, work, and travel in our cars by choice.
RV Campgrounds
On any road trip, you’ll drive by dozens if not hundreds of RV campgrounds and trailer parks. I’ve had the experience of pulling into one hoping to park my truck overnight, only to be told it’s RVs-only. I’m not sure what difference it makes if I’m paying the same rate, yet taking up less space and electricity? Shouldn’t it be preferable to have someone park a compact vehicle instead of a giant, energy-sucking behemoth?
In the United States we make a lot of allowances to help RV campers travel with ease; there are amenities and sites designed specifically to accommodate them. To me this sends a message that it’s ok to travel in the most environmentally unfriendly way possible, meanwhile downsizing is, for some capitalistic reason, unacceptable.
Truck Stops
In the past I have parked my Toyota Tacoma overnight at truck stops to sleep, but in recent years I’m noticing a pattern where truck stops are cracking down on regular vehicles. I do understand that they are designed for drivers who are delivering goods via 18-wheelers and who must drive extremely long hours every day for their livelihood; obviously these workers need somewhere safe to park and sleep overnight, and to take showers. If regular vehicles were taking up the designated sites for the truckers and basically “gentrifying” those lots so that truckers could no longer park, that would be a huge problem. But is that happening? Most truck stops have separate parking spaces for regular vehicles vs trucks. Why can’t the focus be on enforcing those separate designations, as opposed to barring vehicles from parking overnight at all?
I’m in a Facebook group for people living out of their cars, and one member surmised that it’s because truck stops are a business. Truckers pay for showers, laundry, and to restock food and other goods at the store. Meanwhile car campers are treated like homeless people who will only take and give nothing back. During stretches where I am living in my car, I don’t consider myself “homeless”. I have a full time job that I can do remotely. I pay taxes. I contribute to the economy. I am equally interested in buying things from the store. Why are businesses not catching up to the times and recognizing the untapped potential of the vanlife movement? How many more millions of people have to use the #vanlife hashtag on Instagram before someone realizes the money that could be made from accommodating these people?
Rest Stops and Parking Lots
Roadside rest stops in many states only allow people to park for maybe 3 hours maximum (again, unless you’re a trucker). As an alternative, parking in Walmart parking lots is an oft-cited option for car campers, and I used to do this frequently myself. On my latest trip, however, I noticed many Walmarts now have signs that say “no overnight parking”. One time I started to settle into a Walmart lot, noticed a sign banning parking, and drove a few yards over to the Home Depot lot next door instead, where I saw 18-wheelers and some other cars parked. That seemed like it would work momentarily, until a bunch of shadowy figures started collecting in the lot and conspicuously lurking around different cars. One car alarm went off after being approached by one of the figures, and then someone started walking towards my car too, so I took off and found a KOA. What I’m saying is that department store parking lots are sketchy and loud, and that has always been one major tradeoff with parking somewhere “free”.
Paid Campsites
KOA’s now cost $30/night, $40/night, or more, just to park. I’m not even using any amenities or hookups. Sometimes I’m only parking there for a few hours. That’s comparable to rent on a full apartment if you park there every night for a month. Shouldn’t living in your car be cheaper than having an apartment?
Free Campsites
Freecampsites.net and The Dyrt have always been extremely helpful resources for me. That said, while I’ve been able to find great spots this way, some of the time the sites can be duds. If I look for truck stops or stores featured on freecampsites.net, I might arrive and it turns out they have the “no overnight parking” signs. If I am looking at actual campsites in the woods, I’ll get excited about one up until I dig further and read the reviews, and find out that the last ten people who parked there had their cars broken into, or the road is washed out 90% of the time and inaccessible. Or, sometimes there just aren’t many options nearby, the nearest listing being an hour’s drive away. When I’m planning my trips in advance, I try to zero in on an area where 3 or more free campsites are featured in close proximity so that if I show up at the first one and it sucks, I can still try the others. But what happens when you try all 3 and every single one is a no-go?
I understand that if you want something free or cheap in this world, you have to make sacrifices. I don’t expect a free site to have a toilet, fire pits, and power outlets. My truck setup is self-contained. I am happy if I find a free site that is just safe and accessible, and preferably legal. I am even willing to pay (a reasonable rate) for this; sometimes the reason I use freecampsites.net isn’t even because I’m looking for something free, I’m just looking for something.
Apps and Resources for Full-Time Vanlife and Car Living
Private Land
The app “Harvest Hosts” has 2500+ RV camping spots at wineries, breweries, and farms. One app that provides something similar for car campers is HipCamp. It’s basically like AirBnB for camping, since the campsites featured are on people’s private property. Some of them are unique accommodations where you can sleep in a yurt or treehouse, and others are tent-camping sites, but some are simply places you’re allowed to pull over and park for as cheap as $15/night. As a result, HipCamp has been a sustainable solution for me when free first-come first-served sites are unavailable or unreliable.
However, it’s not a catch-all solution in every destination. HipCamp has camp hosts all throughout the United States, but when you pull up their interactive map for a certain city/area and then filter locations by price, you’ll watch your options start to dwindle, depending on your budget. If you’re looking only for a place to park, and not some other type of alternative accommodation, watch your options dwindle even further. Not every campground featured on HipCamp is a boring pull-over-and-park situation, and for good reason; they are in the business of offering interesting experiences. The website was not created just for overnight car parking, though that’s all I personally need it for. These types of apps are not necessarily intended for people trying to live this way full-time.
Federal Land
You can always book regular designated campgrounds. On Recreation.gov you can reserve at national parks and other recreation areas throughout the country. Of course, these sites are for people who are trying to vacation specifically in that park, and as park visitation continues to increase year after year, these sites can book up instantaneously. This is not usually a last-minute or even one-month-before option. You could try walkup sites, but there’s no guarantee of availability when you arrive, so you would be taking your chances. If you work remotely like me, you don’t always have the ability to waste time taking chances. You need to be available for work when it’s time to be available.
Plus, if I’m not particularly interested in forming my trip around a certain park, I don’t want to take up precious space at one of those campgrounds when there’s someone else who is desperate to visit on their vacation. If I just need *a* site in the state of California, it’s kind of an asshole move to take up a Yosemite National Park site if I’m not particularly interested in doing a Yosemite trip.
Bureau of Land Management land is a great boondocking option and unlike national park land it is free and doesn’t require reservations, but more and more I am hearing stories about how BLM land is being trashed since people who have no interest in nature or camping are parking there just to have somewhere legal to park. I fear BLM land will start to see the same overcrowding and Leave No Trace issues that Park Service land is experiencing.
Stealth Parking
The easiest thing I have done is to park in a suburban neighborhood. If it’s a place where street parking is the norm for the residents anyway, and parking doesn’t require a special residential permit, then nobody should ever notice or question seeing a car parked there.
Technically I think this is illegal in many states, so as a result you spend your night paranoid about getting the dreaded “knock” of a police officer waking you up to tell you to move. I have no clue why they care if I’m there. I’m not bothering anybody. It’s not a street cleaning day. There are other cars parked immediately next to me, the only difference being that I am sitting inside my vehicle and they are not. Who gives? Someone’s dog that barks all day and poops in the neighbor’s yard is probably causing more disruption to the community than me, quietly sitting in my truck wondering which nearby coffee place I should order at tomorrow.
When Googling why it’s illegal to sleep in your car, I found two main reasons cited multiple times. One is that it may not be illegal to sleep, but it’s just illegal to park in certain places for long periods of time in general. I can understand why it would be important not to hog space in some locations if you’re not a patron, like hospital parking lots or busy restaurants (though I’m not sure why it’s bad to rest when you’re at an actual rest stop. Isn’t it better than driving while drowsy?).
The other is because the city thinks everyone who sleeps in a car is by default a homeless, unemployed crack addict. Firstly, that is incorrect, especially in 2021 when homeownership isn’t even something younger generations aspire to. Secondly, this blatantly speaks to a lack of empathy and infrastructure for homeless people that is also problematic. Where exactly do we want these people to go? Back into a tent city? I thought cops spent a lot of time breaking those up too? Why are we only on the defense and not being solution-oriented?
If a hoard of car campers learns about a certain spot where parking isn’t prohibited, and as a result that location becomes overrun with dozens of car campers ruining what used to be a beautiful beachside oasis, I suppose that makes sense and I would be annoyed if I lived nearby. But if we want to prevent this, why not come up with alternative locations where we can all agree car campers are allowed to be, where it will not be disturbing to others, or to the environment? Please, do tell me where you want me to go, I will gladly go there! I am not actively seeking to break rules! I would love if there’s a spot you are cool with me parking at, I just don’t know where that is. If you tell people they must stop doing something that’s essential to their livelihood or lifestyle but no alternative options are available, it just becomes a game of whack-a-mole where car campers might move away from this spot today, but tomorrow they’ll just be causing the same problem down the road.
Telling people they can’t park is not going to deter this lifestyle choice altogether. People who live this way are already risk-takers and freedom fighters who aren’t interested in following society’s expectations. If a cop knocks on my door one night and tells me to move, my first thought is not “welp, it was fun while it lasted, guess I’ll go back to suburbia and buy a house with a picket fence and fall in line.” It’s also not “I will now go spend $200 on a hotel room”. Instead my first thought is, “where will I park next?” or “will the hotel catch me if I sleep in their parking lot?”
Where are the Solutions?
For a country so obsessed with freedom and property rights, you’d think we’d be more up in arms about being barred from sleeping in our own cars that we paid for. The entire concept also makes me depressed about how removed from the land we’ve become as a result of modern capitalist society. As human beings, we should have the inalienable right to roam, at the very least in our own country. It’s shocking that the only way to follow the rules is to choose from just two possible options: home ownership or apartment renting. The only fully legal lifestyle is to file myself away in a cubby where you won’t have to look at me, and I won’t get to see a blade of grass all day? The extreme amount of red tape preventing us from choosing any kind of third, fourth, or fifth option strikes me as insidious. These are things that also occurred to me while working seasonal gigs or hitchhiking from town to town as well (situations where I was not sleeping in a car), because of issues like voting addresses and health insurance.
If cities want to wise up and work with us instead of against us, and make an absolute financial killing in the process, they’d be smart to follow in Denver’s footsteps (although Denver is doing it as a nonprofit), or in Leavenworth, Washington’s, where they have a lot designated for one night of free overnight parking for both RVs and cars. When I was working remotely from the North Cascades, I slept overnight at that lot so that I would be close enough to the trailhead to hike Colchuck Lake the next morning. As a result of being able to park walking distance from town, I spent money on food, beer, and ice cream with abandon. I stayed in town into the evening knowing I could easily walk to my parking spot and crash without any concern that someone would come tell me to leave. If an easy option wasn’t available, then instead of buying things I would have spent my time driving around in the woods aimlessly in the dark looking for an appropriate stealth spot to pull over and basically hide for the night. Why would that have been more beneficial to anyone involved?
As a hiker and backpacker, I know we already do this for thru-hikers. When you’re on a long hike like the Pacific Crest Trail or Appalachian Trail, you’ll come across “trail angels” and little hostel accommodations along the way, which are designed to profit off of accommodating your dirty, homeless, stinky ass. What a thru-hiker wouldn’t do for a shower and a bag of Cheetos! I have to imagine this paradigm is also emotionally enriching for the people who are helping thru-hikers out and dispensing local wisdom. They don’t look down upon hikers as lawless vagabonds (or if they do consider them to be lawless vagabonds, it’s with a sense of respect rather than disgust), but rather take pride in contributing to the nomadic dream. Is someone living out of their car not living by a similar creed?
Millenials and Gen Z are revolutionizing the way we think about work/life balance and The American Dream, and we’ve got that content-creator money coupled with values of sustainability. If cities, truck stops, and RV campgrounds don’t want us to spend it on them, eventually we’ll find someone who will gladly accept our currency, and those new businesses will topple the old.
2022 update: Companies called Van Life Campgrounds and Kift are starting up in this space!
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