The UCLA Students Who Live in Their Cars

The month I moved to Los Angeles felt apocalyptic, even by the standards of a city forever being destroyed in film. It was the end of the summer of 2020; stores were closed, streets empty, and wildfires had enveloped the region in smoke, turning the sky orange. Yet after I parked the U-Haul, things got even bleaker.

Walking to my new apartment, I passed a car where a 20-something had passed out with the engine running. Folks, I noticed, were sleeping in nearly every car on the street—a mix, I would later learn, of UCLA students and construction workers.

I had never encountered vehicular homelessness before moving out West. Indeed, it hadn’t even registered to me as a possibility, as a thing one might do to avoid sleeping on the street. In New York City, most homeless people don’t own cars, and in any case, the city has a legal obligation to provide shelter. This is not true in California.

live in RVs, vans, or cars, a 55 percent increase over when the count