I Live in My Car

Chrystal Audet tried to get comfortable in her “bedroom”—the back seat of her eight-year-old Ford Fusion. September nights are raw in the Pacific Northwest, with sheets of rain that cut to the bone. But Audet had to stretch her legs, so she left a passenger door ajar.

From her own “bedroom” in the front seat, her 26-year-old daughter, Cierra, asked her to close it.

“We have to get out of this,” Audet said to herself as she pulled a comforter to ward off the cold. She struggled to fall asleep in a parking lot in Kirkland, Washington.

Audet, 49, earns more than $72,000 a year as a social worker for the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services. But a combination of bad luck, bad debt, and a bad credit score priced her out of her apartment. With eviction looming, she put her furniture in storage last spring. She began parking the sedan in the U-shaped parking lot outside a Methodist church.

The car, her biggest investment, became her home—the roof turned into a dining table, the trunk a closet. And a weathered stretch of blacktop provided by the church became her yard, her neighborhood, and her safe place.

Around the nation, parking lots are being set aside for people like Audet. Dozens of such lots have opened across the U.S. in the past five years, with new ones announced every few months, including as far east as Pennsylvania and North Carolina. They provide a safe harbor for a growing cohort of working Americans who earn too little to afford rent but too much to receive government assistance. 

As a result, they’ve turned their cars into a form of affordable housing.

“Tens of thousands of people are living in their vehicles,” says Graham J. Pruss, an anthropologist studying the trend who heads the National Vehicle Residency Collective. “It’s huge.”

The car, her biggest investment, became her home. The roof turned into a dining table and the trunk a closet. A weathered stretch of blacktop provided by the church became her yard, her neighborhood, and her safe place.

Around the nation, parking lots are being set aside for people like Audet. Dozens of such lots have opened across the U.S. in the past five years. There are new ones announced every few months, including as far east as Pennsylvania and North Carolina. They provide a safe harbor for a growing cohort of working Americans who earn too little to afford rent but too much to receive government assistance.

As a result, they’ve turned their cars into a form of affordable housing.

“Tens of thousands of people are living in their vehicles,” says Graham J. Pruss, an anthropologist studying the trend who heads the National Vehicle Residency Collective. “It’s huge.”

In 2001, Audet posted a bad check. She went to court and it ended up on her record. It was one of several setbacks that damaged her credit.

But her free fall into unsustainable debt began in December 2022, when her car died. Then medical bills in the thousands arrived. Audet missed two rent payments. Then the landlord raised her monthly rent by $248.

“It was a case of one bill too many,” Audet says.

Down the spiral that led her to homelessness were a series of choices between bad and very bad that she made, often out of desperation.

By midsummer of 2023, Audet’s take-home pay was nearly $4,300 a month. It was reduced by bills totaling nearly $2,600. This left her with too little to pay for an apartment in a market where the average rent is around $2,000.

She finally found the parking lot after seeing a news story about parking programs for homeless people. For months, Audet, her daughter, and their dog, Coda, lived out of a space that was no more than 30 square feet.

Being able to hang on to her car let Audet maintain a semblance of normalcy. Almost no one knew her secret. Each morning, she used a portable toilet to get ready for work. Then she commuted to her downtown Seattle office. She spent her day sitting behind a Plexiglass partition across from some of the city’s most destitute residents.

“There’s no judgment here,” she told the desperate people seeking government assistance, including a man clutching a medical certificate proving that he is blind. She helped him qualify for disability benefits. “It could be me on the other side of this glass,” she told them.

She was, in fact, on the other side of the glass. Her bank account was overdrawn by more than $900, with loans and bills that ate up her paycheck. She spent her days assisting others. But she knew that she earned too much to be helped herself by the government. The cutoff for receiving housing assistance where Audet lives is $70,650.

In many cities, the “mobile homeless” are now the majority of the homeless population.

Many of them have jobs: In Denver, 135 out of the 217 people who slept in a lot provided by the Colorado Safe Parking Initiative last year earned an average of $1,581 a month. One-bedrooms there average $1,655.

There are so many people in need of parking that most are turned away. 

“We can only serve 10 to 20 percent of the people who call us,” says Terrell Curtis, the program’s executive director.

In other parking lots across the country, car dwellers share the hardships that landed them there: A man who scraped by delivering pizzas in Santa Barbara ended up in his Nissan Frontier when the pizza parlor cut his hours. A 35-year-old who installed home security systems moved into his Chevy Suburban when he lost control of a drill, snapping his radial tendon. 

“The rent just kept going up and up and up,” says Brooke Rosales, 41. She now lives in her Jeep Liberty at a lot for homeless parkers in Denver. 

To try to stay ahead of the bills, Audet worked two jobs. On a recent evening, after clocking out of work, she took a bus back to Kirkland, where her daughter, a college student, waited for her. They spent the next three hours delivering food through DoorDash. The pair earned $86.05 that evening, then spent $20 on gas and $20.37 at a waffle place for a takeout dinner.

In many cities, the “mobile homeless” are now the majority of the homeless population.

Many of them have jobs. In Denver, 135 out of the 217 people who slept in a lot provided by the Colorado Safe Parking Initiative last year earned an average of $1,581 a month. One-bedrooms there average $1,655.

There are so many people in need of parking that most are turned away.

“We can only serve 10 to 20 percent of the people who call us,” says Terrell Curtis, the program’s executive director.

In other parking lots across the country, car dwellers share the hardships that landed them there: A man who scraped by delivering pizzas in Santa Barbara ended up in his Nissan Frontier when the pizza parlor cut his hours. A 35-year-old who installed home security systems moved into his Chevy Suburban when he lost control of a drill, snapping his radial tendon.

“The rent just kept going up and up and up,” says Brooke Rosales, 41. She now lives in her Jeep Liberty at a lot for homeless parkers in Denver.

To try to stay ahead of the bills, Audet worked two jobs. On a recent evening, after clocking out of work, she took a bus back to Kirkland, where her daughter, a college student, waited for her. They spent the next three hours delivering food through DoorDash. The pair earned $86.05 that evening. They then spent $20 on gas and $20.37 at a waffle place for a takeout dinner.

“It’s the irony of working and making a nice income and still not being able to afford housing,” Audet says. “I make $32 and some change per hour, but even still, I find myself struggling.”

Audet and her daughter bathed at a state park. There, on the door of the public shower, someone had taped a real estate listing to the wall advertising a $4.25 million home that was walking distance away. Six miles from the public restroom where Audet showers is the exclusive community where billionaire Bill Gates lives.

There are so many ways in which a person’s life becomes smaller when they’re forced to fit a home into a car. To avoid using the portable toilet at night, Audet tried to limit how much water she drank, leading to dehydration. The fact that she couldn’t properly stretch out caused her ankles to swell to the point that she couldn’t fit into her sneakers. 

“It’s the irony of working and making a nice income and still not being able to afford housing,” Audet says. “I make $32 and some change per hour, but even still, I find myself struggling.”

Audet and her daughter bathed at a state park. There, on the door of the public shower, someone had taped a real estate listing to the wall advertising a $4.25 million home that was walking distance away. Six miles from the public restroom where Audet showers is the exclusive community where billionaire Bill Gates lives.

There are so many ways in which a person’s life becomes smaller when they’re forced to fit a home into a car. To avoid using the portable toilet at night, Audet tried to limit how much water she drank. This led to dehydration. The fact that she couldn’t properly stretch out caused her ankles to swell to the point that she couldn’t fit into her sneakers.

In between working two jobs, Audet found time to search for apartments. She faced the impossible math of her life. Her pay stubs presented a picture of a woman earning a respectable income. But her credit report presented another.

Her luck changed in late August. There was a housing event inside the church. Housing activists saw that she was being trailed by a New York Times reporter. Several of them offered their business cards. One coached her on how to approach potential landlords. She was told what to share and what to omit. Soon after, she toured a $2,360-a-month one-bedroom in Redmond, Washington. It was a palace about 20 times the size of her car.

She was nearly in tears when she heard that she had been approved. But she almost lost the apartment when she couldn’t provide the security deposit. The church where she had been parking stepped in, ending her homelessness for a little more than $2,000.

In September, Audet and her daughter moved in. For now she’s relishing the simplest of human pleasures. Yet the math of her life remains precarious.

Her sizable debt continues to carve out her salary, leaving too little for rent.

“I’m always, like, on the edge,” says Audet. “At least I have a car to sit in—and a safe parking lot to be in.”

^{Rukmini Callimachi is a reporter for The New York Times.}

^{Rukmini Callimachi is a reporter for The New York Times.}