In Los Angeles County, unhoused people living in cars, trucks, and RVs outnumber those in tents and makeshift shelters by 50%, yet vehicular homelessness receives relatively little attention. Many cities don’t even measure or report on it — at least not yet. The Lewis Center’s Madeline Brozen joins to discuss her research on the distinct demographics and experiences of unhoused people living out of their vehicles, and the promise of safe parking programs to support the transition back into stable housing.
In Los Angeles County, unhoused people living in cars, trucks, and RVs outnumber those in tents and makeshift shelters by 50%, yet vehicular homelessness receives relatively little attention. Many cities don’t even measure or report on it — at least not yet. The Lewis Center’s Madeline Brozen joins to discuss her research on the distinct demographics and experiences of unhoused people living out of their vehicles, and the promise of safe parking programs to support the transition back into stable housing.
Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello! This is the UCLA Housing Voice Podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This is the third installment in Pathways Home, our series on research into the causes of and solutions to homelessness. Our guest for this episode is the Lewis Center's deputy director Maddie Brozen, sharing her recent work looking at the demographics and contributors to vehicular homelessness. As the name suggests, vehicular homelessness refers to when people rely on cars, trucks, or RVs to provide them shelter.
We're releasing this episode on the heels of the 2023 national Point-In-Time Homeless Count numbers being released, showing that over the past year, homelessness increased by 12% nationwide. On a given night in January of this year, approximately 653,000 people were unhoused, about 40% of them unsheltered, including those sleeping in vehicles. Vehicle dwelling is common in Los Angeles County, and the same is likely true of other high cost cities, and particularly those with limited shelter systems. An estimated 22,300 people were sleeping in their vehicles in Los Angeles County in 2023, up from an estimated 18,900 in 2020. For comparison, the number estimated to be sleeping in tents and makeshift shelters in 2023 was a bit under 15,000.
Vehicular homelessness is a massive but largely hidden problem, and it's something that most jurisdictions don't yet measure and report on. Los Angeles is relatively unusual in that it's tracked these numbers for several years now, and Maddie and her team have combed through the data to give us a picture of how this population differs from other people experiencing homelessness, and to share what we know about effective programs for helping people back into housing and helping them live safer and more stable lives while they work on getting there.
The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Gavin Carlson, Jason Sutedja, and Divine Mutoni. As always, you can send comments and questions to shanephillips@ucla.edu, and with that, here's our conversation with Maddie Brozen.
Madeline Brozen is Deputy Director of the Lewis Center — our Lewis Center — for Regional Policy Studies, and she's here to discuss her research on vehicular homelessness and the ways that cities are responding to it through policy. Maddie, thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Housing Voice Podcast.
Madeline Brozen 2:50
Hi, thanks guys, it's an honor. Longtime listener.
Shane Phillips 2:54
I hope so. And my co-host is Mike Lens. Hey, Mike.
Michael Lens 2:59
Hello Shane, hello, Maddie. Great to have all Lewis Center pod. The risk obviously, is that a staff meeting is gonna break out. So try to avoid that.
Shane Phillips 3:09
Yeah, no one wants to hear that. Including us. Okay, Maddie, you know the deal. First things first, give us a tour. I think we're going to Minneapolis.
Madeline Brozen 3:21
Yeah. So I'd love to take you on a tour of Minneapolis, which is where I grew up. And I think the best way to see the city is by bike. Well, sadly, this year, the bike share system was actually removed, we can just grab a bunch of bikes from my parent's garage in South Minneapolis. And so kind of start heading north along Brian Avenue, where they just upgraded to this beautiful bicycle Boulevard. It's a residential street but as an on treat path. And then kind of as you move north, you really see how kind of the zoning changes along the neighborhood from single family to duplex small Plex, four Plex small apartment buildings. And also just noticing like small commercial corridors that are really the remnants of the former streetcar system. We'll take a little detour to go see the Rose Garden at Lake Harriet. And then jump on the Midtown Greenway, which is a former rail corridor, which is now a separated bicycle and walking path. And it's really kind of like this bike separated highway that goes along the city from west to east. So a couple of things will jump off the Greenway and go to the Midtown global market. This is in the former Sears building, one of kind of many former Sears buildings has been redeveloped throughout the country. And in the global market, you get to see the diversity of Minneapolis with shops and foods from indigenous and Somalian East African and Latino communities. The next style will stop along the lucky Avenue and Milwaukee Avenue is actually about a four block Historic District. There's not cars allowed along these areas. And it was actually built as low income housing in the late 19th century. They're quarter lot sizes. They're beautiful craftsman porches, and we can just chat about how Different we did low income housing. At that point, first of all we do now eventually just riding along Hiawatha Avenue where the light rail is, and stopping off in Minnehaha Falls where the watershed flows into the Mississippi. And we can grab some walleye tacos and some well earned cold beverages.
Michael Lens 5:16
Oh, while I tacos as a St. Paul native, which has come up a couple of times on this show, I don't know half of that stuff because my mom was generally afraid of crossing the Mississippi River or, and not because of like the usual like, you know, racist sort of stuff. But more, we will just get lost. We didn't know our way around Minneapolis, even though it's a much simpler city to get around than St. Paul, which has absolutely no rhyme or reason to its street cred. Exactly.
Madeline Brozen 5:50
I mean, in all fairness, you know, Mike's gonna have to give us a tour and media tour of St. Paul, because, besides a couple of particular things, I similarly know nothing. It's just the funny thing about the Twin Cities. You grew up in Minneapolis. You didn't go to St. Paul, you grew up in St. Paul, you probably didn't go to Minneapolis. Yes.
Michael Lens 6:06
Yes. I haven't lived in St. Paul for 20 years, of course. So I'm, I'm a pretty bad tour guide around there too.
Madeline Brozen 6:13
Well, half most of this tour is just me showing you things that I did as a you know, free kid around so
Michael Lens 6:18
nice.
Shane Phillips 6:19
I don't think I knew that Minneapolis even had a light rail line. And now I'm actually very interested in learning more about like pre 1900 affordable housing developments. I didn't really know that that was a thing in the US. This was kind of news to me,
Michael Lens 6:37
Not much of a thing.
Madeline Brozen 6:38
Not much of a thing. I mean, I think it's just you know, just low income housing built a lot held for workers that were doing things you know, right so that's I think a lot of what you see just
Michael Lens 6:48
a quick aside, Jesse The Body Ventura or Jesse, the governor Ventura, whatever he wants to be known as these days, does get a fair amount of credit for Minneapolis is, well, the Twin Cities I should say light rail existence.
Madeline Brozen 7:04
Yeah, exactly. No. And you know, the Hiawatha Avenue where the light first light rail line went, I mean, if that's another just interesting story about like, how much that's been redeployed. It's just it was really industrial land, besides the McDonald's I would go to as a kid, like there was nothing on Hiawatha. Yes. And now there's also there's two light rail lines. There's a long Hiawatha that goes from the airport to downtown Minneapolis and then one from downtown Minneapolis to the University of Minnesota to downtown St. Paul. Boom, we
Michael Lens 7:31
could talk about Twin Cities all day, which is generally what I do with Maddies spouse memo of course, since we are from like the exact same plot of land on the east side of St. Paul.
Shane Phillips 7:44
I get a lot of Minnesota folks here I feel like so we are talking about two recent articles on the subject of vehicular homelessness one is titled who lives in vehicles and why understanding vehicular homelessness in Los Angeles. And that is in the journal housing policy debate with co authors Christopher G. Marino, and our very own Lewis Center, Faculty Director Evelyn bloomingburg. Will talk a bit about your findings on this one to help answer that question of who lives in vehicles and why. But the other article is in the Journal of the American Planning Association with the same set of authors, and it's called planning for and against vehicular homelessness, spatial trends and determinants of vehicular dwelling in Los Angeles. That one is more policy oriented, I would say and it will be our focus on the back half of the conversation. Just a preview some findings here. In that second paper in particular, you find that census tracts with the strongest restrictions against vehicle dwelling had smaller numbers of people sleeping in vehicles. That makes sense, and so does the fact that neighboring tracks saw higher concentrations of vehicular homelessness, since of course, preventing someone from sleeping in one location does not solve the problem of them needing a place to sleep. So they will just go somewhere nearby in many cases. But you also found that the positive effect from being next to neighboring a census tract with more restrictive regulations was stronger than the negative effect within those restricted census tracts. And so the result is actually an overall positive association between vehicle dwelling restrictions and vehicular homelessness, more of one is actually associated with more of the other. And that does seem a bit more surprising. But we should note that this is a correlation. So it doesn't necessarily mean that the restrictions are causing increased vehicular homelessness. It is very possible, maybe more likely, that causation runs the other direction with cities responding to higher rates of vehicular homelessness by adopting more restrictions. But we will get into that later, along with some discussion of solutions that do more than just shuffled people from one neighborhood to another These studies focus exclusively on Los Angeles County, just to be clear, specifically 85 of the 88 cities here. But as usual, a lot of this is sure to apply elsewhere. And I think that's especially true for the reasons vehicular homelessness may be on the rise and lessons from our local policy responses. So to turn it back to you, Maddie, before we even get into these articles, tell us what motivated you to pursue vehicular homelessness as a research topic. Your focus, as with Evie is traditionally more on the transportation side of things. And you know, there's a clear connection to that here. But it's also a new area for you, in some ways. So what drew you to this topic?
Madeline Brozen 10:40
Yeah, so I'm certainly housing topic interloper. But I started paying attention to this topic over a decade ago when I was a graduate student at UCLA. And it was actually part of the neat McEachin, informal city class. So in that class, you were just told to find some kind of type of informality and really understand it and think about kind of how it could be regulated or address. So I was in a group where we were thinking about how do people use their vehicles as informal housing. So we went out and talked to a handful of people who live in their vehicles in and around Venice. And we also just mapped out the concentration. So we could kind of get a sense a little bit of, you know, what's the experience of this? And where do we find it. And since that class, you know, over 10 years ago, I've just followed the topic and seeing how the city's policy response didn't change, and how very little was being done, how little attention was being paid to it. So a few years ago, there was an interest in a transportation research call for projects that gave me the opportunity to actually do more of a formal research project, and use some of these county wide data that we'll talk about to really understand this at a broader scale. Well,
Shane Phillips 11:51
welcome to housing research. We are very territorial here. And we are not happy to see you. Just kidding, of course, just
Michael Lens 12:00
stay away from housing, Twitter, everything else?
Shane Phillips 12:04
I think she's seen enough of it. Yeah. All right. So let's get into some of the basics from your first article about the demographics of vehicular homelessness, and spend some time talking about the people behind this research before we get into the nuts and bolts of the policy. So what is vehicular homelessness? How do we define it, and who lives in vehicles, and to kind of build on that, in what ways are people living in their vehicles different from those living on the streets or in shelters, whether we're talking about things like age, or gender, race or ethnicity, family status, employments, things like that. So
Madeline Brozen 12:41
there's really a spectrum of homelessness, I think that's useful to think about. So from people living in like very crowded housing, multiple families, doubling up people without a permanent home. So maybe they're, you know, living on a friend or family's couch temporarily, to people that live in a car. So they have no kind of formal housing, on streets, in tents, or makeshift shelters, as well as like a formal homeless shelter itself. So we're defining vehicular homelessness as people who live in cars, vans, or RVs. And this is the same definition as Michelle Walken, who wrote a book called otherwise homelessness, which was published about 10 years ago, that was really the predominant look at vehicle living for homeless people. And her book is an ethnographic examination, mostly focusing on Santa Barbara, but also Santa Cruz and Sonoma County. So other kind of areas of California. So in our housing policy, debate paper, we use a demographic survey that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority collects, and I think we'll get into a little bit more about that survey itself. But each year they do this survey, that just gives a sense of the demographic look of the population. They actually also use the survey to figure out how they actually take the numbers that are counted, and figure out, you know, is there one or more people in each kind of count of a person? Right? The survey has a lot of different questions that asks about, you know, demographics of the people, how they fell into homelessness and other experiences that they have. There's about 2000 of these surveys, which are collected each year. And I just really want to give Lhasa real credit for doing this. It's a impressive data collection effort for anyone has done original data collection. 2000 surveys is a lot. And it's also distinct from pretty much most other homeless authorities because these demographic surveys are actually not required by the US Housing and Urban Development Department. So what we found in the surveys was that people that are living in cars are the kinds of vehicular homeless population are more female. In all of this. We're just comparing people that live in vehicles to people that live kind of intense on sidewalks or in kind of what's called me makeshift shelters. So we're not looking at kind of those other ends of the spectrums in formal, you know, homeless shelters, or kind of in crowded housing, right. So the people that live in tents, 70% are male in vehicles is about 5050, male to female vehicles have a slightly higher percentage of white people that's 31% on kind of streets 36% in vehicles, vehicle dwellers are older, they're more likely to be employed, they're more likely to be on disability, and they have higher monthly incomes. Now, I want to make a point that this is not really survivable income by any means high
Michael Lens 15:38
monthly, not high income higher than people living in tents. 50 $100
Madeline Brozen 15:42
a month, right? Yeah, like, compared to $500, kind of for the average person on the street. Otherwise, people in cars have also been homeless for shorter periods of time, which ends up meaning they're kind of less chronically homeless. And most significantly, people living in cars are living in a household with children. So that's just kind of the descriptive look of what was important, what was significant. When we modeled this, we found that the households with children was the biggest difference between these groups. In fact, people living in cars were 11 times more likely to be living with children.
Michael Lens 16:17
Right. And I think that is great to highlight. Because I mean, if ever, you wanted to get it, right, in terms of being humanitarian, with a policy response to homelessness, it's when you have so many children involved. And so some of the slight differences be in this population in terms of the lower likelihood that they're chronically homeless in terms of the fact that they have some earned income. Like, that's great. But we're also so often dealing with kids, right? And so you can't, in my view, you know, be too punitive with this. But as we'll find out, lots of cities do this.
Madeline Brozen 16:56
Yeah. And we see this, you know, in other kinds of systems in LA, right, like the Los Angeles Unified School District knows that there is a significant amount of their students that are homeless, you know, to the point where they actually like, do things at the end of the year to kind of like recognize and say, like, you've made it through this year, even though you're experiencing this trauma in your household life. So
Shane Phillips 17:17
yeah, I mean, our very own UC system has a very high rate of homelessness as well, yes, in its student population, UCLA is not at the top of that list, but it is not doing great. We are extremely expensive neighborhood for anyone to live in, much less someone in their teens or 20s. And so just to get a sense of scale here, what do these numbers look like? And how have they changed over time, especially in the past decade, like what did vehicular homelessness look like in absolute terms as a share of the unsheltered homeless population? You know, in 2015 2017? And where are we now?
Madeline Brozen 17:54
So in LA County, people living in cars make up a huge amount of the homeless population, both in terms of the numbers and of the proportion. So you know, we were pulling the data from 2016. And I'll also say that these papers are both pre COVID. And we do have some, a couple of years are really one year of data about kind of what's happened since the onset of the pandemic. So throughout 2016 to 2020, people living in cars made up 60% of the homeless population in LA, it didn't really change that much. You know, as our homeless population is growing, the portion of people live in vehicles is growing at the relatively same rates. But yeah, this like, majority of this population, is why we think it's really important to do this work, you know, we're not talking about this enough, we're not recognizing it enough. And we're not understanding the problem in order to address it. And what that kind of looks like in terms of absolute numbers, you know, in terms of the numbers of people, you know, you're talking 5000 and above people living in cars and vans, and, you know, somewhere 789 1000 people living in RVs. We also took a look at what can we say about how this is in LA relative to other places, and some other California counties do report the proportion of people living in cars, that's more on the order of 20 to 25%. There's one estimate from outside of California King County, Washington or Seattle is located as about 19%. So LA, the vehicular dwelling population is a huge portion of our homeless population. It's larger than pretty much any other places where we have this, but I think that kind of speaks to the size and scale, just the number of people experiencing homelessness in LA in particular.
Shane Phillips 19:47
Yeah, I mean, I gotta say that was it was news to me that it was more than half that is a shocking percent and it's in some ways understandable why there's a lot of focus on like people sleeping in tents. For example. Pull, for one just being more visible. But there's also, you know, a lot of advocacy around preventing sweeps and kind of pushing people around. And I feel like we have not really seen that same level of advocacy, not to take anything away from folks who are working on this. But I just don't think it's risen to the same level of people's attention, as elected officials are placing all these restrictions that are really kind of doing the same thing, in some ways, at least. So that is some of the the what and the who, let's talk about the why. What do we know about why people live in their vehicles rather than these other alternatives? Or, at the very least, what do the demographics of vehicular homelessness suggest as an answer to that question of why people are living in their cars, rather than in a tent on the sidewalk or finding a shelter? or what have you, it might help to break this down into why people might prefer living in a vehicle or end up living in a vehicle rather than other forms of unsheltered homelessness, which I think might be a little more of a straightforward and intuitive explanation. And then why people might also prefer living in a vehicle to a shelter, which might be a little less than to ative to many folks.
Madeline Brozen 21:15
Yeah, so there's other work, especially this ethnographic work that has really kind of got into the you know, why a car? Why is this a good place for you. And if we've kind of linked this also back to what we see about the demographics, it makes sense. So we think about how this is more women, more families, if you can live in a car, you have a more sense of safety and security, but also, you know, if you're employed, it's makes it so you can get to work, you can get your kids to school, the other part about kind of vehicles is being more easily able to hide in plain sight, right? Like, you're just going to be less of a target. In terms of, you know, there's a lot of cars on the street, right, you're just kind of another car that's parked in a neighborhood, or, you know, especially will kind of get into this places that are mostly not residential, that's where people are now industrial lands, under freeways, places like that. But also you can use the vehicle, which you're using as housing as a vehicle, right, like, so that's kind of the benefit side of things. I do want to highlight that these benefits don't make a car a good place to live right right away, or don't have basic hygiene, you don't have a bathroom or a shower, you don't really have a way to store cook meals. And you know, now that you're in a vehicle, there's parking restrictions, there's as we'll kind of talk about in terms of the ways that regulating this issue, you're you're a target in different ways for kind of different punitive approaches. Actually, in the state of California, the vehicle code says that you have to move a car every 72 hours. So that could be a ticket as well. And we'll get into the degree to which the regulations we have are actually enforced or not, right. But getting parking tickets is a really difficult thing when you just have very little income. And when you can't pay those, they get more expensive. And there was actually a LA Times article recently from someone who was living in their car and had kind of fallen into the situation where more and more tickets meant their car got taken away and and you're just now you're going to even worse situation when you're in a bad situation to start from. So when I was a graduate student, and we talked to people that live in their cars, they use things like other amenities to figure out how to kind of make a full life for a full home. Right. So getting a really cheap membership to 24 Hour Fitness gives you access to a shower, locating near a park
Shane Phillips 23:38
on each planet fitness sign of a real cheap one planet money. And then we'll see to see if any podcasts.
Madeline Brozen 23:47
So you know, if you are located by the beach, or park, there's a bathroom, right? So you do figure out ways to add other elements that you need when you're living in a car. But kind of going back to the like why. So the survey that we use just asks about, like what was the reasons that led to their loss of housing. And I think that gives us a little bit of an insight here. And the largest driver was unemployment. So people losing their home because they lost their job. It's slightly significantly higher than people living in tents. You know, you have 33% of people in cars versus 30% of people in streets, you know, it is significantly different, but the magnitude is not that different. But also just fewer other reasons. Right. So in this question, we said what's the main reason you could check as many as is kind of happened. And we see that people that live in cars also report that like mental or physical health problems, were less related to their loss of housing. So you know, you kind of have probably one catastrophic event, which has made you lose your home. And now you have this asset, right, like you have a vehicle and so that is your next form of housing that comes to you know,
Shane Phillips 25:01
what can you say about the distinctions between different kinds of vehicles as dwellings? You know, I have to assume there's a very big difference between living in an RV versus, you know, a Corolla, and also living in a vehicle that runs is operational and one that's not I think that's more of a of an issue you see with RV sometimes that are just kind of posted up and no longer functioning, what can you tell us about the different experiences and kind of how people experienced that and maybe even aware if these are distributed in different ways or spatially?
Madeline Brozen 25:35
So RV is are certainly the big focus when people think people that live in vehicles, especially kind of, in what gets talked about in a leg, you're gonna think about the RVs, mostly similar to kind of tents, they're just the most visible, right? Like, it's kind of going to be the most obvious that someone you see an RV, you know, not like some very fancy coach parked logs of neighborhood and Westwood, but you know, maybe a little rundown RV along an industrial or along the LA river or something like that. About half of the people that live in cars live in those are views, right? We don't know whether cars are operational or not. When the counts get generated, it's just a count of is this a vehicle that it looks like someone's living in, and RVs are better suited for living, but they're probably less suited for being a vehicle, right? Like,
Shane Phillips 26:26
especially in LA,
Madeline Brozen 26:28
they have less gas mileage, they're harder to park, right? So moving them is just expensive. And so just because like an RV isn't moving may or may not actually mean it's operational or not. It's just like, does that person have gas money to get somewhere else? Right? You know, cars, vans are the opposite, less suited for living better suited for actually moving about places. So, you know, I think it is important as we think about responses to this, to think about both and distinct responses to our v's and like cars and vans, because there's different needs, there's different sizes, but they both need some type of policy response.
Michael Lens 27:09
Yeah, I think we, you know, we definitely want to get, you know, going on on these policy responses that you've analyzed. But since Shane and I did a podcast with Esther Sullivan on mobile home parks, it's interesting to think about the intersection of our failures in mobile home park policies, and the fact that we have our V's on the street, some of which are mobile, one of the kind of easy and interesting things that you learned from Esther is like, the mobile home idea is a misnomer that home is not mobile, right. And so it's, you know, I think, way down the road, there's some space for figuring out where parked RVs and mobile home parks somehow come together as policy, you know, legalizing mobile, home parks everywhere, or something like that. But, you know, it's it's interesting to think about these relatively immobile homes that are kind of in this, you know, liminal space between being a mobile home and an actual home. Yeah,
Madeline Brozen 28:18
and there's some work from Oakland where people were talking to the RV dwellers there. And that was kind of the idea that they came up with, which is like, not safe parking, which we'll get into, but like, you know, there are people that would prefer to live in an RV for various reasons. Also, like this is a place they've called home for a while. And can we think about actually like giving them land under which to live having some sense of autonomy and land ownership? And as you mentioned, like, that's actually kind of a mobile home park, but actually maybe has the mobile part of it attached.
Michael Lens 28:50
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Shane Phillips 28:52
So you note in the article that the estimates of unsheltered people and particularly those dwelling in a vehicle are probably undercounts. Because there's a very large discrepancy between the point in time homeless count, and then the demographic survey that is of a smaller sample of unhoused people, but that take place, I think, at the same time, for those who aren't familiar with them. Could you say a bit about the point in time homeless counts and the survey that accompanies it? How do they work? And what are some of the limitations with them that we should know about?
Madeline Brozen 29:25
So the point in time count is what is required by HUD, every continuum of care, or you can think about homeless service authority is required to do this every year. I encourage anyone in Los Angeles or via the opportunity or own community to actually participate in these point in time counts. Yes, because it just gives you a real sense of what this looks like and not from a way of kind of a windshield bias. Or when you kind of showed up to some commercial corridor or something that you see it you really kind of get a sense of the places that people are sleeping overnight. So the way that Los Angeles Point in Time Count is organized is that there are community organizations, and Lhasa separates the area into smaller communities. And then within each community, there's a census tract. And then you go out in groups on, I think there's maybe two or three nights throughout the city. And you either walk, I usually bike or drive all the streets in a census track. And in that process, you're giving a training on how to kind of identify someone that is homeless, and then you make a mark on whether you're seeing someone that's in like a tent, in a makeshift shelter, or just on the sidewalk, and then in a vehicle, and they give you a lot of clues on how you identify someone in a vehicle. So like, there's a lot of stuff in it, or there's like shielding on a lot of the windows, right? This is about people trying to hide in plain sight. I also think it's good to do it in your neighborhood. Because if you are like me, and you just end up on little walking routes a lot, you just start to notice you're like that car never moves, or they said the car door open during the day, you might just actually know those people. So that's the counts that are done. It's a really massive effort, and LA, just kind of given the size and scale of the region. And then separately, the surveys are done by Lhasa themselves. So they go out, I think actually before the counts. And they'd collect these surveys at a concentration of areas, you know, where they know, people are dwelling in any kind of way, shape or form at shelters at safe parking sites. And they collect these surveys. Like I said, there's about 2000 surveys that are collected, that is about 10% of the population. And it seems like a small number relative to the total number of people that are experiencing homelessness in LA. But in general, when you're doing a survey, you're just getting a sample of people, right. The main kind of issue and we're hoping to actually get some of the newer survey data is that actually the number of surveys that are collected, undercount are underrepresented people in cars. So like I said, that to 60% people living in cars, we don't have half of these surveys, we have more like I want to say about a quarter of them. So hopefully, over time, kind of as this work is being disseminated, and we're engaging with people in the city and county, that we're starting to actually get a higher number of those surveys from people living in cars.
Michael Lens 32:45
Yeah, and, you know, I gotta stress that this is heroic work, right? The challenges in documenting homelessness in County, the number of people who are experiencing homelessness at any one time, the demographic characteristics of those people, etc. Like, it's all very, very, very challenging. And so it's everybody who does this, and every dollar we spend on it is, to me, important and worthwhile, you know, of course, then the recovering statistics professor and me has to know, like, we always have to know that there are major limitations to these numbers, whether it's the total number of people that are experiencing homelessness at one time, or the demographic information, that to me, that's not because like our share of the people that we actually encounter, it might be low, but because there might be some selection bias, or what we might call sampling bias in the people that we are able to talk to that people that we're able to count. They're just in some ways different from the people that we don't find. And so, you know, I don't know if you want to comment on that in terms of how that impacts how you study this or how you interpret findings, but I think it's important to highlight that data on homelessness is just more flawed than song.
Madeline Brozen 34:07
Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing that we try to highlight in this work is that even at that 60%, which is shocking, we're still probably undercounting, right? Right? Because especially people in cars are doing the most they can to not be seen, right? And if you're not familiar, if it's the first time you're doing the count, if you're doing the count in a place you're not familiar with, you're probably less likely to pick stuff up. You know, or on the other hand, maybe there's people that think just messy cars are people living in them and there's just some neighborhoods that got a lot of messy cars in it right so it kind of flows both ways.
Shane Phillips 34:41
If someone looked at my car when I was about 16 They might have shocked me off on the on a on the homeless list
Michael Lens 34:49
is young Shane living in this
Shane Phillips 34:53
kind of broken window taped up and everything. I just to add to this point, though, I think, you know, another challenge in This is not unique to tracking vehicular homelessness, but just homelessness generally, is that there's kind of a deliberate effort in the homeless count to not be invasive to not kind of intrude on people's privacy. And so even if you're like, see a tent, like that's a pretty sure sign that there is an outhouse person there, but you're not going to like unzip it or call them out. In most cases, you're just going to kind of assume, there's probably one person in there, maybe it's like a really big one. Or maybe because of certain things, you know, multiple bikes outside or whatever, you might assume it's too, you just have to make a lot of guesses. And that's just kind of what you got to work with. I do want to step back. Just to clarify, though, the discrepancy between the homeless count and the demographic survey the percentages, you're saying, when people do the counts, something like 60% of unhoused, people are in some kind of vehicle. But when they do the demographic surveys, only about 20%, a quarter or so of the people who respond are living in vehicles.
Madeline Brozen 36:03
So it's kind of you think about the surveys really distinctly from the counts themselves, they're done at different times by different people. When you're out there doing the Point in Time Count, you are not to your point, you are not engaging with people whatsoever. So when losses out kind of doing what you'd kind of think is like the sampling framework, their sampling framework, traditionally, I think has been a little flawed, because they are not intentionally going to places where people living in cars are right. And so we don't actually use the survey to say what percentage of people are living in cars, we just use the survey responses to understand these different demographics got it. The other thing to note is like that survey is actually how the counts get extrapolated to our total number. So in those surveys, they ask how many people do you live with in this car in this tent. And so that's how we go from the numbers of just tents or vehicles, that people count during the point in time to our actual count of homelessness, is by processing those surveys to say, Okay, on average, a tent is 1.2 people and a car is 2.2 people. I made those numbers up, but that is the general idea. Got it? Oh, yeah, actually, to correct. Some I said earlier, you know, when we were looking at the numbers of surveys, for some reason, I eliminated half of them. So actually, there's about 4000 surveys, that Lhasa collected in the 2020 data, which is what we used.
Shane Phillips 37:36
Got it Yeah. And I've looked at those surveys, they are long too. So to do 4000 of this. It's just an incredible amount of work. Okay, so let's move on and talk about the ways that cities respond to vehicular homelessness through various restrictions. You categorized these restrictions as one of five types. And if a city had more than one kind of regulation on vehicle dwelling, you assign them the more restrictive category, there were 85 Total cities in this analysis, all the three cities in Los Angeles County, could you go through those five types of regulation and the number of cities that fell into each of these categories? Yeah,
Madeline Brozen 38:14
so one thing to just point out is that the Lhasa or kind of that continuum of care covers the vast majority of LA County, but a couple of cities in the county have their own continuum of care. So that's why we have 85 of 88 cities. So we and by we, I mean, my amazing graduate research assistant, Christian Marino went through every single of these 85 city's municipal code to figure out how they actually regulate. And we categorize those into these different types. So one way is they could have a city wide ban on sleeping in a vehicle. That was the second most common 22 cities had city wide bands. The next the actual most common one was they have an overnight parking ban. So you cannot park on the street in these cities whatsoever. 26 cities had those. The next most common are tied with another that I'll get to was permit parking. So you know, in order to actually park on the streets in a particular city, you need a permit to do so. That was 12 cities just to
Shane Phillips 39:23
stop you really quick. On the first two the the city wide bands and the overnight bands. What are we banning? exactly is it basically saying like, you're not allowed to sleep here, and then it's just kind of has to be enforced by figuring out who might be sleeping in their car, or is it specific kinds of vehicles included in this or is that a different kind of restriction?
Madeline Brozen 39:45
Yeah, so there are other types of restrictions like you could ban vehicles of certain sizes, like heights or length. Those types of restrictions are particularly targeting RVs we're not looking Add that necessarily I will get to that a little bit in the zone type of variance. But yeah, in city wide or overnight parking and overnight parking is you can't park on the street. Right, like, okay. And the other thing I'll note is that like, we can't say, you know, with that one, is that actually a response to people in cars? Or is that just how they're regulating their streets? Right? So there's a bit of an unknown of the origins of these types of regulations, and whether they're actually what they're trying to target. Right? Yeah,
Shane Phillips 40:29
it has that effect, regardless, but that may not actually be the intent.
Madeline Brozen 40:32
Exactly. So when we make these categories, we're looking at the outcome of the regulations, right? So just how does it actually affect someone's living in a car, it's also going to affect us where you can put your car in general, but that's kind of the majority of it 12 cities in their municipal code, just repeat state law, the 72 hour, you have to move a car. That one's a little weird, but it does seem almost kind of intentional, like we're really serious about this, that one, I actually,
Shane Phillips 41:02
I feel like they have this law in other states as well, I'm from Washington State, I feel like they have something like this up there. And I never thought of it as like an anti homeless, you know, anti vehicular dwelling policy. The main thing I think I've actually is like, the guy who has like eight cars, and just keeps them all on the on the street, and everyone hates them, because they takes up all the street parking. So like, at least creates a hassle or he has to keep moving things around and stuff. But you know, to your point, whether that's the intent or not, like it certainly has the effect of the very least making it inconvenient to sleep in your car, cuz you have to keep moving around.
Michael Lens 41:40
I think like, you know, anti vagrancy policy has a long history. And it's a big contract motivator. So yeah, yeah. I mean, nobody, nobody likes to junkyard out front. But I think on a wider scale, it's probably more anti homelessness, vagrancy, whatever that
Madeline Brozen 41:59
well. And going back to like, you know, when in this graduate student project, when we actually talked to people, you know, we would ask people, like, are you aware of different laws, right, and everyone knew the 72 hour law, like they knew that, and especially in Venice, which has kind of always been one of the concentrations, like there was parking enforcement, that would was called chalk a car, right? So like it would markets, and then notes, kind of at what clock face, the thing that you put air in to the tire is as evidence of whether this car moved or not. Right. Wow. So back to kind of these categories of regulations, we have the zone regulation, this is how the city of Los Angeles regulates this issue is that street by street, they say there's no vehicle dwelling on this street. And in LA, the city of LA, more and more, we're seeing that Council offices are bringing more streets that they want to restrict vehicle dwelling, they typically will make the case that this is like residential, or by a park or a school as a GIS person, I'm a little offended that you don't have to prove that in a map. But that's kind of the way or is it exactly right. If you're saying that we're going to ban this, and that's kind of been the big fight in LA, it's municipal code 8502, which says that vehicle dwelling can be banned in kind of certain places. And so we have a lot of streets, you know, overall, but not all streets. And then four cities actually had nothing on the books. So what we can say is that there's something in pretty much all of LA County that regulates this. I think the interesting thing is that even though there's regulations everywhere, people living in cars are everywhere. There's pretty much no census tracts in the county, excluding like mountains, or kind of large open spaces that don't have anyone in cars. Right. So this is kind of what motivates to be like, Well, what actually, what's the effects of these different regulations? You know, we do know that cars and vehicle dwelling is much more dispersed than tents. But even though we have regulations everywhere, it doesn't seem they seem to be working to varying degrees. And maybe we can get into that a little bit of like, just because you have a law on the books, how well is it being enforced?
Shane Phillips 44:18
Well, that's let us get into that. So you've got the point in time counts of where unhoused people are, and if they're living in a vehicle, and then you also have data on the kind of vehicle dwelling restrictions in these locations in the cities. So you can put those together and sort of see what the relationship is between them. We will get into what you found in a moment. But could you just tell us about some of the specific relationships you were looking for using this data and just data about kind of the neighborhood itself? So we
Madeline Brozen 44:50
try to pull together pretty much anything we could that we think can might have a relationship to where these cars are located, or using kind of our inference about this previous work that have been publish to say like, where are you might expect. So we looked at information about the city like the income, the population density, the relationship to the kind of tents and other homeless population to service providers, parks and open space to freeway space to save parking locations. And of course, these regulations. So that kind of idea was that, you know, how are these different factors affecting the number of people in vehicles?
Shane Phillips 45:30
And then what did you find there? Where did you tend to see particularly high or low rates of vehicular homelessness kind of disproportionately. And getting back to the results I mentioned in the intro, give us some more explanation on that positive association, overall positive association between just stricter regulations on vehicle dwelling, and actually higher rates of people sleeping in vehicles overall.
Madeline Brozen 45:56
So the big takeaway is the thing that matters most are the regulations, and that places with the strictest regulations, so that's a we categorized as the city wide or overnight bans, reduce the number in those places with those regulations the most. But I think as you alluded to, like, no one knows where a census tract begins or ends and or may or may not know where a city begins or ends. So that's why we thought it's really important to not look at just the census track itself. But what happens to its neighbor, you know, you can think about this a spillover effect or kind of the relationship between those two. So other things that matter just in those tracks beyond the regulations, I'm going to list them, but just want to note that the magnitude of the other effects is just so much lower than the regulations themselves. So larger tracks have slightly higher counts, the higher income areas have slightly lower, more industrial land is higher, and higher population density is lower, but the magnitude or the coefficient, there might as well be zero. So I don't even think it's kind of worth digging into too much. But back to the story about these regulations, this is all I just explained, are kind of the direct effects, stronger regulations, lower council people in cars, but the indirect effects, or what happens to the neighbors is the real important story here. When you have a city wide or an overnight ban, that indirect regulation, so what happens to your neighbor is going to mean that there's a higher number of cars in your neighbor. And even though you have a lower number kind of in the place where the regulation happened. So the kind of big point here is that a regulation reduces the amount in a track, but it increases the number nearby more than it decreases in your neighborhood. So I think it's a pretty classic tale of just moving the problem around. But I think it's, you know, useful to think about that. When you're setting a policy in a particular area. It's not just affecting you, but it's also affecting areas nearby.
Michael Lens 48:01
spillovers, should we
Shane Phillips 48:03
think about this as a causation story, you know, where imposing these stronger restrictions is actually leading to more vehicular homelessness overall, can can we say something like that? Or is it? Is it a more complex story than that, or just a less clear story than that?
Madeline Brozen 48:20
I think it's, I wouldn't make that connection. So there's kind of two ways to think about this. One is why does this happen? Right. And so we know that homelessness is a housing problem. People are living in their cars, because they don't have housing, the way that we are regulating this issue or addressing, it has nothing to do with housing, we're using the transportation system to move around a problem that we don't want to see. And so the kind of ideas like okay, rather than do you have people living in cars, your or even in tents, right? We even hear this anecdotally, when the counts happen, that people might be moved from one city border to another, right? Because they don't want the perception of a higher number, or they want the idea that they're doing something. So I think it's important to kind of not make this a story about causation. But just like to Mike's point that he made like this is a humanitarian problem, right? So you have these people that are living in a really crappy situation. They're probably living with their kids, they want some stability, right? Like they just want to be in a place, give the most stability and a really crappy situation. And when you enact a policy that just moves them around, you're not dealing with it, you're doing a really punitive approach. The other point to make here is that just because there's a regulation, we don't know how much it's enforced. We don't know how much there's awareness, right? You might know that you might have gotten a parking ticket because there's a no parking sign up the block and you didn't see where you parked. So there's a lot that we don't know about how these regulations work in practice. But I do think it's useful to disentangle the problem from the response. But
Michael Lens 50:06
think that's verbally said, it's very hard to link these things causally. But, you know, punitive measures against the symptoms don't reduce the underlying causes, right?
Shane Phillips 50:15
Yeah, it does seem at the very least we can say, these restrictions are not causing homelessness to go down. Exactly. And that should be our goal. So we've talked about what doesn't work. And I think there's a lot to consider in terms of short term and long term solutions to this problem. This paper, your second paper, is focused on at least one short term solution that has already been tried in LA County and elsewhere, and certainly could be scaled up and improved and connects to long term solutions. And that's safe parking programs. You've mentioned them a few times already here. Could you tell us a little bit about what those actually are, and what the track record is for safe parking programs, whether that's here in LA County, other parts of the state, or if there's, you know, any research beyond our borders as well, the idea of
Madeline Brozen 51:08
safe parking began in Santa Barbara, and really thinking about how do you use parking lots that are maybe unused a lot of the time, as a way to provide more of a safe haven for people. So I believe in Santa Barbara, it was really started through the church community. So using church parking lots or kind of portions of church parking lots, to make it a place where if you live in your car, you can be there overnight, you will have access to a bathroom, and a haven from any type of tickets or kind of financial concerns, right? They've been doing it in Santa Barbara, New Beginnings is the organization that has been running it for a long time. And they have a pretty impressive scale of efforts. Los Angeles has been doing it for a shorter period of time. So about 2016. And the problem that we have in LA is we just don't have enough of the safe parking lots. So there's maybe 500 spaces available. And going back to the scale of this there's a
Michael Lens 52:14
you are UCLA urban planning graduate saying that we don't have enough parking lots Maddy?
Madeline Brozen 52:20
No, I'm the I'm the opposite. I am saying that there's so much parking in Los Angeles. But yet, the amount of assets we're using to help people living this way, is not matching the scale of the problem. You know, how much parking do we have in LA lots way too much. So
Shane Phillips 52:40
18 point 6 million spaces at last count
Madeline Brozen 52:43
exactly. The shout out to other UCLA transportation colleagues who have done that work to actually tell us how much of this asset that we have. And help us to see that, you know, if we get more creative about the ways in which we're doing this, or we actually have a sense of urgency about addressing the short term needs, right. So safe parking, we think about was called kind of a harm reduction framework. It's really kind of useful in this way. So the harms to people that are living in their cars, we've already talked about it doesn't work well for living in, you know, you can get tickets, that type of thing. So we want to reduce the short term harm to those people by giving them same a safe space. And also, you know, we think about there may be harms to the environment to kind of housed people, not just the harm or psychological thoughts of you have to see someone that's unhoused. But you might be concerned about trash, because you know, there's may or may not actually be trash receptacles if it's an RV about illegal dumping, right, so we can think about safe parking as a way to both address the short term harms to people living in vehicles, and to some of the concerns that people have in these neighborhoods themselves. So
Shane Phillips 53:57
connecting this to long term solutions. What role does safe parking play there? I guess, you know, one thing I just want to say is, even if we can't connect these vehicle restrictions to more vehicular homelessness, it seems at least very plausible that when people are harmed in some way or even just having to move around and waste gas and but then get tickets and all these different things like that is a impediment to getting back on their feet in one way or another. And so I think just by itself, like removing some of those impediments via a safe parking program is probably a big help to say nothing of just like making someone's life better in a difficult situation. But how then do we kind of build on that are what what is the sort of promise of safe parking programs to not just remove those impediments, but actually help people along into a more stable and actual housing situation?
Madeline Brozen 54:59
So Safe parking also provides a way for service providers to actually connect with people, right? Like I said, this problem is everywhere in LA County. So trying to kind of connect social workers to people is a really difficult challenge. And so getting people into safe parking, you can help them get their registration up to date, get a up to date, driver's license, and get them into the queue of trying to actually get them into permanent housing. So not only can the safe parking be a short term solution, the best ideal is getting them on a path to permanent housing. The question we have always is like, is that going to work that kind of relates to just the bigger mismatch between having affordable housing for people who are experiencing homelessness to be placed, right. But if we go back to who lives in cars, in theory, these are easier people to house, right? Like they've been homeless for shorter periods of time. So they probably have less of a gap in their housing history, they have some incomes. And you would think that they may have a driver's license because they're trying to probably protect things for like, you don't want to get stopped for driving without a license. Right. So like, they're kind of better set up to figure out how to just get back in. And they probably just need some type of short term financial support, right? We actually cited best shins work that I heard about on this podcast. So thank you all for talking with her, you know about can we kind of connect people to vouchers, or can we just do some short term housing assistance, because, you know, if we think about people who kind of have a lower barrier back to housing, they probably just need less support. So safe parking really kind of provides a way to connect with people, and to hopefully get them on the path to getting back into permanent housing.
Shane Phillips 56:54
So as you said, we only have like 500 spaces out of the 19 million parking spaces in this county that are devoted to safe parking programs. At this time, the program in the city of LA has been around for six, seven years. So it's had a lot of time to grow, and it just hasn't, what is holding us back? Or what do you think we need to see for this to grow into a more impactful program that is actually, you know, meeting the scale of the problem. And for other folks in other parts of the country or the world even? How can they get something like this going where they live to.
Madeline Brozen 57:27
So the safe parking really has to be a partnership model. I've talked with some of the service providers that are actually doing this. And their real focus is kind of on the operational parts of this, you know, having it going day to day trying to connect service providers, if they need to actually both find sites for setting this program up and doing their work, it just makes their work much harder. So we need partnerships between the cities and unincorporated areas, to these providers to really identify these sites, and then figuring out whatever the land leases are kind of how that is set up. Because that is really, if you talk to the safe parking providers, that's the hardest challenge for them. And that's something that they're really best set up to do. And so it's you know, taking advantage of city lots, I think is part of it. I think that the other way to think about getting started is like maybe there can be smaller scale, like do we actually need an entire lot? Can we take just a portion of a lot to actually kind of just start getting more spaces, right? Because if everything is you need an entire lot to do, it may be more difficult to do that. Cities also need to think about not just their own assets, but like are their private assets, you know, there's a lot of spaces, you can just walk around that are empty parking lots, right. But thinking about other partnerships, like we see in Santa Barbara, with churches, that's a really good one. But part of this kind of goes to what's the highest and best use of land, right. And so if we think about parking lots are underused spaces, really as an opportunity to stabilize and address this through a humanitarian lens versus like inconvenience people that might not be able to park in that lot on a Tuesday when they need to go somewhere, you know, I think that you can start to think about it differently. The last thing I'll mention is that safe parking in the city of LA predominantly is not a 24 hour model. So I think not only in expanding the partnerships, we need to start thinking about how the program can work better for people. So San Diego actually recently just passed a motion where they're going to try to use their lats for 24 hours, because right now it's a parking lot. So you kind of have to come in within a certain time period and leave within a certain time period, sort of like the shelter model, very much so and so we just need to make it as easy as possible to get these slots up and running and to have them work for people. And so we just think just need to expand our realm of thinking of how we're going to approach this response. Yeah,
Michael Lens 59:58
I totally forgot about This until you started talking about how to better utilize parking lots. Katie Yaroslavsky, who is now my council person on the west side, has recently announced her plan to build some kind of modular structures on a very underutilized parking lot on Pico Boulevard Midvale and Pico. And, you know, predictably, if you walk or drive through our neighborhood now you see these signs that are, you know, Katie's very bad idea, you know, no homeless, this now that his team no slack and my neighborhood, you know, and I think we can debate temporary shelters versus, you know, other interventions ad nauseam. But that's, I think, a idea that could certainly better utilize and, as you say, make a higher and best use of such parking lots. And, you know, let's not have the NIMBY discussion, but we know it's there.
Madeline Brozen 1:01:07
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, the opposition to safe parking is very similar to the opposition to other homeless shelters. So, you know, there's a political challenge. But I'd like to think about kind of the opportunity window that exists right now in the city of LA, as our mayor is really intensely focused on this, I would love to see her put a lot of attention on trying to help people, you know, partnering with LAUSD, they know that these are their students don't they want to figure out how to kind of stabilize their lives a little bit? Right. So there's really a lot of important responses that could be done. And it'd be great to see more political will to actually make it happen.
Shane Phillips 1:01:47
All right, Maddie Brozen, thank you for joining us on the Housing Voice Podcast.
Madeline Brozen 1:01:51
Thank you for having me, be a housing interloper today.
Shane Phillips 1:01:58
You can read more about Maddie's work on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. Show notes and a transcript of the interview are there too. The Lewis Center is on various social media, and Mike and I are on Twitter in particular. Thanks for listening, we'll see you in a few weeks with the next installment of Pathways Home.