Car campers in beach parking lots
bakersfield.com
bakersfield.com
I can't argue with the logic. It means $24,000 a year to apply toward student loans or what have you isn't a bad deal. And he will eventually pay off the motorhome giving him some security there.
Sadly, most people won't talk about their situation (I tried by walking down a road and knocking on doors) I was hoping to get a sense of how many people were living in motorhomes because they wanted to (like the guy I talked to) and how many were there because they felt they had no choice. I don't have any good ideas on how to get that information.
I did enough research to know that building a small lifestyle business out of offering black/grey water pumping and garbage collection services for the folks who were doing this by choice was probably viable. You would need a couple of custom trucks[1] that were capable of being mobile RV dumping stations and a business with sewer rights to dump (the City of Sunnyvale will license a business to have an RV dumping station on site, so starting there would work.) I think it would be a "pump and dump" scheme that would be both good for the neighborhood and probably make enough money to employ a few folks.
[1] To be full service you'd probably want a fresh water tank, a propane tank, and a sewage collection tank. Then you could dump the grey/black tanks, refill fresh water and refill propane. Personally I think it makes way more sense than these companies that were sending trucks out to refill your gas tank.
We give cars free places to sleep while people are homeless.
Parking is only "free" if you share it. Perma-parking a motorhome or "building a studio on it" is not that.
This is basically the equivalent of saying, "People give pets free food and shelter while letting the homeless starve, what's wrong with our society"
Sure sounds deep and meaningful, but really it isn't
If you reclaim a parking space for another use (such as building accommodation for families or an animal shelter), you're not depriving the car of anything, it's an expensive, large piece of metal and is not sentient.
Next, you'll say that you're depriving car owners from the practicality of parking their vehicles anywhere they like. I'm perfectly fine with depriving car owners from this convenience to allow a human being to have a roof over their head. (speaking from direct experience as I've just minutes ago had to park my car 1km away from home because the city is currently building housing and has restricted parking space nearby)
Then, some might argue that one should be ashamed of helping animals while humans are suffering. That's the exact same train of thought with «we can't allow more migrants in, we have to take care of our "own" homeless people».
This is a false dichotomy. Western societies inequalities are growing larger and larger. Me trying to do my part is insignificant. Me donating to human or animal causes is a small dent into the mountains of inequalities we live on top of. Us collectively, we do make a difference, by donating, voting and generally keeping our eyes open about the world we live in...
Finally, an entirely anecdotal pov: I've witnessed several times extremely poor people going out of their ways to show solidarity to animals or humans. I've also witnessed an awful lot of extremely wealthy individuals complaining about the poor inconveniencing them by just being there, whose wealth was a direct consequences of their ancestors exploiting whose very same poor people.
I feel this is only really relevant to high-density cities that are being underdeveloped because of local regulations and NIMBY. Most of America has plenty of space when it comes down to it.
And aren't the parking lots this article is talking about basically public access parking for beaches? Do ya'll really think it's reasonable to say we need to remove public beach parking because it could be better used for condos? Because that's dumb, and that quote I responded to was said as if parking is a violation of human rights because it takes away room for shelter.
There are probably places where that would be dumb and others where the community as a whole would benefit from increased housing availability?
Most of America has plenty of space but why would anyone agree to live in bumfuck nowhere? How could they make a living out of nowhere (remote jobs are, in the grand scheme of things, a drop in the bucket)? Why should they forego access to health services, community & the fabric of society? Some human beings enjoying being solitary but we all crave to various degrees of social interaction.
To answer your comment in a too simplistic way: if parking does take room away from shelter, yes, absolutely, that's very bad urban planning & if done on purpose is a "violation" of the rights of those who needed that shelter. Except that life & urban planning aren't always that cut and dry and we need parking space, shops, warehouses, factories, housing & animal shelters and a myriad other things, as well as stop urban sprawling as much as possible.
[0]there might be a cultural/language bias generated by me having english as a 2nd language
It's a pretty easy decision for me whether to support a pet charity (including the wildly inefficient service of personally rescuing a dog or cat) or a humanitarian charity. It's different if you have pets for your own enjoyment.
I really would like straightforward answers. I'm surprised there isn't more things like this: https://causeprioritization.org/Cause_prioritization It gets very complicated and turns into three dimensional chess. Well I guess I answered my own question of why it's a small niche.
This has influenced my thinking a lot: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/purchase-f...
As a consequentialist I'm a bit noncommital. I would hate to spend 40 hours in a month helping an acquaintance to find a job when I could spend that same 40 hours saving a life by making more money and using it to buy mosquito nets for Against Malaria.
Misery and poverty in the midst of plenty is symptom of a serious problem, it's signal we should be thinking about the situation. The non-insightful part is that this, by itself, doesn't point the way out of the problem.
apple and oranges. The permit to built the studio makes that building legit, kinda forever. A motor home, they can chase out with a new law, or just by enforcing existing laws.
I have an inquiry out to a developer on the cost of building a 'multi-story' RV park. Not trying to recreate the "stacks" here (if you're a Ready Player One fan), but wondering if you could increase the available parking spots while not consuming additional acreage. It has to be a better use than 'public storage' buildings.
Most california cities are under extreme pressure to increase housing supply, an RV lot isn't going to house as many people as a condo/apartment building. (I honestly don't even know if an RV park counts towards overall housing supply)
Though the stacks idea is interesting ;-)
There's a few buildings going up in the Oakland Temescal by Rad Urban which are modular its been cool seeing units with kitchens etc already installed getting stacked up into a larger complex.
Sunnyvale, as a city, has preserved its mobile home parks in an effort to keep housing more affordable.
In the past year, the last two I know of (Blue Bonnet and the one on ECR near Poplar) shut down, with everybody ejected. Several of the mobile homes at the latter were outright abandoned, since there was no place to move to.
I'm talking about east-bay area that still has space. Not sunnyvale.
- Just checked out the ready player one images - holy mother of guacamole.
Ok, and the idea isn't even original, see this: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/mobile-home-skyscrape...
The only reason I can imagine a multi-storey RV park making sense would be to take advantage of some weird zoning quirk or something. But that's a lot of money to throw at what's effectively a legal vulnerability that will probably quickly be fixed.
From a cash flow perspective I started with parking garages as a business model. The typical 'monthly parking' type garage is a concrete and steel affair with sprinklers and elevators as its biggest operational expense, a bit more if you add an on-site office for an attendant to capture additional revenue from special events.
All the space that requires maintenance in an apartment building that is 'non-apartment' doesn't exist in an RV park. You don't repaint or re-carpet, you don't send HVAC dollars on cooling or heating, Etc.
My assumption (and I'm open minded about missing things) are that using the ratio of comparing of a traditional RV park to a one story apartment complex is a valid way to estimate expenses and cash flow. Then to extrapolate by adding additional layers to the RV park. There are also different tax treatments but I suspect that if the difference there appears to exploitable that it will be quickly changed.
The biggest complaint about RV parks are that they are RV parks and they are an "eyesore". By enclosing the park you can improve the optics, and by increasing the density you grow the ROI relative to an apartment by the cost ratio. But is it a $5M project, a $10M project, or a $25M project that I don't know yet. And while a casual polling of city folks about which would they prefer, RV's parked on the street or parked in an externally attractive structure set aside for them, polls favorably, it isn't clear that is enough to get final approval.
Then have underground hyperloop tunnels to connect the RV parks, so that you can go to sleep in your home and move it from city to city, and pop up above ground to enjoy local tourism.
Roughly, you’re not going to get over 60psf with vehicle traffic or storage.
People jammed together can be 200psf, as can library stacks, and indoor pools are potentially even worse.
* And perhaps additional levels of parking for tenants.
Even in situation of hardship, “I would have bought my house next to a trailer park if I wanted that — but I didn’t," becomes the ultimate reaction [1].
[1] Chico Resist FEMA Trailers: https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/fires/article22...
Give it time, without controls it will become ludicrously unaffordable sooner rather than later.
Any support the company gave is in the long past now.
But there are so few good places in the valley that they may have had to disallow it in order to not become an RV lot.
you win.
When I was visiting, the people there are so nice. It’s a community in which people help each other, not like the upper class neighborhoods of my youth. In a span of one day, I got some weed, some beer, and an popsicle.
A far cry from many upper class neighborhoods in which no one is willing to talk to each other.
Modern technology allows permanent structures to be much more space-efficient for housing by building many stories high. However, the use of such technology is often banned and structures are limited to one or two stories. Also, even for one-story structures, rules often require eg. 6000 sqft of land to be used for a 1500 sqft house. These rules all result in significant surplus land wealth being required (or expensively rented) for people to obtain permanent housing.
Is it any wonder that, faced with these constraints, people are choosing to live in one-story homes on free land? Government policy is practically begging for it.
Struggling to see how a car space that can be taken with no charge results in more customers either, surely it increases the amount of time used by individual cars instead and reduces potential customers.
Very few retail stores charge by the hour. Getting people in and out as quickly as possible is the ideal.
It is demonstrably harmful to the enviroment, physical and mind health and the society in general.
I'm all for this:
I'm having trouble understanding how single-family housing is less harmful to the environment, relying on this statement and my back-of-the-envelope calculations alone. Likewise, what are the effects on physical and mental well-being for people who have to live in the street, because affordable housing is "banned", and they can't afford a suburban house?
This can be supplemented to benefit the poor sooner by eg. requiring a subset of units in high-end developments to be subsidized for people with lower incomes.
I lived most of it in the high-rises, and not slums at all. "Respectable neighbourhoods".
I'm not talking about slums.
I pity the people who choose to live in those anthills.
I hate people who advocate to force other people to live in those.
I'm talking about overcrowding. Not enough private space, not enough public space, not enough transport. And it's a death trap if something goes just slightly wrong with the infrastructure. Have you witnessed shit fountains out of you r toilet? I did. Have you seen what a gas explosion does to those? A section or three just collapses, top to bottom, and everyone there is dead. What if water mains gets cut off because the electricity cut off and so there are no lifts? What if it's 15F outsite and the heaters die?
This is no way to live.
Listen, I'm not going to disrespect you for growing up in the projects or whatever. Those things are usually out of our control. But you got to let other people live the way they want to live, man.
> The couple isn’t completely reconciled, but they came together to provide a roof — one that’s not welded to a chassis — over their children’s heads.
> “We’re working things out,” said Cheatham, 37. “The most important thing is to have a stable place for our kids.”
It's amazing to me to see / hear of parents, who even after disagreeing badly enough to divorce, are able to come together to care for their children. It's hard for me to even fathom how much work and humility that would take. That they were willing to talk to each other at all is, in its own right, remarkable.
I have been fortunate enough to have always lived in a secure home, and I've never needed to sleep in a car out of necessity- the only times I've gone camping are as a Boy Scout (okay, Scouts BSA member), when a warm shower was only a day or two away. As for the policies: Cars are, besides being a little awkward to sleep in, a lot more secure than a tent is (and more fireproof, to boot). With the understanding that all it takes is one mistake for a poor family to become an even poorer, homeless family, I feel like a lot of these "parking overnight, or being homeless = vagrance = illegal = fines" laws can be a little out of touch- they're generally written by college-educated politicians, many of whom have never had to do anything of the like, and who don't understand that a $50 fine when you can't even pay rent is really bad.
Why does it seem to be that we, at least in America, punish the poor for being poor, instead of, or even at the same time that we try to help them up?
I think that's the natural consequence of having spent years pushing the idea that being poor is a personal choice or a lack of character. Once you make the connection that it's directly linked to a lack of character, you can be punitive instead of providing a safety net, and punitive is much cheaper for those of us with high moral character.
I didn't understand this assertion. Could you expand on it a bit?
I read "high moral character" as sarcastic equivalence to "not poor". I presume that it is very common for people who have never been poor, or even at risk for being poor, to attribute their good fortunes to an imagined causal factor within their own sense of identity, rather than being entirely due to random chance. They reason that they are rich because they are good, and then, though back-formation, also reason that poor people are, if not entirely bad, then at least less good.
Thus, "people of low moral character" becomes a euphemism for poor people. It is shot through with fallacies of reasoning and circular argument, but based on the statistics, many rich people didn't get rich by being smart, either.
To someone with this type of worldview, poor people deserve to be punished. And since it's less effort than helping them to be less poor anyway, everybody wins. Nobody who deserves wealth has to become less rich in order for other people who don't deserve anything to be less poor.
I can't say for certain whether or not this is a real thing, but the hypothesis does fit a lot of observations.
To expand in what was said, when meritocracy teaches you that hard work will always bring success (ignoring luck), then the opposite must be true: if you're poor, it must be because you're lazy.
And rich trustfund kids/lucky startup bros need to believe they have moral character instead of just rich parents/luck, so they think they're righteous people when in reality maybe they're dicks.
Your statement both inaccurate and insulting.
It's one of those sad states of affairs where the data doesn't at all back up the prevailing notion.
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housi...
You could just say "authorities punish the poor for being poor while pretending to help them up". We have reached the point where courts demands that when police move homeless people on that these police offer them a place in shelters. So, you wind-up with a situation where phantom shelter-beds are created. The (mostly) fiction of attempting to help people has to be maintained while the primary intention to remove them as annoyance, knowing they'll reappear elsewhere.
And yeah, allow tiny house camps on private land and you'll reduce the incredible pressure towards higher rents (or build public high rises like the old days or whatever). But then a whole lot of land value is threatened and so the concerned, naive homeowner becomes the threatened homeowner.
It wasn't without its precarity. Sometimes I'd get woken up by sheriffs at 2AM, have mechanical issues, and generally struggled to conform and relate to friends and coworkers. Also, sleeping in SF was terrible. Buses waking you up at 2am, and after meeting others living living in their vans on Division due to hardship, I couldn't help but feel guilty and privileged in my solar paneled, cassette toiled equipped, expedition vehicle. People would joke that I was gentrifying the streets.
Eventually I sold it and moved on. Worthwhile experience though.
I think regulation to provide a path to legality for people to van dwell should happen but it should also take into account the needs of the communities and home-dwellers in an area. I never parked overnight in residential areas -- it seems to me a strange van parked overnight in a neighborhood could easily impact somebody who lived nearby, especially if they saw someone climbing in or out. Making someone nervous when they go for a walk in their own neighborhood is more than high enough cost to be worth avoiding.
The reality though is that there is a _lot_ of space in a most American cities that _nobody uses at night_ -- and its often not far from desirable places to be. Opening up small pockets of space sufficiently close to desirable locations for legal and safe use by van dwellers, in conjunction with other regulatory approaches (special vehicle registration, possibly even innovation via things like ODBC-gps appliances to allow local municipalities to collect van-dwelling taxes) could really curtail the negative effects residents experience while also enabling people the freedom to pursue the lifestyles they are already pursuing ...
Its possible to do all of (1) limit impact of van dwellers on communities (2) make van dwelling safer and more convenient (3) keep costs of van-dwelling lower than traditional housing and viable for people on a range of incomes
https://web.archive.org/web/20190322180054/https://www.baker...
1) They are targetting EU users and serving to EU users and thus the block is pointless
2) They aren't targetting EU users and thus the block is pointlessIn that situation, there are two cautious ways to proceed.
One approach is to assume that you might be targeting EU users and so comply with GDPR. Even if you aren't doing anything with data that would make compliance hard, this is somewhat annoying because GDPR requires that you have a representative in the Union as a point of contact for users and regulators.
The other approach is to make a good faith effort to block EU users.
If you have little or no income directly or indirectly from EU users, the second approach has a lot to recommend it, especially until there is a good body of regulatory rulings on what GDPR actually means.
I live in Portland, a city that used to known for being a clean city. In the last 8 years we have had a large increase of car live-in residents and homeless population. I would not call Portland a clean city anymore. In-fact it's far from it. Homeless make up about 3% of the population, but according to a recent article they make up half of the arrests. Personally I've had car camping people outside of my house and we've been afraid of retaliation for call them in and try not to make contact.
I understand that these people have nowhere to go, but cities should create a homeless car shelter of sorts or some other solution other than just hoping for the best of people living on the edge.
2011 article on how clean Portland is(was) - http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/308068
RV issue in Portland -https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-neighbors-fe... Homeless issue -https://katu.com/news/local/neighbors-say-theyre-getting-now... Half of the Police arrests are Homeless - https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2018/07/portland_mayor_t...
The rise of this lifestyle is a direct result of rising inequality in our society. Yeah, that mother of 2 living in a vehicle probably has way bigger problems than paying for disposal service. But people utilizing services they can't pay for is what concerns you, not the fact that so many people are in such dire financial straits that living in a car makes economic sense.
The rise of this lifestyle is a direct result of people feeling entitled. Take the musician in the article ("Lily"). She's trying to make a career in indie rock, playing local gigs. That can't be your full-time job unless you are exceptionally talented, to a degree where others value your creation/contributions enough to pay you a lot for it. This takes more than just musical talent - it requires experience, marketing, networking, business, and other skills. And it is of course, a highly-competitive line of work - after all, who wouldn't want their work to also be their passion.
Lily lived in Nashville before, which is a lot more affordable than California cities like San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. San Diego is a full 55% pricier than Nashville (https://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-...). So in effect, Lily made a conscious choice to move to a pricier area without having a plan for how to live there. A responsible way of making that move would be to work for a few years in Nashville, build up savings, identify jobs in your destination that pay enough, and then make the move.
What gives Lily the right to expect she'd be accommodated in whatever city she moves to? If her work is not producing enough earning to pay for housing locally, it is because her work is not valued by society to a great enough extent to live in a very desirable (and thus expensive) area. I don't think the local community is obligated to provide lower-cost housing (either through subsidy or greater supply) to enable her choices, which squarely fall under the realm of "personal responsibility".
As with the lessons learned from public housing projects in big cities, it is better to spread the poverty out more thinly across a larger area of the city than to concentrate it all in one place. A homeless car shelter would be a disaster of epic proportions. Double the number of reserved parking spaces, spread more uniformly throughout the city, would still be burdensome, but far less so.
One Randy Griswold in Clark's driveway is more tolerable than row after row of them, for as far as the eye can see.
I'm very respectful of others. I never park overnight in front of a house and don't like parking in one street spot for more than 12h. I often pick up trash in the area I park.
For those who complain about us, keep in mind there is a minority of assholes in every population. Don't judge everyone by the assholes.
Feel free to ask me anything.
I've slept in my car numerous times along the PCH in the past, and in SoCal it's particularly irritating how much CHP harrasses folks just trying to get some shut-eye on a road trip.
I've had CHP wake me at 3AM then force me to drive half asleep down a winding cliff-top road I had pulled over specifically to avoid driving sleepily down.
But I fully expect there to be new laws introduced to prevent these streets from becoming trailer parks. The judge already criticized the vagueness, they'll just get more specific targeting persistent occupancies.
The concern for sanitation is very legitimate. Especially for folks in cars and vans, there's no holding tank infrastructure in these vehicles. A person spending a day somewhere in a car with no public restrooms nearby is either urinating in a bottle or on the ground. And if in a bottle, the bottle is very likely getting emptied on the ground nearby.
Even people in RVs and campers have fairly limited holding capacity. It doesn't take much laziness to exhaust the capacity and regress into the same pattern of a car/van-dweller. Not to mention those systems are failure-prone and often neglected because who wants to do maintenance on a sewage system?
While working on my software, I make money as a field engineer. I drive to my next client and just park nearby overnight. To the rest of the world, my minivan looks like any other parked vehicle. It's not an RV, so it's completely invisible. There are no signs I am there after I convert the interior into sleep mode. Since I have no commute, I don't waste fuel or time in rush hour traffic.
You would never know I do this unless I told you. :)
I met many others like me, usually by fixing their car.
Eat? Wherever. I have plenty of money.
The big thing I found interesting was the lawsuit angle that it discrimination for disabled homeless, that living in a tent is legal, but living in an RV is illegal. RV's and Tents are spreading all around major cities, its getting quite bad up here in Seattle, tourists are mentioning it all the time, its visibile from the highways.
I'm as intrigued as the next outdoors-loving fellow, but is it actually "super popular"? Do that many people, proportionately, take up van life? I suspect in the big picture it's still extremely niche, especially if you drill down to just people who are voluntary van dwellers.
I read Nomadland by Jessica Bruder earlier this year. A significant number of baby-boomers have taken to the road, often because of a lack of retirement funds.
Having gotten a travel trailer 18 mos ago and travelled a bit in CAlifornia, it's amazing what you see when your eyes are tuned to it a bit.
In Seattle, we see the effects of similar permissive laws all around us. Property crime has gone up significantly alongside our recent lax enforcement of littering laws and due to the allowance of "urban camping". We have induced a large homeless population from elsewhere due to our permissiveness - even from cities immediately next door (https://q13fox.com/2019/02/26/did-federal-way-bus-its-homele...). The rise of RVs taking up parking spaces is another problem - it is essentially freeloading off of spaces meant for use by residents of that neighborhood and for temporary day-use. And of course, these RVs are a blight - they are often in shoddy condition, they make the neighborhood look less safe, and they leave trash all around them (or worse, sewage runoff). Many have needles around them and are clearly used to deal drugs. With burglaries happening often, I can't tell you how anxiety-inducing it can be to have someone pitch a tent on the sidewalk in front of your home, camping there all day everyday, watching all residents' movements, etc. This city used to be beautiful and it is trended towards a trashy Mad Max like situation.
I don't agree with arguments that this is due to cost of housing or supply issues. This is due to people feeling entitled. If one can't afford to live in some area, then they should consider finding a different area to live in, or a different line of work that enables them to live in that area. No one is entitled to live wherever they want, doing whatever job they want (e.g. the musician quoted in the article), at whatever wages they are able to earn in that job. That's simply not tenable. There are plenty of affordable places in America where people can make a living and thrive. And yes, it may require that you look outside of the most-desirable locations, or that you do work that isn't your "passion", but that type of compromise is simply a part of life.
That said, I think you under-estimate how hard it is for someone to move once they are experiencing homelessness. I doubt the majority of people in this situation are doing to to pursue a music career...
This isn't about entitlement.
If your only option is to live in a van, your day to day existence is going to be very stress-full trying to scratch out enough income for your basic needs, and parking tickets, impound, etc could put you into an even worse spot that you can't recover from.
The idea that you should just up and move to a cheaper place to live sounds reasonable on the surface. But imagine all you have is that Van, you don't have enough money for any major repairs, let alone hundreds of dollars in gas to get to some cheaper place. You don't have a network there, and you don't know your way around, so what are your job prospects?
The reality is that when you're living this close to the edge, you're only thinking day to day, because you're always one problem away from ending up in an even worse situation. Packing up and going some place cheaper is far from a viable option.
Finally, most people who are now homeless in an area were previously housed in that area, so they probably know people there. They may also have some kind of public benefit, and have some clue about how to navigate that system. Packing up and leaving, especially to another state, starts them back at zero.
Not to mention the mother was going to college for acting while her 3 kids were living in a cockroach and bugbed infested car. Talk about priorities, there are plenty of majors people can take that actually have the prospect of a positive income.
My van was nicer than may of the places one could rent around the bay area. Oak floors, oak countertops, modern high end sink and faucet, designer light switches, high gloss push open cabinets (with electromagnetic locks when in motion).
I did it because I wanted to build something and I had the time to do it nights and weekends while working. There's nothing like learning multiple disciplines from woodworking to electrical, from insulation to plumbing, and applying it all to create something physical and comprehensive.
I parked mostly in my company parking lot during the weekdays. On the weekends, I parked in the Mission, where many others in vans did as well. In SF, it was clear that I was abusing a public good, but couldn't easily find a way around it. I would have happily paid for a monthly parking spot if there was one around the area, but there was no monthly surface parking available in the area.
I don't think van life is an answer to the untenable housing situation in california. It's a niche lifestyle, unsuitable and undesirable for most. However, I do think we need to get over this obsession with space. Space efficiency is something so entirely foreign to most Americans. Having excess space is culturally desired and fetishized. This is a cultural phenomenon, not necessarily good or bad. In a less densely populated region, having extra space is not a luxury. However, when space is so sparse, I do think we could, as a culture, benefit from a shift towards loving space efficiency more.
It's rather interesting. I had considered this lifestyle too. Freedom to roam. Digital nomad.
Looks like someone forgot to proofread.
I guess that's the risk of just mindlessly hooking up your CMS to someone else's feed.
(Yup, there are lots of other hits for this exact story published elsewhere; other publications seem to have done a better job filtering out these notes to the editor: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22to+leave+its+usual+spot+i...)
Here's the wayback link for us poor Europeans:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190322191045/https://www.sandi...
I'd probably keep some cameras hooked up so I could drop in and see what's going on around the van remotely, and maybe a server I could ssh into and run some commands for the vehicle.
Only question is finding suitable places to park it that don't require a long commitment.
It's a far better investment IMHO, and as the years go by you may find yourself slowly adding infrastructure and before you know it you have multiple small off-grid homes.
Also keep in mind a small shed requires a lot less maintenance than an automobile to serve its purpose. Leaving automobiles unused for months or years tends to break them. A shed needs a coat of paint or shingles replaced occasionally (corrugated metal roofs last > 50 years).
I supposed I could have floated out in the Bay every night, but I suspect that would have made my costs go up significantly from the extra maintenance and fuel.
But the point is, California seems to be very against alternate forms of housing, and this isn't a new thing.
Of course, you could also allow camps on private property with provisions to meet basic health and conditions.
Both these measures would undermine the scarcity of housing itself, which goes against the interests of both landlords and homeowners. So I doubt either will happen soon.
I had imagined at one point having parking garages constructed for this very purpose to be used as homeless shelters.
There would be quite a few considerations. I would pretty say that these hypothetically could be worked but in reality those who just didn't want this at all would object and the situation could never happen in modern reality.
This is largely a self inflicted problem that California has caused for itself.
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Another reason to support article 11, 13 or 17.
[Edit: sorry, I didn't get the sarcasm :) ]
One big problem with tech regulation right now, particular that which involves the internet, is that the old farts making the rules are barely skilled enough to send emails. Not only do they have no concept of how they're ruining things, but they don't have to suffer the consequences.
Imagine if every time they changed the channel on their TV, they had to stop and drive a cursor to _somewhere_ on the screen to find the correct button to press to get past the popup and watch the channel they were hoping to watch.
In summary, economics is hard. But making something (internet/web) increasingly unusable is just pure ignorance.
Oh, definitely! Those in power don't understand that much of economics, and those voting don't really understand that much of technology.
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GDOR is the mitigating effor after years of abusing Safe Harbor both by state agents as well as from private companies. Instead of fixing their deal, they prefer to black list EU? Seriously?
Go .... yourself, and I am returning the favor of black listing you 'dear' bakersfield.com. I know that this is not the first site to do this, but to give us this really shitty behaviour is just plain rude and arrogant.
I'm sure this is hugely annoying and unexpected for EU visitors, but you gotta understand that you are not obligated to use their website, and the website is not obligated to serve its content to you.
It's a shame they're losing traffic because they chose to believe people spreading lies and misinformation.
451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging
to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be
granted at this time. For any issues, contact webmaster@bakersfield.com
or call (661) 395-7500.
Reminds me of the whole Vinod Khosla drama up in NorCal [1]. Seems like muscling in on access to a beautiful view / beach and trying to gatekeep it is a common pastime for more than one wealthy Californian.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/technology/california-bea...