Im not sure it's comparable. I thought the backstory for living in an airport is something along the lines of the story of the movie:

"The film is about an Eastern European man who is stuck in New York's John F. Kennedy Airport terminal when he is denied entry to the United States and at the same time is unable to return to his native country because of a military coup."[0]

If you were able to come and go, you would just technically be homeless with the unknown benefit to stay in airport for 20 years.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminal

I detect that your question probes the subtle difference how one can be implicitly defining the semantics of "living" and "in" when posing the question, influencing the expected answer.