Name: RV Homelessness Is On The Rise In California, And 'Vanlords' Are Cashing In
Uploaded: 2026-03-02T22:06:30.000Z
Duration: 7 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It's a shared space at the back of the RV park where she lives with her boyfriend.

They used to park their RV on the street until they moved here.

I need you to put more spaces at your RV park.

Victoria Garibaldi runs the show here at the Berryessa Safe Parking site in San Jose.

I do this because I myself was homeless as well.

So I know what it's like to not have a shower, to not have food.

In Santa Clara county, home to Apple, Google, and

eight of America's 50 most expensive zip codes, the number of people living in RVs full time in the region has surged.

County data shows the portion of homeless individuals sleeping in vehicles have more than doubled since the pandemic, from 18% in 2019 to 37% in 2025.

These aren't inventor seeking van lifers who opt to live in vans for freedom.

It's a way to find shelter in a state that's short up to three and a half million housing units.

When you stand back and look at California, you see two crises at once.

that has inflated home prices and created the fifth highest rate of homelessness in the United States.

And then layered on top of that, we have one of the lowest inventories of shelter available for people who become homeless.

So in other words, in California, you're more likely to become homeless than almost any other state.

And when you do, you're more likely to become homeless on the streets rather than in the shelter than almost any other state.

This RV lot opened just a year ago and now is among the largest in the state of California.

With a full wait list, it represents one city's answers to a growing crisis of RV homelessness in which individuals without homes live long term in RVs.

Others park their RVs on city streets, and some don't even own the RVs they're living in.

Instead, they rent them from an underground market of vanlords.

For renters, it's one of the few options between communal shelters and the streets.

But advocates and lawmakers say the arrangement is often exploitative, with no tenant protections and and vanlords able to demand payment or threaten eviction at will.

The person confides in you that this person is extorting them for a large sum of money, 5, $600 a month to use their RV, and

they'll come to me and tell me, hey, this person hasn't paid me rent.

I don't let them on the site or on the property.

If they are in a van lording situation, I make them a priority.

I tell the case manager, look, this person is about to lose their rv.

CNBC spoke to one vanlord and several individuals renting out RVs in varying states.

Some very well kept, others falling apart.

None agreed to appear on camera as the issue is contentious and in some cases illegal.

San Jose enacted a law last year to crack down on the practice of van lording, banning people from renting out RVs as housing on city streets.

When people rent in apartments, there are rules they must follow.

But renting an RV doesn't really have the same protections, and

it's very damaging for the people who are renting.

Cohen says there's also pushback in neighborhoods where RV communities have become entrenched.

The city now has two safe parking sites that can house up to 128 RVs at a time.

We are trying to walk that balance between offering services, keeping our streets safe, and

making sure that there are resources available for people who need it.

It's funded by a city grant and is run through, We Hope, a local homelessness nonprofit.

Residents are provided a parking space for their RV for free.

They provide dinner, they provide breakfast, they provide the showers and the washrooms to wash, to wash our clothes and stuff.

Plus the community garden where Selena grows her vegetables, and even a dog park.

Believe it or not, residents live here as long as they need to while they save money in search for a place of their own.

And in exchange, they meet weekly with caseworkers who help them transition into traditional housing.

There's no timeline for leaving, but most do within a few months.

But not everybody gets access to free parking spots like Salina.

That includes all the utilities and taxes.

Once a low cost option for tourists, this RV park in an industrial corner of San Francisco now charges as much for a parking spot as some Bay Area apartments do for rent.

It houses people who take on some of the city's toughest jobs, dock workers, janitors and day laborers.

And it doesn't include the RV itself, the hard working people.

And they're sort of middle, lower middle class, working class.

In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie enacted legislation in July to address RV homelessness on city streets, where individuals say people have been tapping into public utilities and leaving debris for others to clean up.

It's unfair to the general community to have these large vehicles that become very large homeless encampments in certain spaces.

There are now two hour parking restrictions for large vehicles citywide, with few exceptions.

City workers are reaching out to RV dwellers to offer subsidized housing, and

permits are being made available for those who are actively engaged and awaiting placement.

We're really trying to mitigate that while helping the people inside.

But until that housing is built, RVs serve as a stopgap.

When you look at who's in these RVs, sometimes it's poor families who are down on their luck, and

Between them and the streets, there's another type of person who believes that they're not homeless.

They just want a safe place to park it, which we don't have.

So we should be looking again to RV parks that are well managed and well maintained as a means of providing housing and stability for very low income Bay Area residents.

We aren't likely in the near term going to have enough transitional housing or interim housing to move everybody indoors.

Places like Berryessa offer that stability.

For the lucky few who get in, we're all just a couple paychecks away from being on the streets ourselves.

You know, in the Silicon Valley, it's a systematic problem, homelessness.