People Living in Cars in Portland Aren't Drifters. They're Working.
Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash
Drive through Northeast Portland after dark and you will pass them. Old motorhomes pulled up against the curb. Minivans with the back windows covered in cardboard. Sedans with a sleeping bag bunched against the rear window. They look abandoned. They are not. Someone lives there.
Vehicle residency is the fastest-growing form of homelessness in Oregon. The state's 2025 Point-in-Time count found 4,850 people living in cars, RVs, and trucks, a 15.3 percent jump in a single year. National researchers have called it the fastest-growing homeless subpopulation in the country. And the stereotype most people carry about who those residents are turns out to be wrong.
Many vehicle residents are working. Some are seniors. A surprising number have been doing this for years, holding down jobs while waiting on a housing market that will not take them back.
Last September, OPB profiled Rachelle Lacy-Powell, a 59-year-old who had spent five years living between a Honda Odyssey minivan and an RV. She used the van to run errands and drive to appointments, and slept in the RV at night. She panicked one morning when she found green abandonment notices on both windshields. She didn't have enough money for gas to move both vehicles. So she emptied one into the other and lost half of what she owned to a tow.
Stories like Lacy-Powell's are common. A former carpet layer in his late sixties, profiled by Street Roots, has lived in the same RV for seventeen years. He wants out. He cannot pass a credit check in Portland's rental market. So he stays in his vehicle, and he keeps working.
This matters now because Portland is changing the rules. Mayor Keith Wilson, elected on a pledge to end unsheltered homelessness by December 1, has set a goal of towing 1,300 RVs by July 2026, nearly tripling the previous year's pace. The city has also scrapped its fee waiver for "lived-in vehicles." A tow that used to be free for someone using their RV as housing now costs $250 to $350 to recover. For a person trying to claw their way back to a lease, that bill is the kind of setback that ends them.
The math is brutal. Lose your vehicle, and you lose three things at once: your shelter, your transportation to whatever job is paying for the gas, and the storage holding everything you own. Recovering it costs more cash than most vehicle residents have ever held at one time. Many of these RVs are also too old to legally re-register, which means the tow is permanent regardless of whether the resident can pay.
At the same time the city has been towing faster, the shelter alternatives are shrinking. The Sunderland RV Safe Park in Northeast Portland, one of only two sanctioned places where someone could legally sleep in their vehicle overnight, was decommissioned in September 2025 when the City Council declined to spend the $2 million to keep it running. Its residents moved out one by one. Some parked across the street. They had nowhere else to go.
Smaller cities have actually figured out a piece of this. In Washington County, the nonprofit Just Compassion partners with churches and a handful of businesses to run a safe parking program in Beaverton and Tigard. Two or three legal overnight spots per host site, paired with a case manager and access to showers and storage, designed as a short-term bridge into housing. It is modest, deeply local, and it works. The program runs almost entirely on church partnerships and donations.
Portland's RV crisis will not be solved by tow trucks. The vehicles on the curb outside your favorite coffee shop are not abandoned. They are the last thing standing between someone and a tent on the sidewalk, and once that is gone, the next step is not housing. It is the street.
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