I do all the maintenance on my travel trailer, but I have a garage full of tools and a different place to sleep when there's problems. And if I screw it up, I'm not homeless.

I imagine if you're living in an RV, even if you know exactly how to fix a problem, you still have to pay someone else to do it because you don't have a good way to get parts, or equipment to do the work. How do you get Amazon to ship a head gasket to a random spot in the woods on federal lands?

There are tool libraries, and a lot of auto parts places have loaner tools, but you still have to get there to do it, and you can't just sit there for a week working on the problem.

Just another time that it's way more expensive to be poor.

Our homelessness numbers are vastly under counted. They guess the amount by going outside and counting the number of people they can see. A better way to judge this would be by number of people with no active address. (I'm sure it's not that simple and some safe guards would need to be put in place. But we know the number is magnitudes greater than the publicly stated amount.) We say it 800k individuals are homeless but id bet if we actually tried to find every known American to see if they have a permanent address it's two or three million people under counted.

So Ready Player One is the dystopia we're headed for. Wonderful.

I feel the article may have actually meant trailers or campers. RVs are expensive and become a pain to maintain and fix especially if it's a shitbox already.

It's so bad even some supreme court justices are living in them!

Basically i've always had a personal hatred for single-family homes. I grew up in one, and i hated it. My parents moved into the middle of freaking nowhere when i was born, the neighborhood was dull, it was somewhere in the countryside, you couldn't go anywhere without driving a car, my mother was always angry and tired and refused to drive me 90% of the time, and when she did drive me, annoyances always happened (like, i'd say to a friend i'd meet them at 3pm, and it's a 10 minute drive, and we start driving at 2:40pm, and then my mother remembers she has to go grocery shopping first, which takes 45 minutes, and she does that before dropping me off at my friend's place, stuff like that). It was frustrating.

In the countryside, you're dependent on fossil fuels. You're dependent on putting that transparent fluid in your car's tank day-after-day, which i suspect is a method of mind-controlling the people, because it makes the people feel dependent on some kind of infrastructure (gas station) that they don't understand. I mean, where does petroleum come from? have you ever seen it produced? the people can't produce it locally, so they're dependent on the government's goodwill that it continues to be provided to them.

if the people had solar panels, a whole lot of things would be less shit. people would feel somewhat more self-reliant, being able to produce their own energy and all, and i guess that would improve people's self-esteem a lot.

anyways, i've always had a very hatred of the single-family home. it has 1000 m³, of which you realistically need about 300 for 4 people, for a kitchen, a toilet, a shower, and beds. the extra room is to brag to your neighbors ("what would the neighbors think if we were poor!") and mostly to cause yourself a lot of stress while you're trying to clean that whole space, while you could instead just chill and relax. but i guess relaxing means that you have to face your inner emotions, and we can't have that! (according to the people i've met)

Nomadland

I hope they know they’re going to trump’s concentration camps to magically disappear

The American dream

I'm living in a trailer voluntarily and have been for a bit over a year. I've met some people who are living in their vehicle/trailer/rv/tent because it was their last option, and while it was more than I expected when I left its a fairly small percentage. But I also try not to pry into people's lives out here so there's definitely the possibility I've met people who I'm assuming are living this way voluntarily when they are not. I'm also mostly staying in free dispersed camping areas wheres people have to move on after a few days/weeks so I don't have a lot of interaction with people in long term spaces

Funny to read as someone from a country where having a vehicle is far more expensive than having a place to live.

Anyway. I suppose if one can afford transportation (have a vehicle and can afford gasoline), then homesteading\buying a piece of land really far away from good places, making a basic living box on small foundation, with orgalite, polycarbonate and some heat isolation, and vinyl siding, a well (the hardest part) and a potbelly stove for heating, with lots of aspen around (really doesn't take effort to grow LOL) to have firewood, and a place to grow potatoes (maybe a greenhouse to grow something nicer), - can be more affordable than "normal" housing. While you are making the thing, you don't even have to live there.

I mean, OK, it's stupid.

The whole reason so many people are building out vans to live in is the shoddy construction of RVs. When you've selected and installed everything yourself, troubleshooting is far easier. The flipside is it's far more expensive than a used RV.