How RVs became Silicon Valley’s housing safety net

Parked along industrial streets, tucked behind warehouses and clustered in residential neighborhoods, thousands of Bay Area residents are living in one of the only forms of housing they can afford: RVs.

Across California, the number of people living in vehicles has surged in recent years, as soaring rents and a chronic housing shortage have pushed even full-time workers out of traditional homes and into makeshift ones on wheels. 

Booming tech wealth, soaring homelessness

In Santa Clara County — home to Apple, Google and eight of America’s 50 most expensive ZIP codes — the number of people living in recreational vehicles full time has surged. County data shows that the portion of homeless individuals sleeping in vehicles has more than doubled since the pandemic, from 18% in 2019 to 37% in 2025. 

California accounts for nearly a quarter of the nation’s homeless residents, despite being home to 12% of its total population, according to federal housing data. Experts say the state faces a massive housing shortage, with one estimate by McKinsey suggesting California needs as many as 3.5 million more homes to meet demand. 

And even as officials have expanded shelter capacity, federal data shows far fewer shelter beds available than people experiencing homelessness, leaving a significant share of unhoused residents without adequate access to shelter.

“In California, you’re more likely to become homeless than almost any other state,” said Adrian Covert, senior vice president of public policy for the Bay Area Council, a nonpartisan think tank. “And when you do, you’re more likely to become homeless on the streets rather than in the shelter than almost any other state.”

Why RVs?

Advocates say many people turn to RVs because they offer a degree of autonomy that shelters and the street do not.

“The RV was a lot better,” said Salena Alvarez, who has lived in an RV with her boyfriend for a year and a half. Before living in their RV, the couple lived in a car. 

“The car is smaller … you can’t cook, you can’t wash your dishes, you can’t take a shower, you can’t go to the bathroom. You’ve got to go somewhere.”

The rise of ‘vanlords’

As housing options narrow, a new tier of the crisis has emerged — one where even vehicles have become rental properties.

A shadow rental market has taken hold across the Bay Area, where individuals rent out aging RVs to people with few other options. Some call them “vanlords.”

Renters pay hundreds of dollars per month to sleep in a vehicle parked on a public street. The arrangements typically come without written leases or tenant protections.

CNBC spoke with one vanlord and several tenants. Some tenants were immigrants, newly arrived in the U.S., including one woman and her two children from Mexico, while others said the option was simply more affordable than traditional apartment housing in the Bay Area. 

One individual told CNBC he’d been living in an RV on the street in San Francisco for about a year, splitting it with a friend for a total of $500 a month. They rent from the owner of a stretch of vehicles on the same block, calling it “safe and comfortable,” adding that $1,000 to rent a room in an apartment was too expensive.

But lawmakers see the arrangements as exploitative.

“These are folks who are using our public streets for revenue, to make money without any kind of permitting or process to make sure that they’re following any rules about what conditions the RVs have to be in, or what rights the person has who rents has,” said David Cohen, a city councilmember in San Jose, who sponsored legislation to ban the practice. “We’re trying to protect our community as well as protect the people who are unhoused.”

But cracking down on vanlords has been difficult, and the underground market persists.

Meanwhile, cities across the Bay Area have ramped up parking enforcement, issuing citations and towing vehicles as RV encampments have become more visible.

Yet neither approach — banning vanlords nor cracking down on parking — has reversed the growth of vehicle homelessness.

That’s left officials searching for alternatives.

A different approach

In an industrial corner of San Jose, just off the freeway and nestled between a recycling plant and a concrete distributor, the city of San Jose has converted an empty parking lot into what it calls a “safe parking site.”

Operated by a local nonprofit and funded by a grant from the city, the Berryessa Safe Parking Site has space for 86 RVs, making it one of the largest sites of its kind in California, according to WeHope, the homelessness organization that operates it. The park opened in 2025, and organizers say it consistently has a full waiting list. Alvarez, a full-time in-home care worker, is one of its residents.

In the center of the 6-acre lot sits a bank of showers, laundry machines and an office, where case workers meet with residents to help them find housing. Engaging with the system – working to move out of RVs and into traditional housing – is a requirement to live at the park. 

The city expects the site will cost $24 million over a five-year period, including the cost of the services it provides.

The site’s manager, Victoria Garibaldi, said she and her team have placed upward of 40 people in housing since the site opened. 

“We want them to have their own places. This isn’t a permanent solution to the housing problem,” she said. 

The park is San Jose’s second safe parking site. Despite its success, the need far outweighs the supply. San Jose has 128 spots like these across two safe parking sites, but estimates that nearly 1,000 people live in vehicles within its city limits.

Other cities in the Bay Area have tried similar ideas, but experienced more friction. 

San Francisco established a safe parking site in 2022, originally designed to accommodate up to 150 vehicles. But the program never reached that scale.

At its peak, the site housed roughly 35 vehicles, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Infrastructure challenges — including a lack of on-site electricity — forced the city to rely on diesel generators, drawing complaints from neighbors and sparking a lawsuit. 

The city ultimately shut the site down, citing cost and operational challenges.

Today, what may be the only designated RV parking site in San Francisco is privately operated. Once a low-cost option for tourists, Candlestick RV Park, in the city’s industrial southeast corner, has increasingly become home to long-term residents, many of whom work but lack the savings or credit to secure a more traditional lease.

“We’ve transitioned from basically a tourist park to a long-term park, mainly due to the effects of the pandemic,” said Tsin Fung, the park’s manager, who has worked there since 1993.

The price for a spot — which includes water, electricity, sewage hookups and bathrooms — is $2,500 per month. The park recently raised the rate for new tenants from $2,000 per month. 

“They’re hard-working people, and they’re sort of middle-, lower-middle class, working class,” Fung said. “They work hard, they pay their bills.” He also noted that he’s become aware of some tenants renting their RVs from individuals outside the park, in so-called vanlording situations.

Rethinking RV parks

But housing construction alone may not close the gap quickly enough, said Covert of the Bay Area Council.

“We’re coming off of 30- or 40-year trends of hostility from local governments across the state — really, across the country — toward mobile home parks and RV parks,” Covert said. “They’ve been seen as a blight. But what we’re seeing now is that doesn’t just make low-income people go away.”

Instead, he contends, well-managed RV parks should be reconsidered as part of the region’s housing strategy.

“We aren’t likely, in the near term, to have enough transitional or interim housing to move everybody indoors,” he said.

Until more permanent housing comes online, Covert said, cities may have little choice but to treat RVs not as an anomaly, but as part of the housing landscape.

For Alvarez, the safe parking site provides stability while she continues searching for an apartment she and her boyfriend can afford — a place she’s willing to move into if they can find one.

“I’m hoping I can,” she said.