The rise of California’s vanlords A new class of landlord is exploiting the homeless

The most familiar and ominous form of homelessness in Oakland, however, has become the vehicle encampment. A few small clusters of vehicles have gathered in my North Oakland neighbourhood, lines of dirty campers and battered cars seeking shade under an elevated freeway, but poor East Oakland has it the worst. There, such encampments have taken over long stretches of busy street, visiting already-distressed neighbourhoods with huge living sculptures of ugliness and disorder — cars filled with clothes and junk; hulking RVs parked for months at a time, drug and sex deals conducted streetside; trash gathering around and between the vehicles, and lots of new crime. Recently, the city had to replace traffic lights at an East Oakland intersection with stop signs, because people, presumably from the vehicle encampment close by, were constantly stealing the cables to sell the copper wire inside. 

These urban nightmares provoke understandable calls for the city to show some leadership and clear the bigger, more dangerous, more embarrassing encampments, but Wood Street offers a cautionary lesson that, in turn, places the larger problem of homelessness in an unhappy, if clarifying, light. When the city cleared Wood Street, it hoped to move many residents into shelters but many of the homeless, and many of the vehicles that could be started and driven off before the tow trucks and bulldozers and forklifts arrived, just moved themselves to other parts of West Oakland. When officials clear the encampments in East Oakland, we can expect the same thing to happen. This highlights a troubling problem with homeless people that no one has managed to solve — their insistence on being somewhere rather than nowhere.

The attempt to solve this problem of where the homeless are is what brought the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, before the United States Supreme Court in Grants Pass v. Johnson. Two local ordinances in Grants Pass prohibit “camping” on public property — one applying to living and sleeping outside, the other to living and sleeping in a motor vehicle. A lower court has ruled that the Grants Pass ordinances, and other laws that make it illegal for homeless people to camp and sleep in certain places, amount to “cruel and unusual punishment” — as proscribed by the 8th Amendment to the Constitution. The underlying legal notion the lower court fixed upon is the distinction between “status” and “conduct”. Court precedent holds that it’s reasonable to enjoin people from doing something, but it is unreasonable to punish them for being something, for their status, a condition they can’t control that to some extent defines them. The court argued that if shelter is available for the homeless, then the “camping” in question is conduct, something chosen, which it’s reasonable for a city to prohibit. If no shelter is available, then this sort of camping is not conduct but simply a necessary entailment — necessary because everyone needs to sleep — of the status of being homeless, which it’s unreasonable to punish.  

The court will be making these careful distinctions between status and conduct, what civic measures are and aren’t reasonable. But in 2013, Grants Pass city council president Lily Morgan made clear that the underlying concern of the ordinances is the one I mention above, not so much the existence and metaphysical nature of homeless people but their location. “The point,” Morgan said, “is to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road.” It’s better for the homeless to be there than here. Most people agree.

But not all people. In San Francisco, for example, non-profit executives, public health academics, and government bureaucrats who serve the homeless don’t want to send the homeless on down the road. These influential figures work to portray the homeless as genuine residents of the city, to defend their rights to be where they are, wherever that is. This approach may sound humane, but over the long run it may be as ineffective, and indeed as inhumane, as the other approach of sending the homeless down the road.  

This matter of where the homeless are from has become very salient in San Francisco, especially in the city’s notorious Tenderloin District, where the open, obvious, unashamed daylight commerce in and consumption of drugs provokes understandable questions. Might it be that – sort of like the hippies in the Sixties who flocked to the city for its freewheeling atmosphere — a good number of these drug-addicted homeless people aren’t actually from San Francisco? 

For the city’s influential homeless advocates, to raise this suspicion is — in the words of Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness — to engage in the “othering of unhoused people”. And she’s right. Many people really do make an “othering” sort of distinction between those who met misfortune in their city and became homeless there and those — those others, if you will — who came to their city and live on its streets because they wanted to use drugs there. These people would like to move some of San Francisco’s homeless on down the road.

In any case, official data roughly, apparently, support the idea of which Friedenbach is so protective — that San Francisco’s homeless are mostly San Franciscans. For example, a 2022 survey shows that 71% of San Francisco homeless became homeless while they were San Francisco residents, and only 17% had been in the city for a year or less. Homeless advocates cite these numbers in a peremptory spirit, as if they simply settle the matter, but they actually invite a fair amount of questioning and scepticism. For example, homeless people are viewed as being from the city if they were living there “at the time they most recently became homeless” but this phrasing pretty much forces you to wonder how much prior homelessness in other cities is hiding in this 71% number. 

But the numbers aren’t great even if you believe them. Even if fully 71% of the city’s homeless are “from San Francisco”, 29% of the city’s 8,323 homeless people is still a lot of people. At the lowest estimate, 2,413 of San Francisco’s homeless people came to the city already homeless. And 17% means that 1,414 of the city’s homeless people are newly arrived. That’s a lot of newly arrived homeless people in a fairly small city. 

From there it’s a reasonable assumption — given the current drug epidemic and the city’s vigorous “harm reduction” infrastructure, which dispenses free drug paraphernalia and exerts serious political and legal pressure to minimise enforcement of crimes associated with drugs and homelessness — that drug addicts are overrepresented among these thousands of recent arrivals. That is, it’s likely that at least hundreds of drug addicts from other places are coming to the city every year, and especially to the drug-ridden and drug-tolerant Tenderloin. Anecdotes from the neighbourhood support this modest assumption — such as San Francisco’s police chief noting that, in a recent drug crackdown in the Tenderloin, only three of 46 people arrested were from San Francisco, and the series of very affecting YouTube interviews called “Soft White Underbelly” whose Tenderloin subjects very much paint a picture of the district as a drug destination for outsiders.  

These drug migrants to the Tenderloin may account for a small or even marginal portion of the city’s overall homeless population, but from the standpoint of its lawfulness and civic order, and of the survival of its small businesses and its tourism industry, and of the security and pride and happiness of its citizens, it’s not marginal at all. It’s central. The Tenderloin is in the centre of the city. 

Activists and academic commentators often portray any concern with this aspect of homelessness as morally shallow and politically nefarious, a desire to render the homeless “invisible”. But the wishes of shopkeepers trying to keep their little businesses alive, and parents whose children have to pass those appalling scenes on the way to school, are not abstract or hypothetical. These people aren’t shills of international capital. It’s not to erase the needs and suffering of the homeless to consider the humble interests of these everyday citizens when we decide where to encourage the law-breaking homeless to pitch their tents and sell and use their drugs.

We’ve travelled to an interesting place, culturally and politically, when not wanting to step in human faeces on city sidewalks is considered morally frivolous. To put it another way, it’s possible that harm reduction is good for the drug-addicted homeless in the Tenderloin and bad for the city of San Francisco, and what we have is a political conflict, in which open contestation and compromise are necessary, rather than the dogmatism and language policing of the city’s homelessness functionaries. Then again, people seem to get a lot worse once they’ve been in the Tenderloin for any length of time. Encouraging more people to join them doesn’t seem like harm reduction. If bureaucrats and non-profit executives can be deceptive about homeless in-migration and blithe about its bad effects, their opponents can generate a tunnel-visioned portrait of homelessness that also hinders a clear understanding of the problem and its possible remedies — which threatens to leave us choosing between maintaining the homeless where they are and merely moving them from place to place, rather than reducing their number. 

California contrarian Michael Shellenberger, recent candidate for governor and author of San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities, has built something of a movement from pointing out the folly of Left-wing approaches to homelessness, and of progressive governance more generally. Shellenberger argues that homelessness is not, as progressives will tell you, a problem of poverty. It is, he says both in his book and in a growing number of online videos, a problem of drug addiction and mental illness. This latter claim is substantially true, but only within his very narrow framework. That is, his implicit comparison (I say “implicit” because his work contains little if any systematic demographic comparison) is between the homeless and non-homeless in cities — especially Los Angeles and San Francisco — already characterised by high rates of homelessness, as well as by nice weather and progressive governance. Within this framework, individual pathologies such as addiction and psychosis account for a lot of variation between who is and isn’t homeless, and thus seem to explain homelessness per se. And progressives, occupying safe seats of influence in these places, are easily blamed for their undeniable failures of vision and policy, the squalor and madness they seem happy to tolerate, if not actively curate. But the framework itself is conceived in a way that isolates individual variables like addiction and psychosis, and leaves broader economic ones to the side, barely considered.

When, instead of comparing individuals within high-homelessness cities with progressive power structures and Mediterranean climates, we compare rates of homelessness across different cities or regions in the United States, a very different set of variables rises to the surface, or a very different variable: housing costs. Yes, being psychotic or addicted to a powerful drug, along with being recently incarcerated and newly unemployed and disabled and a victim of domestic violence, increases your chances of becoming homeless wherever you live in America. But it increases these chances a lot more in some places than in others.

That is, when we compare rates of homelessness across different cities and regions, the differences do not correlate with levels of drug addiction and mental illness in these places. West Virginia, for example, has very high rates of drug addiction and very low rates of homelessness. These differences do, however, strongly correlate with housing costs. Drug addiction and psychosis are far more likely to cause homelessness in and around expensive San Francisco or Los Angeles than they are around more affordable, and progressive-led, Chicago and Detroit, or warmer-weather cities like Houston or Charlotte, North Carolina. Boston has one of the highest rates of homelessness in America because, though quite cold and snowy in winter, it’s a very expensive place to live.

This claim might seem counterintuitive to people who’ve zeroed in on mental illness and drug addiction as the obvious causes of homelessness. How can psychotics and drug addicts make rent? But New York housing analyst Stephen Smith, who posts as @MarketUrbanism on X, gives an illuminating gloss on how it applies at the individual level. “Fun fact,” Smith tweeted in 2021, “homeless people with mental illnesses and drug addictions are humans who can interact with the housing market. They often have families who can take them in (if they have room), and are eligible for housing subsidies (if housing is available).” 

These and related expedients for housing the hardest cases are much more accessible where there’s more, and thus more affordable, housing. They’re not ideal, but the gulf between even these marginal housing arrangements and living on the streets — especially if you want to keep the addiction and mental illness from getting much, much worse — is huge. As Smith puts it: “Sometimes you see somebody talking to themselves on the street (normal life thing), and sometimes you see somebody who smells terrible and has what looks like rotting flesh talking to themselves on the street (scary city thing). The difference is housing.” 

Somewhat depressingly, this is not a story of poverty or weak economies. It’s a story of affluence and economic vigour. American cities and regions with the highest rates of homelessness — such as New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and their environs — are all, or recently have been, “superstar cities”. They’re employment destinations, coastal cities that many people move to over short timescales. Many of these new people are highly educated and high-earning, and, when they arrive, they bid up rents and home prices. The superstar performance of these local economies may boost wages for their poorest citizens, but they drive up housing costs a lot more. 

The other part of the story is familiar to anyone who follows these issues: failure to build additional housing to meet the new demand. This, in turn, is largely a story of incumbent homeowners and their elected representatives using zoning, environmental, architectural and other pretexts and regulatory means to block new housing, especially multi-family housing, and thereby protect the inflated values of existing homes (like mine). Sometimes, as Shellenberger points out in San Fransicko, this reflects the hypocrisy of land-rich progressives in desirable cities, who put out social-justice yard signs and then make sure new homes for poor people don’t get built anywhere near them. But it’s also the work of conservatives, who invoke “local control” to defy state laws that oblige their roomy suburbs to approve a few apartment buildings. It’s fun to mock the limousine liberals of San Francisco and Santa Monica, but many of the most anti-housing members of the California legislature are Republicans.

For those who still want a solid reason to mock Leftists, a crucial anti-housing force at the city level is the teamwork of urban socialists and anti-gentrification activists, for whom landlords and real-estate developers have a sort of demonic status. These are people who’ve made being deeply confused about housing markets into a guiding principle. Given a choice between “no new housing” and “new housing someone might make a profit on” they consistently choose “no new housing”. Then, when rents go up and gentrification intensifies and more people end up homeless, they wave their hands and say capitalism did it.

One clear signal that housing costs drive much of the homelessness where I live comes from the vehicle encampments blighting my city’s streets, specifically the growing number of those trailers and vans and RVs that were built for people to camp in. For as long as those things have been a presence and a problem in Oakland, they’ve also been a mystery. People see them and wonder, “Why are they here?” “Where did they come from?” After all, owners of recreational vehicles are an unlikely class of people to be so conspicuously represented among the homeless.

But the people in those RVs don’t own them. They rent them, from people who’ve come to be called “vanlords”. These energetic businesspeople buy up old trailers and RVs and either drive or tow them to unfortunate neighbourhoods in cities like Oakland. There they enter into informal rental agreements with homeless people. These campers, and the people who own and rent them out, occupy a tier of the official housing market that should exist but, thanks to the efforts of high-minded urban fanatics and small-minded suburban Nimbys, does not. 

Their growing presence should also be a warning. If you think landlords are a bad influence on your city, just wait and see what vanlords have in store for it.