Along industrial streets, hidden behind warehouses and crammed into residential neighborhoods, thousands of Bay Area residents live in one of the few forms of housing they can afford: mobile homes.
Across California, the number of people living in vehicles has skyrocketed in recent years as rising rents and a chronic housing shortage have pushed even full-time workers out of traditional homes and into makeshift homes on wheels.
Booming tech wealth, rising homelessness
In Santa Clara County — home to Apple, Google and eight of America’s 50 most expensive ZIP codes — the number of people living full-time in recreational vehicles has skyrocketed. County data shows the share of homeless people sleeping in vehicles has more than doubled since the pandemic, from 18% in 2019 to 37% in 2025.
California is home to nearly a quarter of the nation’s homeless residents, despite having 12% of the total population there, federal housing data show. Experts say the state is facing a massive housing shortage. A McKinsey estimate suggests California will need up to 3.5 million more homes to meet demand.
And although authorities have expanded emergency shelter capacity, federal data shows there are far fewer shelter beds available than people experiencing homelessness, leaving a significant portion of homeless residents without adequate access to emergency shelter.
“California is more likely to become homeless than almost any other state,” said Adrian Covert, senior vice president of public policy at the Bay Area Council, a nonpartisan think tank. “And when you do that, the likelihood of becoming homeless on the streets is higher than in almost any other state.”
Why mobile homes?
Advocates say many people choose RVs because they offer a level of autonomy that shelters and the road don’t.
“The RV was much 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 shower, you can’t go to the bathroom. You have to go somewhere.”
Salena Alvarez is a resident of the Berryessa Supportive Parking site in San Jose, California. She has been living in a mobile home for a year and a half.
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The RV was much better. The car is smaller… You can’t cook, you can’t wash your dishes, you can’t shower, you can’t go to the toilet. You have to go somewhere.
Salena Alvarez
Caravan dwellers
The rise of the “Vanlords”
As housing options become scarcer, a new level of crisis has emerged – one in which even vehicles have become rental properties.
A shadow rental market has emerged throughout the Bay Area, with individuals renting aging RVs to people who have few other options. Some call them “Vanlords.”
Tenants pay hundreds of dollars a month to sleep in a vehicle parked on a public street. The agreements are usually concluded without written rental agreements or tenant protection measures.
CNBC spoke with a vanlord and several tenants. Some tenants were immigrants newly arrived in the U.S., including a 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 person told CNBC that he had been living in an RV on the street in San Francisco for about a year, sharing it with a friend for a total of $500 a month. They rented from the owner of a number of vehicles on the same block, calling it “safe and comfortable,” adding that $1,000 was too expensive to rent a room in an apartment.
But lawmakers view the regulations as exploitative.
“These are people who are using our public streets for revenue, to make money, without any permit or process to ensure that they are following any rules about what condition the RVs have to be in or what rights the person renting has,” said David Cohen, a San Jose city council member who sponsored legislation to ban the practice. “We are trying to protect both our community and those who are homeless.”
However, it has been difficult to crack down on vanlords and the underground market still exists.
Meanwhile, cities across the Bay Area have stepped up parking enforcement by issuing citations and towing vehicles as RV parks become more visible.
But neither approach — banning vanlords or cracking down on parking — has reversed the rise in vehicle homelessness.
This leads officials to look for alternatives.
A different approach
In an industrial area of San Jose, just off the highway and nestled between a recycling plant and a concrete spreader, the city of San Jose has converted an empty parking lot into what it calls a “safe parking lot.”
The Berryessa Safe Parking Site is operated by a local nonprofit and funded by a grant from the city. It can accommodate 86 RVs, making it one of the largest sites of its kind in California, according to WeHope, the homeless organization that operates it. The park opened in 2025 and, according to organizers, there is always a full waiting list. Alvarez, a full-time home worker Caregiver, is one of her residents.
At the center of the 6-acre property is a series of showers, laundry machines and an office where caseworkers meet with residents to help them find housing. In order to live in the park, it is necessary to engage with the system – that is, to work on moving out of mobile homes and into traditional housing.
The city expects the site to cost $24 million over five years, including the cost of the services it provides.
Site manager Victoria Garibaldi said she and her team have housed more than 40 people since the site opened.
Victoria Garibaldi, program manager at WeHOPE, oversees the city’s safe parking lot. She says the program has helped more than 40 residents find permanent housing.
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“We want them to have their own homes. This is not a permanent solution to the housing problem,” she said.
The park is San Jose’s second safe parking lot. Despite the success, the need far outweighs the supply. San Jose has 128 such spaces in two secure parking lots, but estimates that nearly 1,000 people live in vehicles within the city limits.
Other Bay Area cities have tried similar ideas but experienced more friction.
San Francisco established a secure parking lot in 2022, originally designed for up to 150 vehicles. But the program never reached that scale.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, there were about 35 vehicles on the site at peak times. Infrastructure problems — including a lack of on-site electricity — forced the city to rely on diesel generators, leading to complaints from neighbors and a lawsuit.
The city ultimately closed the site, citing costs and operational issues.
Today, what may be the only designated RV park 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 don’t have the savings or credit to secure a more traditional rental agreement.
“We have evolved from a purely tourist park to a long-stay park, mainly due to the impact of the pandemic,” said Tsin Fung, the park’s manager, who has worked there since 1993.
The price for a parking space – including water, electricity, sewage connections and bathrooms – is $2,500 per month. The park recently raised the rate for new renters from $2,000 per month.
“They are hard-working people and are middle class, lower middle class and working class,” Fung said. “They work hard, they pay their bills.” He also noted that he had become aware of some renters renting their RVs from people outside the park, in so-called vanlording situations.
“We have developed from a purely tourist park to a long-term park, mainly due to the effects of the pandemic.”
Tsin Fung
Mobile home park manager in San Francisco
Rethink mobile home parks
But housing alone may not close the gap fast enough, said Covert of the Bay Area Council.
“We’re moving past a 30- or 40-year trend of hostility from local governments across the state — across the country, actually — toward RV and mobile home parks,” Covert said. “They were seen as an eyesore. But what we’re seeing now is that they’re not just causing low-income people to disappear.”
Instead, he believes well-managed mobile home parks should be reconsidered as part of the region’s housing strategy.
“We probably won’t have enough transitional or transitional housing to house everyone indoors in the near future,” he said.
San Jose has reserved 128 mobile home spaces on two properties, offering residents rent-free housing while they work with case managers to secure permanent housing.
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Until permanent housing comes online, Covert said, cities may have little choice but to treat mobile homes not as an anomaly but as part of the housing landscape.
For Alvarez, the secure parking space provides stability as she continues to search for an apartment that she and her boyfriend can afford — an apartment that she would happily move into if they found one.
“I hope I can,” she said.