San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A TALE OF TWO VANLIFERS.
Last year, Bodhi Goncharoff, a laid-back and affable 21-year-old farmers’ market worker in Santa Cruz, moved into a weather-beaten 2000 Dodge Ram he found on Craiglist for $1,300. That’s just $150 more than the monthly rent he and his then-girlfriend had been paying for a cramped studio in the city’s Beach Flats neighborhood. Even stacking several part-time jobs, Goncharoff found it hard to make rent.
When Goncharoff, a native of Spain who moved to the U.S. three years ago, needed to find a place of his own, he realized he couldn’t cover the deposit for first and last month’s rent. Moving into his van “was an overnight decision,” he says. “It really was not a choice because it came down to money, pure and simple.”
The van he bought had 230,000 miles on it and was filthy. At first, one thought ran through his head: ‘What would happen if the van broke down, and I was left with nothing?” But after a while, Goncharoff came to think of van-dwelling as “a great adventure,” he says. “Let’s just take on the world in this tiny little van and see how it goes.”
The art of traveling and surviving for prolonged periods in boxy vehicles converted into living spaces, commonly called vandwelling and glorified online as #vanlife, is en vogue these days. Social media personalities peddle dreams of minimalist but comfortable living on the road. But the flashy images of young people in kittedout
luxury vehicles waking up by the beach present a simplistic view of an economically diverse movement that encompasses cash-strapped wage earners as well as wealthy vagabonds.
In California, where the median price of a home is more than half a million dollars, according to the California Association of Realtors, van-dwelling is becoming as much a contingency plan as a play for adventure away from the toils of office life. While some van dwellers are sufficiently well-off to live in vans for the fun of it, others have been priced out of communities such as Santa Cruz.
Meanwhile, California’s homeless population jumped 14 percent to 134,000 from 2016 to 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
As a van dweller, Goncharoff is somewhere in the middle. Priced out of the renters’ market, he doesn’t consider himself homeless. But his choice to live in his van full time, in one city, means he is treated by police as one of the hundreds of indigents, based on police estimate, who sleep in vehicles each night.
While staying in Santa Cruz, Goncharoff tries to slip unnoticed into parking spaces late at night and move on early in the morning so neighbors won’t complain. Anyone who sleeps in a vehicle between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. in Santa Cruz is subject to ticketing,
“It really was not a choice because it came down to money, pure and simple.”
Bodhi Goncharoff
“That is what our parents did — get a big giant McMansion and work until you die. That is not what people want anymore.” Erik Ekman, founder
of Outside Van
and the police sometimes come knocking.
Santa Cruz Police Chief Andrew Mills says police officers respond to complaints about parked vehicles, rather than actively targeting homeless van dwellers. Mills says he would be more inclined to ticket someone who lives in a van by choice than someone who is forced to live in a vehicle because of a recent eviction or long-term homelessness.
“For people who purposely choose this lifestyle, my compassion drains immensely,’’ Mills adds. “There are other options for them. I don’t think it is a good idea.”
Goncharoff finds it hard to relate to affluent van dwellers he sees in popular Instagram images. “What they are doing is glamping — total ego, seeing who has the biggest, most deckedout van. But I am not going to bash it,” he says. “If I had the money, I would absolutely love that.”
Erik Ekman owns a small home in Hood River, Ore., a small town east of Portland on the Columbia River, but spends four to six months a year driving all over Northern California and Idaho. He surfs, mountain-bikes, goes downhill and back-country skiing, kiteboards and practices yoga.
During his cash-lean college years, Ekman slept in vans out of necessity. “The money I saved on housing, I spent on ski passes,” he says. But today, the 50-year-old founder of Outside Van, a Portland company that offers highend van conversions, prefers living on the road: It’s fun and flexible, and he enjoys the heedless thrill of “living on the edge,” he says.
Typically, he travels in a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter or a Ford Transit. His vans are the real deal: fully solar electricity, diesel heat and outfitted with Vitamix blenders for smoothies on the go.
Ekman spends his Novembers in Santa Cruz, visiting friends and taking side trips to Big Sur and San Simeon. “I pay for a campground,” he says. “I will not street-camp in that town. Too many weirdos.”
Every so often, during his West Coast adventures, he will hop on a plane from San Jose to Portland, check in at his company for a couple of days, and hit the road again. “I could be a lot richer if I just wanted to run my company, but I don’t,” Ekman said. When he was younger, Ekman spent up to a year and a half at a stretch in a van. These days, his stints are somewhat shorter. “You start to spin out at about six months,” he says. “After a while you don’t have any purpose or tether.”
Contemplating the motivations of Outside Van’s clientele, which ranges from middle-class van dwellers to billionaire adventure seekers, Ekman profiles a type of person looking to buck the conventions of typical American adulthood. “That is what our parents did — get a big giant McMansion and work until you die,” he says. “That is not what people want anymore.”
Ekman, like many of his clients, lives what he calls a “hybrid’’ lifestyle, meaning they mostly work remotely, but have homes or property they can return to when they grow road-weary. “They drive into the city for their meetings, and the rest of the time they work online,” he says. “You have some sort of base. You need some sort of business or have to be far enough along in your career so you can have freedom instead of money.”
Yet Ekman insists that his life is far from glamorous. “Van life usually stinks, and it’s hard to get a shower,” he says. He ridicules the popular image of van-dwelling “30- and 20-year-olds with beautiful girlfriends and vistas all Photoshopped to hell.
“It’s not that pretty,” he says.
“For people who purposely choose this lifestyle, my compassion drains immensely. There are other options for them. I don’t think it is a good idea.” Andrew Mills, Santa Cruz police chief