For over a year, grassroots organizers with the Venice Justice Committee have spent time on the ground speaking directly with people living in their cars across the Westside of LA. The result is Keep Moving, a report based on in-depth, face-to-face interviews with 99 vehicle residents conducted throughout 2024 and into early 2025. Rather than reinforcing the official narratives that typically justify punitive enforcement, the survey offers a radically different perspective rooted in lived experience and community trust.

The report shows that policies designed to address vehicular homelessness often end up inflicting more harm than good. Vehicle residents are not stationary or disengaged, but instead constantly on the move, driven not by preference but by a need to avoid tickets, towing threats, and relentless code enforcement. The act of staying in one place, even for a night, often invites punishment, creating a cycle of displacement that leaves little room for rest or recovery. For many, their car, van, or RV represents the final safety net after losing more stable housing due to illness, job loss, skyrocketing rents, or eviction. These vehicles may be old and in poor condition, rarely road-ready and often in need of repair, but they provide a level of privacy, safety, and autonomy that are lacking in traditional shelter options. Within a broken housing system, the vehicle becomes people’s refuge of last resort.

Although city and county officials often invoke the availability of services to justify their enforcement actions, those interviewed for the report said that outreach is sporadic, impersonal, and often misaligned with what they actually need. The rare offers of shelter often come with rigid rules, surveillance, curfews, and restrictions that separate residents from their partners, pets, or possessions. These programs are not true exits from homelessness, but rather temporary containment or warehousing.

The report makes clear that another approach is possible. Overwhelmingly, participants expressed a desire for stability—specifically, access to safe parking, bathrooms, consistent case management, and real pathways into permanent, affordable housing. The report underscores the need for policies that respect people’s efforts to survive and rebuild on their own terms, without coercion or criminalization.

The Venice Justice Committee approached this work not as outsiders collecting data, but as community members already engaged in mutual aid, legal support, and organizing. Their relationships allowed them to gather insights that typically remain hidden in official studies, and can only be gleaned when when people are treated as experts in their own lives. While governments across California continue to expand policies that displace vehicle residents and treat them as public nuisances, Keep Moving argues that the real problem is not the presence of people living in their cars, but the absence of a functional housing system that makes such arrangements necessary. As long as a van feels safer than a shelter bed, no amount of towing or ticketing will address the root causes of vehicular homelessness.