Van life: How I’ve managed to let my son graduate with his class

Lisa Nuss is a single mother with a 14-year-old son. Forced to move out of their rental home in Marin County in California after the landlord died, she was unable to find affordable housing that would accept a child. As of early May, she and her son, Spencer, are living in a van until the end of the school year so that he can graduate from middle school with his class. 

Ms. Nuss has a master’s degree in public policy and a law degree, both from the University of Washington. She has provided legal counsel for the state of Oregon and advised banks and corporations on risk management and regulatory issues. Since being laid off during the Great Recession, she has been freelancing as an analyst and writer on a variety of legal and financial topics.  

Having grown up in what she describes as a “low-income family,” Ms. Nuss put herself through college and law school with the help of scholarships and loans. She has no inherited wealth.

Her words below, lightly edited for length and clarity, were posted May 7 on Nextdoor, an app that functions as a community bulletin board. (All of the locations she refers to are in Northern California.) After posting, Ms. Nuss received many offers to help make van life as comfortable as possible. 

FAMILY NEEDS HELP CONVERTING A VAN INTO A SHELTER  

Need help with heating – NOMADLAND HAS COME TO MARIN  

Hi neighbors – Speaking of short-term rentals devastating our community, we have not been able to find a rental for $1,600 [per month] that allows children, and so we will be forced to live in a van until summer. I am asking for help in making it warm enough to sleep in, and also asking for help in finding a place to shower. There are of course already others in our community living in vans. Some are well employed like me. We need to help each other – we ARE Nomadland now.  

Many, many people assume there’s some place out there for us – rest assured, after months of looking, there is not. We’ve been turned away from cottages and mother-in-law [places] in Sausalito, Mill Valley, and San Rafael because the owners won’t rent to children. Affordable housing advocates tell me this is illegal and asked me for names. I haven’t done that yet, as my focus is on finding shelter for my child, not punishing others. I’ve also been trying since 2018 to get a ban on short-term rentals, but … there has been little interest in the community. …

So this is the reality in Marin. When your landlord dies, like ours did, their children ALWAYS sell the house, and there is no longer any place to house your children. Yes, we see the writing on the wall and will have to relocate this summer – the nonwealthy can’t afford to raise their children here anymore. We live on my wages alone; that is no longer enough to support a family here, without relying on inherited wealth. However, I want my son to finish the middle school he’s been at for three years and graduate with his class. He deserves that – he is one of the top grade-earners at his school and always works hard to help others.  

I tell our story so people know. To make a record. To bear witness. I’ve been to every housing agency there is – I make too much money to qualify for any assistance. The motel programs are only for the unemployed. My son jokes that he hopes the homeless in Sausalito will leave us their tents when they move into the hotel rooms that we don’t qualify for. I’m not saying we are any more deserving of shelter than those in the tent camps who are being given motel rooms – I am saying that people need to know there is no help for employed families who can’t afford $2,000 for rent.

I emailed the county supervisors to ask if they can act in this crisis – doing something outside the box, like declaring a state of emergency so that funds can be used to help working families have shelter. …  

The whole housing assistance “framework” imagines helping the “needy” who are mentally ill and can’t function in normal society. I told the commissioners we aren’t “needy” and we are fully functioning, but it’s the society that is no longer normal. Our only choice left, if we want my son to finish out his last months of his middle school, is to sleep in our car until the summer, after which time we will be forced to relocate out of the area. We are surrounded by some of the wealthiest, most “successful” minds in our country, and yet we have our heads in the sand about this problem.

Can’t we activate the high-tech brilliance and set up small cargo containers or tiny yurts somewhere for families who have lived here for years and are being displaced? Local news is obsessed with helping the displaced Ukrainians, but not with stopping displacement of families right here, right now. [Instead], private builders everywhere here are throwing up “luxury” apartment towers … [with] studios that start at $3,000/month.

To our local [Supervisor Dennis] Rodoni’s credit, his office responded by asking yet another housing agency to contact me. (There are a lot of county employees drawing high incomes to “help” with housing, and yet I wonder if all that staff [is] really needed, since there is no housing.) Anyway, this woman from another county housing agency called me. I explained the situation and asked if she would clarify that there is in fact no assistance or temp shelter for an employed mother and her child who can’t find a place to rent for $1,600 in Marin or Southern Sonoma. Her reply: “You gotta understand living in Marin is very expensive – you could move to another place.”

Lisa Nuss

Spencer, in his loft, a bed above the living area, in the van he and his mother call home on May 12, 2022, in Stinson Beach, California.

So in order to allow my son to finish his middle school, we will be sleeping in our car very soon. A nice person is going to rent us her converted van, but she doesn’t know how to make the heating system work. It’s a Dometic Brisk II installed in the ceiling and might be controlled by a digital device on the wall. … We put our things into storage months ago – anticipating moving into a house, not a van – and so our winter clothes and sleeping bags are at the bottom of the storage unit. If anyone has wool long johns or cold-temperature sleeping bags to lend or sell cheaply, that would be appreciated.  

We are bearing witness to what it’s like in Marin in 2022. This is not a family-friendly environment. This is not a progressive environment. … Anyone reading this is now interacting with a family that will be sleeping in their car. … I first moved to Mill Valley in 2003, when I rented two different, wonderful mother-in-law units. They are Airbnbs now, no longer available for a family or anyone to make their home. We are becoming Nomadland, which will get worse unless the community decides to do something about it.