Chrystal Audet tried to get comfortable in what she called her “bedroom” — the back seat of her eight-year-old Ford Fusion. To stretch her legs, she had to leave a passenger door ajar, but September nights are raw in the Pacific Northwest, with sheets of rain that cut to the bone.
From her own “bedroom” in the front seat, her 26-year-old daughter Cierra Audet asked her to close it.
“We have to get out of this,” Ms. Audet said to herself as she pulled a comforter against the cold and struggled to fall asleep in a parking lot in Kirkland, Wash.
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Ms. Audet, 49, earns over $72,000 a year as a social worker for the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services. But a combination of bad luck, bad debt and a bad credit score priced her out of her apartment in Bellevue, another suburb of Seattle, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. With an eviction looming, she put her furniture in storage this spring and began parking the sedan in a U-shaped parking lot outside a church in Kirkland.
The car, her biggest investment, became her home — the roof turned into a dining table, the trunk a closet. And a weathered stretch of blacktop provided by a Methodist church became her yard, her neighborhood and her safe place.
Around the country, real estate is being set aside for people like Ms. Audet in the form of parking lots. Dozens of such lots have opened in the last five years, with new ones being announced every few months, including as far east as Pennsylvania and North Carolina. They are sprinkled across the Midwest in Green Bay, Wis., and Duluth, Minn. And they dot the spine of the Pacific Northwest, providing a safe harbor for a growing cohort of working Americans who are wedged in the unforgiving middle. They earn too little to afford rent but too much to receive government assistance and have turned their cars into a form of affordable housing.
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The idea of providing a parking lot for homeless parkers is nearly two decades old, with the first known lot opening in the shadow of Santa Barbara’s mansions in 2004. But the idea didn’t take off nationally for some time.
The Lake Washington United Methodist Church began experimenting with offering a beachhead for the “mobile homeless” in 2011 in response to Seattle’s “scofflaw ordinance,” which called for the impounding of cars that had accrued multiple parking tickets, a law that was disastrous for people forced to live in their cars. “Our simple idea was, ‘Hey, if they’re in our parking lot, they won’t get parking tickets. And they won’t get booted and towed,’” said Karina O’Malley, who helped create the program.
Now it is one of 12 in Washington State.
“Tens of thousands of people are living in their vehicles,” said Graham J. Pruss, an applied anthropologist studying the trend, who heads the National Vehicle Residency Collective. “It’s huge.”
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‘One Bill Too Many’
In 2001, Ms. Audet posted a bad check. It went to court and ended up on her record, one of several setbacks that have damaged her credit.
Her free fall into unsustainable debt began last December when her car made a horrible, sputtering sound, and died. With poor credit, the only loan she could find came at a punishing cost: For the 2015 Ford Fusion with over 100,000 miles, she is being charged interest of 27.99 percent, equaling a payment of $398 per month, one-tenth of her take-home pay.
Medical bills in the thousands arrived for her Crohn’s disease. She missed two rent payments. And then the landlord raised her rent $248 a month.
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“It was a case of one bill too many,” Ms. Audet said.
Down the spiral that led her to homelessness were a series of forks — choices between bad and very bad that she made, many in moments of desperation. She spent a week at a hotel. Expedia offered to break up her payments, which she is now paying off at the rate of $138 a month. To avoid her unpaid rent going to collections, she signed an installment plan, agreeing to pay $495 per month.
By midsummer, Ms. Audet’s take-home pay of nearly $4,300 a month was hollowed out by bills totaling nearly $2,600, leaving her with too little to pay for an apartment in a market where the median rent is $2,200.
She finally found the parking lot after seeing a news story about parking programs for homeless people. A tiny house is typically 300 square feet. For months, Ms. Audet, her daughter and their cream-colored mutt Coda lived out of a space that was no more than 30 square feet.
The fact that she was able to hang on to her car allowed her to maintain a semblance of normalcy. Almost no one knew her secret. Each morning, Ms. Audet used a portable toilet to get ready for work, then commuted to the downtown Seattle office of the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, where she spent her day sitting behind a plexiglass partition across from some of the city’s most destitute residents.
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“There’s no judgment here,” she told the desperate people seeking government assistance, including a man clutching a medical certificate proving that he is blind. She helped him qualify for disability benefits. “It could be me on the other side of this glass,” she told them.
She, in fact, was on the other side of the glass — her b
