Priced out of traditional housing, more Americans are living in RVs

MEDFORD, Ore. — Days before his 12th birthday, Dante Reynolds zipped past rows of tightly packed RVs on his kick scooter until he arrived at the 22-foot travel trailer his family calls home. It was parked that week in a southern Oregon campground off a highway.

Inside, his mom was quickly washing a pile of dishes before the water in their RV’s tank ran out. He leaned his scooter next to his sister’s “Frozen”-themed tricycle and came inside to help make lunch. The RV doesn’t have any tables or chairs, so he sat on a makeshift bed covered by a SpongeBob blanket with a cutting board on his lap, chopping peaches, apples and kiwis while his mom cooked hamburger patties on the RV’s small gas range.

“This lifestyle doesn’t accommodate things like sitting at a table,” said his mom, Andrea Stitt.

Childhood looks a lot different for Dante than it did four months ago, before his mom lost the day care business she was running and the family was evicted from their four-bedroom home about three hours away. Now, living out of a roughly 175-square-foot RV with his mom and 6-year-old sister, Dante’s space is limited to a twin bed wedged under a loft, cordoned off with privacy curtains. Without regular Wi-Fi, he rarely plays video games anymore. Most of his belongings are confined to a couple of small bins, and his friends are hours away.

When the family is unable to afford a spot at a campground, which can cost $25 to $45 a night, they park on remote federal lands, which are free for two weeks. But those sites don’t come with water or electricity and have spotty cell service. At times, the family has bathed and washed their clothes in a river and gone to the bathroom in the woods to conserve the water in their RV’s tank.

“I’ve adapted to this lifestyle because we have to adapt,” said Dante, who now spends most of his free time outdoors exploring and started an online school program this fall. “If we don’t adapt, we won’t change, and if we don’t change, we’ll be mad, and if we’re mad, that just sucks. You don’t want to be mad.”

It’s a lifestyle adjustment that data indicates a growing number of Americans are making. As housing costs rise beyond what many families can afford, more people are looking for shelter outside the traditional housing market. About 486,000 people live full-time in an RV, which appears to be more than twice as many as in 2021, according to survey data from the RV Industry Association. About a third have children, and a vast majority earn less than $75,0000 a year. A separate survey by the Census Bureau found a similar trend: In 2023, the most recent data available, it estimated 342,000 people were living in an RV, boat or van, an increase of 41% from 2019.

For many, this is not the lifestyle of nomadic young professionals working remotely as they travel the country, chronicling their van life on social media. Nor is it the more traditional image of the retiree crossing national parks off their bucket list in a $100,000 motorcoach with the freedom of healthy retirement savings.

Rather, it’s the experience of lower-income Americans, making hourly wages as child care workers or home health aides or living off Social Security checks, with no place else to go in a housing market increasingly catering to the wealthiest slices of society.

Housing costs that soared during the pandemic have shown little sign of coming down, with the gap between the median household income and how much income is necessary to afford payments on a median-priced home reaching a near 10-year high last year, according to an NBC News analysis of housing data.

“There’s just a huge housing affordability challenge in this country, and that’s part of a larger cost-of-living challenge I think we’re generally having,” said Dan Emmanuel, director of federal research for the nonprofit National Low Income Housing Coalition. “It’s structural, particularly for the lowest income group. In virtually every housing market, it’s there.”

A slowdown in the labor market has made it increasingly difficult for many families to make ends meet. Applications for unemployment benefits jumped this month to the highest level in almost four years. At the same time, prices continue to tick up, driven by increases in household expenses such as groceries, gasoline and electricity.

Some say living full time out of an RV has freed…