“Tell me about living in your car.”

“What would you like to know? General questions, like how to organize your glove box to make your passenger seat a functional kitchen? Or personal ones, like why was I living out of my truck when I hold two degrees?”

Actually, both are good questions to ask of someone who has lived in their car - someone we’ll call “Kevin”.

“My father was rather horrified that after six years of university I spent a few months living in the car, so an alias of some type may be better.”

Exactly how does a well-educated, gainfully employed, 24-year old man end up sleeping in his 1998 Dodge pickup truck?

Well, like many “car dwellers”, Kevin found himself inbetween, - inbetween apartments, inbetween paycheques, inbetween stages of his life. After completing a graduate program, he found paid employment in northern Ontario, some distance from his university apartment which, unsure of his future, he’d let go.

Facing a six-week lag time before receiving his first paycheque, his options included borrowing money, couch-surfing, or living in his truck, which for him was hardly different than camping in the woods - something he’s accustomed to as a biologist but wasn’t then inclined to do as the area was home to an aggressive bear population.

So his truck became his home, any wooded spot just off the highway his nightly address, the driver’s seat his bed, the dashboard his dining table, the glove-box his kitchen utensil drawer, and the passenger seat his clothes closet and larder.

“Every now and then I’d crash at a buddy’s house and get to sleep all the way horizontal, and that just felt amazing,” says Kevin, reflecting on his nights spent curled up on the truck’s reclined driver’s seat with a seatbelt poking his back.

“Then when my paycheque came in and I actually got my apartment, it made me appreciate the hell out of that!”

In the hierarchy of homelessness - and sadly there is such a thing - Kevin’s situation (living in a car knowing it’s truly temporary) ranks near the top.

Actually, just owning a vehicle rockets you to the top of the list, though the type of car makes a huge difference.

The 1982 Honda Civic that actor Colin Cunningham slept in while attending film school in Vancouver was hardly spacious.

“When I slept in my car at the park I’d have to move the stuff from the back seat and put it on the hood [otherwise] I couldn’t recline the driver’s seat. And I’d sleep with one eye open in case someone took all my stuff.”

The actor, who ironically now stars in a HBOCanada show called “Living In My Car”, recalls rising early. “At something like 6:18 in the morning the sprinklers would come on and I’ve had to move the stuff that was on the hood because it would get soaked.” He’d then snooze sitting in the front seat until a custodian unlocked the park’s public restrooms.

Sidebar: "Living in Your Car", the TV Show Hollywood is full of stories about celebrities (William Shatner, Jim Carrey, Hillary Swank) who, before becoming famous, spent time living in their car. Sadly, there are also those (J.D. Fortune, Boston Celtic Ray Williams) who, having fallen from celebrity status, ended up homeless and sleeping in their car. It’s that fallen-from-grace storyline that sets the scene for the HBOCanada show Living In Your Car. Viewers can be forgiven their initial lack of sympathy for lead character Steve Unger (played by Canadian actor John Ralston) a cocky, corporate executive who served time for fraud and racketeering. Now jobless and homeless, he’s lost everything - except his car - in which he’s forced to sleep. Hardly a rusty clunker though, his ride is a luxury sedan. (The brand’s never actually mentioned - something about not having official clearance from Rolls Royce.) There’s also some murky reasoning about why he doesn’t just sell the pricey car, though in the second season, which just finished filming in Toronto and Hamilton, he does change vehicles. Homelessness, while a timely, important issue, is rather a sensitive premise on which to base a television show. “There’s only one way to write that one,” says George F. Walker (This Is Wonderland) who co-writes the series with Dani Romain and Joseph Kay. Explaining the fallen executive storyline, Walker says, “This is much more contradictory. We shoot everything on location, so we spend half our time in kind of what you might call the edgier side of the world and the half in the corporate world. It just gave us a broader palate to work with.” Directed by David Steinberg (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm), the show is an odd hybrid of comedy and drama that involves numerous plotlines and characters, including a community of car-dwellers whom Unger befriends. “You can’t help but kind of like the guy because he’s just eternally optimistic.” says John Ralson of his character. “I mean, even though he ends up in the streets in this, sort of, car community, he’s just bound and determined to get his life back. It’s only a matter of time and hard work.” For the sake of the show however, hopefully it takes a few more television seasons before he’s no longer living in his car.

There are those, like Sara Ciantar, who first decide to live in their car, then go out and find a suitable vehicle.

“I was trying to figure out how to make my life work. I was working two jobs and going to school fulltime, and I would never be home” explains the then 21-year old who reasoned, “I can’t afford a car and a home, so what about a car that is a home?”

That thought ultimately led her to living in a converted 1982 Ford Econoline van, - for five years.

Attending university in Vancouver while working jobs in two different towns, the singer/songwriter found the van - outfitted with a bed, furnace, stove, water heater, toilet and shower - brought flexibility to her rather nomadic lifestyle.

“I would park where I needed to be the next morning,” she explains, conceding that British Columbia’s milder weather and the (then) less strict parking regulations made van-dwelling easier.

It is however, one thing to be an adventurous, healthy, young person living an alternate lifestyle or sleeping rough for a while, it’s something different entirely to be a senior, or parent with a child, living in a car on a cold city street with no prospects for the foreseeable future.

In Canada there are 200,000 and 300,000 homeless people - an estimate as the homeless are by their very nature difficult to count. Many cities, including Toronto, do conduct one-day surveys, counting the people with no-fixed-address found on the streets, in shelters, treatment and correctional facilities. But, by their own admission, these enumerations do not include the “hidden homeless” - people without proper shelter who remain out of the public eye by squatting in abandoned buildings, couch-surfing or living in cars.

The national charity, Raising The Roof, estimates that 80 per cent of homeless people are rarely seen by the public. Indeed, most people who live in their cars work hard at remaining inconspicuous, both on the streets and in their daily lives, often hiding their lifestyle from family, friends, and co-workers.

“In my experience, one universal about people living in their vehicles is that, if they do so for any length of time, they must have some source of income” explains Dr. Michele Wakin of Massachusetts’s Bridgewater State University, who did her dissertation on people living in vehicles. While without rent or mortgage payments, vehicular expenses (licences, insurance, maintenance, gas) must still be met and many car-dwellers are actively employed, adroitly juggling work and everyday life with the complications of living in a car.

“The constant search for safe parking and resources, such as showers and food, requires a lot of shuffling, a lot of organization, something I don't think most people associate with homelessness,” says Dr. Wakin. “Yet the resources that vehicle living potentially affords are far and away superior to those offered by street or shelter living - namely, legal ownership, the security of a locked door, autonomy and mobility.”

However just finding a place to park each night isn’t easy. Overnight parking is forbidden on most Canadian streets.

Many cities, like Toronto, have three-hour parking restrictions on public roads, while others (Saanich B.C.) have specific by-laws against sleeping in cars.

City parks close at night, likewise public transit and municipal parking lots. Industrial areas are patrolled by security and police. Parking on private property, even seemingly abandoned lots, brings the risk of charges and fines for trespassing.

Safety is a concern in isolated spots, yet on suburban streets vigilant residents tend to call police.

For those living in their cars invisibility is the goal.

“I’m amazed I got away with it for as long as I did,” says Colin Cunningham of his weeks spent parked on Vancouver streets. “Sometimes I would drive around to different places so I wouldn’t call attention to myself. It was a real drag, I do not look back with nostalgia.”

With spots on unpatrolled streets a rarity, many car-dwellers try to blend into parking lots at 24-hour stores, restaurants and truck stops, which offer the added bonus of access to bathrooms, water, food, and garbage disposal.

The steadily-growing number of car-dwellers in some cities has led to the development of unique programs to assist these homeless - and deal with the inevitable parking and citizen complaints.

In Santa Barbara, California the New Beginnings Counselling Center runs a Safe Parking Program which ccurrently utilizes 23 parking lots – provided by churches, non-profits and the county - to ensure safe parking for 110 people who live in their cars.

Screened participants must have a current driver’s license, license plates, and insurance, and agree to abide by a set of rules, including curfews. Each is assigned a parking spot and issued a permit, which is reviewed monthly, providing staff the opportunity for frequent contact, counseling and case management.

A similar overnight parking program in Eugene, Oregon is run by the St. Vincent de Paul Society, but no such programs exist in Canada - not even seasonal ones.

Having recently moved to Toronto from more temperate British Columbia, veteran van-dweller Sara Ciantar says, “I don’t think I’ll be living in a vehicle here though. It’s a very different climate,” then adds with sincerity, “My sympathies to those who do live in vehicles here.”