When Home Has Wheels
What We Do Not See When We Pass Each Other on the Road
By HH Prince DeAndre, Duke of Hanumanteshwar
There was nothing about the van that would have made me look twice if it had passed me on the highway.
That may be the most important thing I learned.
We spend our lives moving beside people whose stories we cannot see. We stop next to them at traffic lights. We walk past them in grocery stores. We sit near them in restaurants. We watch someone pull into a parking space, step out of a vehicle and disappear into whatever comes next. Without realizing it, we complete the rest of their story ourselves. We assume they came from somewhere that looks roughly like where we came from, and eventually they will return to somewhere they call home.
But what happens when the vehicle we barely notice is the home?
I have known Edward for about a year. When he lost his housing, I knew something of what he was going through, and I told him that when I was back in the Washington area, I would meet up with him.
So this did not begin as research.
It began as something I had told someone I would do.
While staying with my friend Beverly in Washington, DC, I finally had that opportunity. Edward picked me up, and I climbed into the van that had become much more than transportation.
Edward works full-time. He is a student. He is a gay man. He is also a person with a disability.
And right now, he lives in his van.
I knew all of those facts separately.
Sitting beside him made me understand that Edward does not live them separately.
That is where the story changed for me.
We left Beverly’s place and headed out of Washington toward Maryland. The city began opening into the familiar geography of the DMV. Highway signs pointed toward Gaithersburg, Germantown and Frederick. We traveled along Great Seneca Highway, past shopping centers, parking lots, trees, gas stations and the steady traffic of people going somewhere.
From the passenger seat, everything looked completely ordinary.
Cars passed us. We passed other cars. Someone was probably going to work. Someone was heading home. Someone was going shopping. Someone was late. Someone was tired. Someone was thinking about dinner.
And among all those vehicles was ours.
The difference was that Edward was not simply driving from one part of his life to another.
A large part of his life was traveling with us.
What a Front Door Quietly Does for Us
I had gone out thinking I wanted to understand what it was like to live in a van.
Instead, I began thinking about everything a house or apartment does without asking us to notice it.
When most of us walk out the front door in the morning, we leave an entire infrastructure behind. Our bed stays where it is. Clothes remain hanging somewhere. Food waits in a refrigerator. There is a bathroom we expect to still be there when we return. There are electrical outlets. Running water. Somewhere to put a bag down. Somewhere to receive mail. Somewhere to close a door, take off our shoes and temporarily stop explaining ourselves to the world.
We carry our keys and our phones and call that leaving home.
But when home moves with you, those ordinary functions get scattered across a city.
A grocery store begins to mean something different.
So does a public restroom.
A parking lot.
An electrical outlet.
A place where nobody asks why you have been sitting there for two hours.
A place where you can safely close your eyes.
A place where your body can rest.
A place where you can study.
A place where you can simply be still.
We stopped at a Giant Food during the day. People walked in and out with bags and shopping carts. Cars arrived and left. Nothing remarkable happened.
That ordinary scene stayed with me precisely because nothing remarkable happened.
If someone had watched Edward go into the store, they would not necessarily have seen a person experiencing homelessness.
They would have seen a man shopping.
And maybe that is part of what we are missing.
We have created a visual language for homelessness in America. We recognize a tent beneath an overpass. We recognize someone sleeping on a sidewalk. We recognize belongings piled beside a person on a street corner.
Those realities exist.
But they are not the whole picture.
Sometimes homelessness clocks in for work.
Sometimes it goes to class.
Sometimes it has a driver’s license.
Sometimes it has insurance.
Sometimes it is disabled.
Sometimes it is gay.
Sometimes it buys groceries.
Sometimes it completes an assignment.
Sometimes it pulls up beside us at a red light and looks exactly like everybody else waiting for the light to change.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that homelessness can include sleeping in a place not intended for human habitation, including a car.
CDC:
https://www.cdc.gov/homelessness-and-health/about/index.html
That definition sounds clinical until you are sitting inside the vehicle.
Then I Met Adelina
The day became more complicated when we met Adelina.
Adelina is a fashion designer and considerably older than Edward. Her age mattered because suddenly I was not looking at one generation or one pathway into vehicle living. I was hearing from two people at different stages of life who had arrived at something that could look almost identical from the outside for completely different reasons.
Adelina told me that she chose to live that way because she wanted to get out of debt.
That stopped me.
For her, living unconventionally was not simply where she landed after something went wrong. She described it as a strategy. She reduced the financial pressure she was carrying, worked her way out of debt and told me she never allowed herself to return to the position she had been in before.
She now has housing.
Her creative work continued too. Adelina did not stop being a fashion designer because of the way she was living. Her professional identity, creativity and financial rebuilding existed at the same time.
Adelina Fashion Designer:
http://fashiondesigneradelina.blogspot.com/2010/10/blog-post.html?m=1
I kept thinking about the contrast between her story and Edward’s.
Adelina entered vehicle living intentionally as part of escaping debt.
Edward entered this chapter after losing housing.
Adelina is from an older generation.
Edward is younger.
She has now returned to conventional housing.
Edward is still living in the van.
The same visible condition, a person living from a vehicle, was carrying two completely different stories.
That is something we often miss when we talk about homelessness, van life or housing insecurity as though the words tell us why someone is there.
They do not.
A van may represent freedom for one person. For another, it may be the safest available option after losing housing. For someone else, it may be a temporary financial strategy. It may represent independence from a shelter. It may be a bridge. It may be survival. It may even be several of those things at once.
You cannot know by looking at the van.
You have to know the person.
The Shelter
Later, we stopped at a men’s shelter Edward had personally used.
That changed the atmosphere of the day for me.
This was not a shelter I was visiting because I had selected it from a research report. It was part of Edward’s own housing history.
Men were outside sitting in lawn chairs. Others were gathered around tables talking. Some were smoking. A cigarette was purchased during the stop.
There was no spectacle.
No dramatic image that could summarize homelessness for an audience.
There were men sitting together.
Talking.
Passing time.
Being human.
I found myself watching the lawn chairs.
There was something familiar about them.
Men sitting outside talking could have been at a family reunion. A backyard barbecue. A neighborhood gathering. A park. Someone’s porch.
The location changed the label society might place on the men.
It did not change what they were doing.
They were creating community.
That may sound like a small observation, but I think it matters because homelessness is so often discussed in a language that removes ordinary life from the people experiencing it.
We count people. We count beds. We count tents. We count shelter capacity. We debate budgets. We argue about where people should be allowed to sleep.
But human beings continue doing the things human beings have always done inside all of those statistics.
They form friendships. They talk. They disagree. They laugh. They get tired. They become frustrated. They want privacy. They want dignity. They want someone to recognize them when they walk up.
Housing instability does not suspend humanity.
Across metropolitan Washington, the 2026 Point-in-Time count found 9,790 people experiencing homelessness on a single day. The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments describes that count as a snapshot, not every person who will move through homelessness or unstable housing during an entire year.
Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments:
https://www.mwcog.org/newsroom/2026/05/13/cog-report-indicates-slight-increase-in-regional-homelessness/
And that distinction matters because people move.
Adelina moved.
Edward moved.
Someone enters a shelter.
Someone leaves one.
Someone loses an apartment.
Someone gets approved for another.
Someone moves into a vehicle.
Someone finally receives a key.
A government count freezes one night.
A human life refuses to stay frozen.
Edward Is Not One Policy Problem
The longer I spent with Edward, the more I thought about how easily institutions separate the parts of a person that life forces them to carry together.
There is housing policy.
There is disability policy.
There is LGBTQIA+ policy.
There is mental-health policy.
There is education policy.
There is employment policy.
But Edward does not wake up as six different policy categories.
He wakes up as Edward.
He is gay while he is working. He is disabled while he is studying. He remains a student when he returns to the van. His disability does not disappear because he has a job. His housing instability does not erase his ambition. His sexuality does not become irrelevant because tonight’s immediate question might be where he can safely sleep.
All of those realities live in the same person at the same time.
That is what intersectionality looks like when it stops being an academic word.
For people with disabilities, the question of housing cannot be reduced to whether four walls are technically available. Accessibility means asking whether a space works for the body that must live there. Can someone rest when their body requires it? Can they access a bathroom? Can medication be stored properly? Can they tolerate heat or cold? Can they navigate a shelter environment? Can they get to medical appointments while also getting to work and school?
And disability itself is not always visible.
A person can look perfectly capable to a stranger standing ten feet away while carrying a body that requires accommodations the stranger cannot see.
National homelessness research shows that disability and homelessness frequently intersect, while the Hope Center’s student research identifies students with disabilities among those experiencing particularly high levels of basic-needs insecurity.
National Alliance to End Homelessness:
https://endhomelessness.org/people-with-unaddressed-health-conditions/
Hope Center for Student Basic Needs:
https://hope.temple.edu/research/hope-center-basic-needs-survey/2023-2024-student-basic-needs-survey-report
Again, the statistics became more meaningful once there was a person beside me.
Gay, Adult, and Experiencing Housing Instability
Edward being a gay man added another layer that I did not want to leave buried beneath the broader word homelessness.
LGBTQIA+ homelessness is often discussed as a youth issue, and there are serious reasons for that. Family rejection and instability among young LGBTQIA+ people deserve attention.
But queer people grow older.
They become workers.
Students.
Parents.
Professionals.
People with disabilities.
People carrying debt.
People trying to keep health insurance.
People paying rent.
People who lose housing.
People who need somewhere to sleep after age twenty-five.
Research from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that 17 percent of sexual-minority adults reported having experienced homelessness at some point in their lives, compared with 6 percent of cisgender straight adults in the comparison population. Among sexual-minority respondents who had experienced homelessness, 71 percent first experienced it as adults.
Williams Institute:
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/lgbt-homelessness-us/
Adult LGBTQIA+ homelessness is part of the story too.
Edward made that fact impossible for me to keep at a statistical distance.
And being LGBTQIA+ can introduce questions into housing and shelter that another person may never have to ask.
Will I be respected here?
Can I be open about who I am?
Will someone harass me?
Will I have to make myself smaller to remain safe?
Do I have to calculate which part of myself I disclose simply to get through the night?
I am not saying every LGBTQIA+ person has the same experience.
We do not.
But identity does not disappear when housing does.
The Mental Load We Cannot Photograph
Then there is mental health.
I want to be particularly careful here because homelessness should never be treated as proof that somebody is mentally ill.
I am not diagnosing Edward, and I would not use one difficult moment in someone’s day to manufacture a medical explanation for his life.
But mental health is larger than diagnosis.
There is also the mental load of uncertainty.
Where will I park?
Can I stay there?
Will somebody knock on the window?
Where is the next bathroom?
Where can I shower?
Where can I study?
Do I have enough fuel?
Will the van start tomorrow?
Can I make it to work?
Where can I rest?
What happens if the weather changes?
What happens if something breaks?
What happens next?
The CDC identifies stress, uncertainty and threats to safety during homelessness as risks to mental health.
https://www.cdc.gov/homelessness-and-health/about/index.html
That does not tell me what Edward was feeling.
But it does tell us that constantly having to solve basic questions the housed world rarely notices has a human cost.
At one point during our day, Edward began having difficulty deciding what we should do next.
I noticed it.
I could have kept pushing.
I could have suggested another stop. Asked another question. Taken another photograph. Maybe another hour would have produced a scene that made this article more dramatic.
But people are not raw material.
That thought became very clear to me.
I had gone out with someone I had known for a year, not with a subject I was entitled to consume.
So I asked Edward to take me back to Beverly’s place.
What Happened When I Went Back Inside
Walking back into Beverly’s home felt different.
There was a door.
There was a bathroom.
Running water.
Electricity.
Somewhere to put my things.
A place where I already knew I was allowed to sleep.
Nothing had changed about the house while I was gone.
Something had changed about the way I noticed it.
I could stop deciding where I was going next because I had arrived.
Edward still had to carry that question with him.
That difference stayed with me.
So did the financial reality surrounding everything I had witnessed.
Montgomery County is not an inexpensive place to stabilize a life. Montgomery Planning reported a median gross monthly rent of $2,097 in 2024, with 55 percent of renters paying at least $2,000 per month and 47 percent considered housing-cost burdened.
Montgomery Planning:
https://montgomeryplanning.org/blog-design/2025/09/findings-from-the-2024-american-community-survey-montgomery-county-maryland-and-the-united-states/
Those numbers do not tell us Edward’s income.
They do not tell us why every decision in his housing story happened.
I will not use regional statistics to invent personal facts.
But the numbers tell us about the environment surrounding him.
And they complicate one of America’s favorite responses to homelessness:
Get a job.
Edward has one.
Go to school.
Edward is doing that too.
The Hope Center’s 2023–2024 Student Basic Needs Survey included 74,350 students at 91 institutions across 16 states. Among those respondents, 48 percent reported housing insecurity and 14 percent reported homelessness. The researchers make clear that the participating institutions are not a nationally representative sample, but the findings reveal how easily housing insecurity can exist inside a classroom without announcing itself.
We see the student.
We do not see where the student slept.
We see the assignment.
We do not see where it was written.
We see the laptop.
We do not know where it was charged.
We see someone arrive at work.
We do not see what had to happen before they clocked in.
We see the person driving.
We do not know whether the vehicle is taking them home or whether home is the thing they are driving.
And then there is the question that may reveal the fragility of the entire arrangement better than anything else.
What happens when the van breaks?
For most of us, putting a vehicle into a repair shop means losing transportation.
When the vehicle is also where you live, the mechanic can temporarily take possession of your transportation, your bedroom, your storage and your refuge at the same time.
From the outside, it is still just a van.
From the inside, it may be almost everything.
Two Generations, Two Roads
I began the day thinking I was going to learn about van life.
By the time I returned to Beverly’s, I understood that there is no single thing called van life.
Adelina taught me that.
Edward taught me that.
Adelina, an older fashion designer, told me she entered vehicle living deliberately because she wanted to escape debt. She used an unconventional way of living to change her financial circumstances, moved forward and now has housing. She told me she never found herself back in the financial position she had once been in.
Edward’s road is different.
He lost housing.
He has used a men’s shelter.
He works full-time.
He attends school.
He is gay.
He has a disability.
And right now, his home has wheels.
I do not want to turn Adelina into an inspirational formula or Edward into a tragedy.
Neither would be fair.
Adelina’s solution belonged to her circumstances.
Edward’s life belongs to him.
What matters is what their stories reveal when placed beside each other.
Two generations.
Two paths.
Two relationships with housing.
One visible object that could make a stranger assume their stories were the same.
They were not.
That may be what we are not talking about enough.
Housing status does not tell us how someone arrived there.
It does not tell us whether they chose the road or whether the road became the remaining option.
It does not tell us about disability.
It does not tell us about sexuality.
It does not tell us what is happening with someone’s mental health.
It does not tell us whether they are working.
It does not tell us whether they are studying.
It does not tell us how much debt they escaped, how much housing they lost, what they are rebuilding, or what they still hope to become.
We see the van.
We do not see everything inside it.
And I do not mean the belongings.
I mean the life.
The next time I pass someone living from a vehicle, I do not think I will wonder first, Why are they doing that?
I think I will wonder what I cannot see.
What happened before this?
What does this arrangement solve for them?
What does it make harder?
What part of their identity is being accommodated here, and what part is being forced to adapt?
What does their body need?
What is their mind carrying?
Where are they going?
And what would it take for them to reach whatever home means to them?
There is a version of van life that is about freedom.
That story is real.
But it cannot be allowed to erase the version that is about debt, disability, housing loss, affordability, safety, identity or survival.
Sometimes wheels mean adventure.
Sometimes wheels mean financial recovery.
Sometimes wheels mean independence.
Sometimes wheels mean there was nowhere else to go.
Sometimes they mean all of those things at different points in the same life.
From the next lane, we cannot tell.
And maybe that is the lesson I carried back through Beverly’s front door.
The housing crisis is not always hidden because people are invisible. Sometimes it is hidden because the people experiencing it look so much like everybody else.
We pass them at traffic lights.
We stand behind them in stores.
We sit beside them in classrooms.
We work alongside them.
We may know them for a year before we ever sit inside the place they call home.
And while we think we are simply passing another vehicle on the road, an entire human life may be traveling beside us.
Research note: This essay combines my firsthand observations and conversations with Edward and Adelina with public research from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, Montgomery Planning, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Hope Center for Student Basic Needs, the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, and national homelessness research. Regional and national statistics provide context; they are not used to presume personal financial, medical or psychological facts that Edward or Adelina did not share.