Hiding in Plain Sight: Understanding the Everyday Practices and Challenges of Car Dwellers

Paper Title

Hiding in Plain Sight: Understanding the Everyday Practices and Challenges of Car Dwellers

Publication Info

• Topic area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) study on vehicle dwelling as housing insecurity and lifestyle choice.
• Keywords: Vehicle dwelling, car living, homelessness, houselessness, infrastructuring, mobility, online communities, public spaces, technology design, identity negotiation.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Vehicle dwelling is underexplored in HCI research, particularly as a form of housing insecurity. Existing studies focus on vanlife or digital nomadism, neglecting the unique constraints of car living and the needs of individuals living in vehicles out of necessity.
• Significance: Understanding car dwellers' challenges and practices is crucial for designing technologies that address their diverse needs, improve their quality of life, and support their infrastructural competence.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has examined ICTs for people experiencing homelessness (PEH) and technologies for digital nomads and vanlifers. However, car dwellers occupy a distinct position between homelessness and nomadism, requiring tailored technological interventions.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Thematic analysis of posts and comments from r/urbancarliving, an online community for car dwellers, to understand their lived experiences, challenges, and identity negotiations.
• Novelty:
  1. Empirical insights into car dwellers’ daily practices and the role of technology in supporting their infrastructuring work.
  2. Conceptual framing of car dwelling as a liminal state between homelessness and nomadism.
  3. Identification of infrastructural competence as a factor shaping identity and resilience.
  4. Design recommendations for technologies supporting car dwellers’ diverse needs and identities.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Data collection from Reddit (r/urbancarliving) using Arctic Shift, focusing on posts and comments from 2020–2025.
  • Inductive thematic analysis of 150 posts and 2,692 comments to identify themes related to daily practices, challenges, and identity.
  • Ethical considerations to safeguard user privacy and anonymity.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Car dwellers creatively repurpose vehicles and external infrastructures to meet basic needs like hygiene, cooking, temperature control, and sleep.
  • Parking strategies prioritize safety and proximity to essential infrastructures, supported by digital tools like maps and mobile apps.
  • Identity negotiations reveal distinctions between necessity-driven (homeless) and lifestyle-driven (houseless) car dwellers, with some shifting identities over time.
  • Tensions exist within the community due to differing orientations toward car living.
• Advantage over baselines: The study bridges gaps in prior HCI research by addressing the unique challenges of car dwellers, particularly those living in cars out of necessity, and providing actionable design insights.
• Experiments / evaluation: Analysis of 500 threads from r/urbancarliving subreddit, focusing on firsthand experiences and excluding unrelated content. Data saturation achieved after coding 150 posts.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Findings are geographically limited to the Global North, primarily the U.S.
  • Demographic factors like age, gender, and race are underexplored.
  • Self-selection bias due to reliance on Reddit data excludes car dwellers with limited digital access.
  • Future work should use ethnographic methods to capture broader perspectives and explore diverse contexts.

Summary

This paper investigates the lived experiences of car dwellers through thematic analysis of an online community, uncovering their infrastructuring work to meet basic needs and navigate public spaces. It highlights the diversity in motivations (necessity vs. lifestyle) and identity negotiations within this population, emphasizing the role of infrastructural competence in shaping resilience. The findings inform HCI research on mobility and dwelling, offering design recommendations for technologies that support car dwellers’ diverse needs. Future work should address geographic and demographic limitations to broaden understanding and improve support for this growing population.