Author lives in car

Earlier this year I attended a music gig at the Ruby Bay Theatre in Mapua and struck up a conversation with someone during the intermission. When I told them that I live in my car because I can’t afford rent or power costs, their candid response took me a little by surprise: “You don’t look like someone who lives in their car.”
For me, deciding to live in my car was not a lifestyle choice. It was born out of necessity. I had two options: Take a room that was more expensive than my current income could afford and hope my job hours would increase, or move into my car and dispense with the struggle to pay rent completely. The year was 2018 and I was at a point in my life where the renting treadmill was beginning to creak very loudly. I no longer wanted to repeat the experience of the last 20 years: moving from house to house, getting frustrated with flatmates, getting kicked out of my paid residence because the owner didn’t want me on the property during the daytime. None of these flats, rooms, or sleep-outs, ever felt like a home.
I made a snap decision. “I’m going to start living in my car.”
There are people who choose this lifestyle because it represents a throwback to a simpler life; others who have been made homeless out of rising rental costs that outstrip their wages; some through retirement dreams of travelling. Others, like me, who just find it cost-effective and are finally able to save money.
I made my new home on the side of the Motueka River, 10km out of town, where the initial struggles to stay warm during winter were overcome with many layers of blankets and clothing (there were mornings I actually woke up sweating). I did not have a house-bus, a motorhome, or a van: I had a Nissan Cefiro 4-door sedan. Initially, I could only put the passenger seat partway down to sleep on because my belongings took up so much space in the back seat.
One of my first goals was to get valuable items like my stereo, computer, and PlayStation out of the car – anything that would tempt thieves to break in. I managed to palm these off to friends. Once that was achieved, I began organising the car (honestly, like any kind of housework, something that never ends) and got a basic setup in the back seats and boot worked out with an op-shop fry pan (still going strong), cooking equipment, and clothing tucked into their own space.
I didn’t know camping gas-cookers even existed, so was forced into doing something I had never done before: build a campfire (if only to get me started with a morning coffee). It took experimentation and lots of failures to get something capable of frying up potatoes, broccoli, and kumara over a fire.
For the next six months, I walked and walked, wrote and wrote, talked to locals who came down to the river, bought food from foodstalls at the end of driveways – experienced life like I had never imagined I would. This was something completely different and unexpected, and proved just how capable I could be when plans are thrown out the window.
Oh and I gew a beard. I began to look like someone who lived in their car.
Since 2018, I have upgraded to a stationwagon and can lie down in the back with my legs stretched out. I have a reading-light above me with two or three books at my side to choose as nightly reading, or a laptop for watching films on. I have enough storage space sectioned off alongside my bedding for two plastic clothes boxes, and at the end of these are the fry pans and cooking equipment. I cook over a hand-built campfire made from river rocks, and if it is wet or raining and I have shelter, I cook from the back of my car with a gas-cooker. If there is no shelter, then I will happily book a room in a motel or hostel (and do look for house-sitting options as well).
Every night when I snuggle into my duvet and blankets with layers of soft bedding beneath me, I feel pleasantly satisfied and filled with emotional warmth that I have finally created a home that is my own. It may not be a house with room to stand or roam around in, but that is what outside is for. This is what I love the most about my living arrangement: that when I need to stand up, I am outside. And I have never spent so much time outside in the beauty of the natural world since I was a child growing up on farms.
Has this style of living, after six years of committing to it, finally become a lifestyle choice? Would I choose a house if I could? I have wrestled with these questions, and I can honestly say that yes, when those months of cold weather arrive each year, I would choose a house. But once Spring and Summer return to the lands, I welcome this life of living in a car I have created.

Warwick Stubbs is the author of Two Left Feet, a collection of poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction, which takes the reader on a literary journey from the sunny hills of Tasman, to summer rain in Central Otago, down to Invercargill and back up again to the sandfly-ridden West Coast, as two travellers explore the struggles and joys of a close-knit relationship in an L300 van while exploring the landscape of Te Waipounamu. The book can be purchased directly for $20 from https://warstub.weebly.com/