Running on empty: In the nation’s most expensive gas market, Santa Cruz’s vehicular homeless face a new crisis

Day Pollini’s dream is to build a space where young girls learn how to make art through metal welding. She was on her way to making this dream a reality when the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown hit, collapsing her business. First came the loss of her client list, then the loss of her Oakland business space.

Although she and her daughter, Remy, did not have to worry about losing their housing because they lived in a recreational vehicle, they still had daily expenses to worry about, such as food, water, gas and doctor bills. Pollini took on freelance bookkeeping jobs to make ends meet, and for a few years after the pandemic, she kept trying to reconstruct all that she had worked toward in her spare time. She even attempted to band together dozens of Bay Area artists to rent a large building and create an artists’ collective, but that, too, failed. 

That was the last sign Pollini needed to fill up her early-2000s Mercedes sedan with her metalworking gear and her large RV with gas, and hit the road to relocate to Santa Cruz. She decided on Santa Cruz because she had grown up in a college town herself. She fondly recalled how Gainesville, Florida, was full of busy people outside in the fresh air, each with a purpose they were trying to seek. 

Two years later, however, Pollini has still not found a full-time job and has also been affected by a new struggle: nationwide inflation that has nearly doubled food and gas prices. 

Pollini managed to get a part-time job a year ago, where she commutes around 90 miles round-trip to Portola Valley once a week. Outside of daily tasks like going to the store or to a job interview, this is what a majority of her gas goes toward. 

But with the high gas prices, she said it’s been harder and harder to get over the hill to her job, especially since her car gets only 20 miles per gallon. She was hoping her boss would give her a raise to offset the high gas prices, but she said he hasn’t.

“I fill up all the time,” Pollini said, gesturing to the small silver car that she parks on the street each day in front of her RV.  “It sucks. … It takes me an hour to get there, but it’s worth it because it pays for stupid parking tickets and for little things like insurance.”

Pollini is far from alone in her precarious reality. Across Santa Cruz County and California, a growing demographic of vehicular unhoused residents find themselves caught in a silent squeeze. Once seen as a shelter against soaring housing costs, living out of a vehicle offers little immunity against the compounded pressures of inflation, local parking restrictions and gas price spikes. For this invisible population, every dollar added at the pump directly threatens their ability to look for work, visit family or simply stay mobile enough to avoid a ticket.

Starting in February, the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran caused a global energy crisis, resulting in a spike in prices in the spring that have remained above the national average for months. California has been hit particularly hard, regularly beating out Hawaii and Washington for the highest prices in the nation. 

Although gas prices have been at the forefront of the recent conversation surrounding inflation, the U.S. has been dealing with overall inflated costs for over five years. Driven mainly by supply-chain shortages and pandemic recovery spending, prices have stayed high in 2026 despite costs peaking in 2022. 

Inflation raises the cost of pretty much everything, including food, beverages, utilities and rent, which can cause many people to struggle when they’re not seeing the rising costs matched with a rising paycheck. Inflation also causes businesses to look for ways to save money quickly, which often leads to hiring freezes or layoffs because these have historically been some of the quickest ways to reduce costs. Even remote jobs have been jeopardized, because companies are pushing their employees back into offices to justify keeping commercial real estate.

“I have like 25 years’ experience with bookkeeping and payroll and office management and stuff like that and I ran my own business,” Pollini said. “So I just don’t understand why I haven’t gotten hardly any interviews, or even been called back or hired. And one of the things I’ve discovered is even locals have had a hard time getting work.”

It was already difficult to find a job that would work around her schedule, Pollini said, but now she doesn’t feel she can be picky because jobs are so scarce. RV living with a child complicates availability, she explained, which makes it hard to work a lot of standard or frequent eight-hour shifts. Tasks as simple as doing laundry or taking showers can take hours because there’s travel involved. Laundry must be done at a laundromat, and showers are taken at the gym. 

She also has to think about taking her daughter to places like school or therapy, and about moving her RV and car on Wednesday evenings so she doesn’t get a parking ticket when the street sweepers come Thursday morning. She often ends up getting tickets anyway, she said, because her RV violates the city’s oversized vehicle ordinance, which states that those with vehicles over 20 feet long cannot park on the street between midnight and 5 a.m. without a valid permit. 

Despite this, Pollini feels lucky not to be paying rent and to have some savings. She mentioned crossing paths with many people who do not have any cash flow at all, and who have hardly any money to put gas in their car – even if they’re living in it.

“Those people get stuck in a situation where they can’t take a job because it requires them to get there and sometimes it’s not a bus ride away. So it feels like a dead end, like you’re stuck in this vicious cycle,” she explained.

Lezlie Tormell is 70 years old and has been living out of her black midsize car for around 10 years. She said higher prices have affected her in every way. 

“I don’t feel like I ever had fear before. I actually sometimes am awake at night, going, ‘OK, how am I gonna do this?’” Tormell said. “I don’t just specifically worry about turning my car on to charge my phone. Do I walk three blocks, or do I drive the car? I walk.”

She was parked on Natural Bridges Drive on Santa Cruz’s Westside one day in early July, getting some respite from the sun under two tie-dyed sheets she hung around her car’s front and back doors to create a makeshift tent. A warm breeze snaked through the street, reminding passersby that they were close to West Cliff Drive and the ocean waves. Tormell had set up an area for her two dogs on the sidewalk in front of her car, complete with dog beds and big bowls of water, and had stacked two black plastic crates on top of each other to create a table for a vase with flowers. 

Tormell became unhoused because her most recent housing opportunity did not allow animals, she said, and she had inherited her partner’s dogs when he died suddenly. She didn’t want to compromise on her integrity and give up the animals, so her car became a “happy option.”

But now that she’s older and isn’t as active, living in her car has become more difficult to manage – especially now that she has to budget for every mile. 

She used to visit her mother in Pacific Grove, about 44 miles away, a few times a week. But now, Tormell explained through tears, because of the inflated gas prices she has not been able to see her mother in months.

“Any way you look at it, it’s 40 bucks,” she said. 

People who live in their vehicles are often referred to as the “hidden” or “invisible” homeless population, because their shelter can allow them to blend into everyday traffic and be forgotten in traditional street counts. As such, exact figures of how many people currently live in vehicles in Santa Cruz County are hard to come by. The county’s 2025 point-in-time count estimated that at least 12% of all unsheltered residents slept in their vehicles, around 176 people at the time. 

Alicia Kuhl, president of the Santa Cruz chapter of the California Homeless Union, was at one point part of this invisible homeless population herself. Around 2014, she said she and her family had a “negative experience” with somebody they were renting from in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which ended in their units being demolished and her family being left without shelter.

At the time, they didn’t have enough money to pay market-rate rent rates, she said, but they did have a small insurance settlement from a car accident that they used to purchase an RV.

“I thought that would be our best bet to avoid basic street-level homelessness, a tent, and so we lived that way for five years,” Kuhl said. 

During her time living in an RV, she became “shockingly aware” of the limited shelter capacity in the county, which has contributed to more of the unhoused population living in tents, on the street or in their cars. According to Santa Cruz County Health for Housing’s 2024 emergency shelter housing chart, there are only 345 shelter spots across the county, whereas there are more than 1,400 unhoused individuals.

William Joseph Maffei, a 44-year-old who lives in his car with his dog, also mentioned the limited shelter capacity and how it’s a privilege to even have his vehicle.

He has been living in his car since he relocated from Oregon years ago and got scammed out of an apartment lease, he said. Trying to find a place to sleep and get away from the cold or the heat is difficult in Santa Cruz, he continued, saying that at least in his car he can charge his cellphone to get ahold of a case manager when needed. 

Not everyone who lives on the street or in tents is as fortunate. “They fall through the cracks in the system, and life is just that much harder,” Maffei said. 

But Maffei has still been hit hard by the high gas prices, and now carefully keeps track of his mileage. Maffei used to be an automotive mechanic, and he explained that to drive a vehicle on its last quarter-tank is bad for the car because it sucks up things like sediments and brings them to the car’s motor, fuel lines and more.

But filling up his tank from empty to over a quarter full, or having enough money to fill up before it reaches that quarter mark, is much harder than it used to be, he said.

He used to be able to fill up his 12-to-15-gallon tank from a quarter-full to completely full for $35 to $40, and that would last him a week. Now, that same amount of money gets him only around three to four days’ worth of gas.

“Twenty bucks really doesn’t get you anywhere – it doesn’t. You put $20 to $25 in at the current gas prices, or at least the gas prices of two weeks ago, and you don’t even get a quarter of a tank,” Maffei said. “If you’re not constantly feeding the tank, you don’t get anywhere. You don’t help yourself, you don’t help anyone else, you don’t get food.”

Maffei is one of over a million people in California who live off of monthly Social Security benefits, which means he tries to budget as tightly as he can for food, gas and any other supplies he needs to live.

“When you’re trying to make money stretch on a Social Security budget, you try to go as cheap as you can. So, you know, you go to the dollar store. But, the dollar store is in East Cliff,” he said.

There is another option, a Dollar Tree, in Capitola, but both Capitola and East Cliff Drive are at least a 30- to 40-minute round trip driving from where he usually parks on the Santa Cruz’s Westside. Driving that much guzzles gas, Maffei said, but the only other options are to either walk or spend money on bus fare and take at least an hourlong round trip. 

“I hate to tell you, it’s an almost four-hour walk from here to East Cliff. And then you pick up stuff, so now you’re carrying 40 pounds of food and stuff like that, and you have to make the entire return trip,” Maffei said. “That’s eight hours out of your day, that’s a full day’s worth of work.”

Despite all of the issues the inflated costs have brought Maffei and many others, it has also brought many of Santa Cruz’s hidden homeless residents together. Some of the people who park on the streets near Natural Bridges State Beach come from different backgrounds and have a variety of levels of expertise, Maffei said, which helps them survive. 

Lezlie Tormell mentioned that amid the hardships many are facing, the community around them tries not to let anyone get forgotten or go hungry. She said they shop creatively and cook creatively. One of her friends “feeds you whether you want to be better or not, so that you stay strong.”

Maffei’s group of friends consider themselves a convoy, with members that include a former nurse, a military veteran and a couple others who are over 70. They often buy and cook things that can feed people family-style, and they can cook things like carnitas for burritos at the beach’s barbecue grills. 

“We try and do what we can to try to help feed them, even if we’re trying to buy food for four people, we end up feeding 12,” Maffei said. 

Although the population of people living in their vehicles is adapting to endure these difficult financial times, Pollini says there still needs to be more support for people’s situations – especially since everyone has their own story and experiences. 

Kuhl agreed, posing the initial solutions of more permanent or interim housing programs, mental health care and substance-abuse rehabilitation. She continued to say that the fact that everything costs more right now is exacerbating the problems people are facing. The city and county are not offering enough long-term resolutions, she said.

“For somebody who’s unhoused and already struggling, I mean, that’s the reason they can’t do a lot of things. That’s the exact reason people can’t use the Safe Parking Program the city has that’s only nighttime use, because it costs too much to go back and forth and drive back and forth and only park at nighttime,” Kuhl said. “People can’t afford some of the solutions that are even being offered.”

The two safe parking programs were first created along with the city’s oversized vehicle ordinance, and they include overnight-only parking and long-term, 24/7 parking for RVs. The overnight-only parking program is located downtown and has served between eight and 34 people monthly over the past two years, and the 24/7 parking spots located near the DeLaveaga Golf Course outside the National Guard armory have served 82 people total in the same period. 

Alongside the issue Kuhl cited of driving back and forth from the overnight parking program each day, which costs gas and takes time, residents also regularly report that there are not enough spaces at the 24/7 lot for all who want to stay there. 

Two ideas Kuhl posed to combat these particular issues was for the city to allow people with RVs to park on Delaware Avenue for 72 hours at a time, or to expand the programs currently in place to allow more people to use them in different areas of the county.

“There’s just so many solutions,” Kuhl said. “I mean, we need to just start acknowledging that people need a place to be, and they need their basic needs met.”

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