With the flick of a key: RV living in the city

Compared to traditional homelessness and poverty, RV/vandwellers are not a well-studied topic in the social sciences. This research project fills an empirical research gap on RV/vandwellers living as locals and it focuses on their lived experiences/observations and a municipality's response to this lifestyle. This project is an exploratory, mixed-methods study with interview and documentary analysis components. With informed consent, participant interviews were done through their preferred electronic method. Documentary analysis was conducted by examining municipal documents to better understand the city's response to the lifestyle. I attempted to find shared ideas of moral worth between RV/dwellers and City officials to identify "common ground" between them. I identified several overarching themes from participant interviews and documentary analysis. By "rubbing" a neoliberal critique with ideas from pragmatic sociology, I uncovered how other ideas of moral worth can challenge neoliberal market worth by offering alternative means of evaluating lifestyles.