What if Your Home Could Be Mobile, but Also You Could Park It?
What if the answer to “where to live now” is actually “lots of places” and “kind of nowhere”?
Kibbo is a new entry in the booming business of American life in vans. It rents vans to its members and also creates communities for them to engage with.
It plans to start with five wilderness locations in which its vans can park. Its first, expected to open in September, include Ojai and Big Sur, in California; Zion, in Utah; and the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, home of Burning Man. These locations — you could call them campsites? Or … trailer parks? — have a central hub, or clubhouse, designed to feel like co-living space. There will be Wi-Fi, bathrooms, a kitchen with shared food.
The other upside? Members lease these mobile homes, with all-access membership and Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 4x4 cargo van rentals starting at about $1,500 per month.
Marian Goodell, the C.E.O. of Burning Man, owns her San Francisco apartment but has been living in a borrowed Kibbo van for the past several weeks, test-driving the lifestyle.
“Before Covid, this was an interesting idea,” Ms. Goodell said. (She was parked just outside of Grand Rapids, Mich.) “But now, this crisis is going to create more micro-communities.”
Next year, the company plans to add five urban locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. Members may come, go and return as they wish.
Much of the United States is mobile already, though in very different ways. The country has a long-established network of R.V. parks where people can vacation or live semipermanently. And the Sturgis annual motorcycle rally will rev on this year in early August, despite local opposition; last year it brought nearly half a million motorcycle enthusiasts to Sturgis, a town of 7,000 in South Dakota.
Then there are the many darker aspects of our current life on wheels: Many cities are in the midst of a growing homelessness crises, with tens of thousands of people in America living in vans or cars out of desperation. (In Los Angeles alone, 16,500 homeless people were living in cars in 2019.)
Earlier this year, the City Council in Berkeley, Calif., grappling with people sleeping in vans overnight in commercial districts, voted to try a program of permits for overnight use of city lots.
This stands in opposition to the Instagram-friendly influencer version of #vanlife — vintage Volkswagen buses with cute curtains, California sunsets, wide-brim hats, where what’s going on after the pictures are taken is a bit unclear.
“It’s really difficult to be in a van, in a city,” said Colin O’Donnell, the founder of Kibbo. We were actually speaking in one of his vans, parked on a San Francisco street in a perpendicular spot. He sat in the passenger seat, swiveled backward. There were cork floors and a small kitchenette between us, with a little fridge, a little stove.
