Our Story

The National Vehicle Residency Coalition (NVRC) began in November 2021. The NVRC was originally founded as a collective of legal and community advocates by anthropologist Graham Pruss and lawyer Tristia Bauman, then a research fellow at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness & Housing Initiative and a senior attorney with the National Homelessness Law Center (respectively).

Both had already spent years working with and advocating for people living in vehicles — with Tristia helping to lead national legal efforts that challenged the criminalization of homelessness and vehicle residency, while Graham’s research and outreach documented vehicle residency as a distinct form of housing across communities in the western United States. In early 2022, they expanded to become a coalition that brought together vehicle residents and service providers alongside attorneys, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. The all-volunteer team hosted the first U.S. National Vehicle Residency Summit later that year.

From 2023 to 2025, their work continued across the California Bay Area, where Dr. Pruss served as Strategic Advisor on Homelessness to the San José City Manager’s Office and Tristia as Directing Attorney at the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley.

Graham expanded the NVRC beyond cities, building relationships with the Homes on Wheels Alliance, with rural and remote vehicle dwellers, nomadic communities, and people living in mobile housing across the country. These connections helped broaden NVRC from a legal advocacy network into a national coalition connecting people whose experiences of vehicle residency differ, but whose needs for legal space, infrastructure, services, and representation often overlap.

Today, NVRC brings together vehicle residents, service providers, researchers, attorneys, policymakers, parking program operators, and nomadic communities to advance the rights, representation, and infrastructure of people living in vehicles nationwide. Through coalition building, research, policy and legal advocacy, technical assistance, and public education, NVRC works to ensure that vehicle residents have a meaningful voice in the systems and policies that affect their lives. The NVRC educates communities on the needs of vehicle residents, evidence-based programs that serve people sleeping in vehicles, and the infrastructure necessary for the wide variety of vehicle residents living across the U.S.