At the age of 76, Susan Patricia Staples is a veteran of vehicle residency, as it is called, the act of sleeping in a car with no address except the next Walmart parking lot. She did it for nine impoverished months a few years ago, and if car life sounds like part of her past, it isn’t. Sleeping in her vehicle is the only way she can afford to leave her tiny apartment and visit friends in faraway locales, staying connected to the world.

Car life, says Susan, is a pragmatic choice for women unable to afford housing in a time of impossible rental costs. While there is limited Canadian data, if any, on its prevalence, American researchers have given it much consideration because it is a way of life in the United States. Across North America, there are thriving online communities of women who have embraced this existence. They post photos of portable toilets and spacious sleeping hacks, such as tents that connect with the open door of their vehicle. On Facebook, women share their stories, which often involve a job loss or leaving a toxic partner, and receive dozens of supportive messages.

Sleeping in a vehicle is either a necessity or a subversive act of freedom, Susan says. “There are two reasons why we older women end up in cars. One is because we can’t afford housing. The other is because we can’t afford life.”

Susan has the steady gaze of a woman who can hold her place in the world. Her hair is long and wavy, an elegant shade of grey that looks as if a stylist selected it, though Susan does not have the money, nor the inclination, for such proclivities.

Still, she does not look like someone who, in 2018, approaching the age of 70, lived in a Ford Focus with the rear seats removed. It had a makeshift bed on one side and on the other, boxes with shampoo, soap, toilet paper, clothes, and big plastic water bottles, as she explains, to wash private bits under billowing dresses while hidden behind trees in a park. As she tells other women, if you keep yourself presentable, no one will know.

Look around, look closely. You may see signs of this poverty, although women are discreet. Some still have the veneer of a middle-class life. This existence is not what these women imagined decades earlier when their children were young or the job opportunities seemed exciting, even if they did not pay well. The money will come later, they told themselves — except sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes those jobs are creatively satisfying or flexible enough to help accommodate parenting, but that work does not always lead to flush retirement savings or a livable pension.

Susan has a degree in social work from Carleton University in Ottawa. She raised a son, now in his late 30s, and for a time ran an after-school education program in a local church as a small-scale entrepreneur. She is admittedly a hippie at heart, or at least she was in her youth, but never imagined that during those nine months of hard-core car life, she would feel a glow of pride knowing that none of the parents knew the tutor slept in a parking lot.

These days, she has an old van. Susan doesn’t have the money to buy airplane tickets, but she loves to be out in the world, to visit friends and go deep into discussions on politics, global affairs, or the value of existence with a body in decline. When she goes too long without these visits, Susan feels trapped. She’s left with elevator small talk. Car life offers her an escape from her tiny, subsidized Ottawa apartment; it’s the only way she can reach the source of her emotional sustenance. And that worries her the most. Susan expects to be among the growing cohort of women who live for a very long time. What if her apartment complex is old to private developers? What if her body doesn’t keep up with her mind? Once physical decline begins, can she live in her van or make those 20-hour trips? In quiet moments, she wonders if longevity is a blessing after all.

For now, she tries to avoid those thoughts and stays busy, sharing tips on the nuances of vehicle domesticity with women online.

On hot summer nights, she says, use netting attached to Velcro around the windows, allowing a breeze to float inside without bugs. A McDonald’s restroom offers a quick early morning wash; just leave it clean. Sleep on a mattress of upholstery foam, instead of the memory kind, which is temperature sensitive and feels like a block of ice in the winter.

When Susan first started living in her car, few were publicly speaking about this peripatetic life, at least in Canada. It is better known in America, where the 2017 book “Nomadland” examined the lives of men and women who lost jobs in the 2008 depression and drove across the country, chasing work. It is, of course, anecdotal, but in the past few years, on private Facebook sites in Canada and the United States, Susan has noticed more women, especially older women, asking detailed questions about survival. 

A women-only Facebook site devoted to car life and camping in North America has 122,000 members, though not everyone in the group relies on vehicles for housing. Many are curious.

Others are considering the option as their savings run out. Some sleep in their cars to save money on travel, like Susan. Others say they have crossed over, like a 74-year-old woman with mobility issues who asked for advice on a portable stool for the back of her truck. In another post, one woman wrote, “When I turned 68, never in a million years did I think I would end up living in my van.”

Sometimes talk turns to the judgment of others, the fear of exposure to problematic people or, equally dangerous, the cold. 

Some post heartfelt responses, often with advice on survival or warnings about certain states that have made it illegal to park overnight anywhere other than an official campsite. Others recommend the safety of Quartzsite, Arizona, a destination with long-established vehicle communities. Many are Americans, but on a Canadian Facebook chat group, women send each other messages mostly about safe parking lots or surviving sub-zero temperatures. Everyone has a solution for the cold. Susan zips together two extreme weather sleeping bags, slides inside and wraps a fleece Polar Plus blanket around her head before stuffing the rest of it around her shoulders and deep inside to fill the pockets of cold air.

However anecdotal, and it is, Susan sees a rise in the number of Canadian women posting pictures of solo life on the road or asking how to do it for financial survival. The struggle to afford housing and food is somewhat more quantifiable, with 80,000 Ontarians known to be homeless, at least for a time, in 2024, a number that could double by 2035. That does not include the hidden homeless, those who sleep on friends’ couches or in cars. 

While many older men are also living on a low income in a time of rising housing and food costs, it is women who are most at risk. In Canada, the gender pension gap, the difference in retirement savings and pensions meant to carry you through your final decades, ranges from 17 to 26 per cent, depending on how it is measured. It’s often higher for racialized women or those who immigrated to Canada as adults. The pension gap especially impacts women who worked part-time or had a low salary. The less you contribute to a pension, whether a workplace’s or CPP, the lower the earnings in retirement.

Canada’s gender pension gap has not narrowed in the 45 years between 1976 and 2021, and while younger women are increasingly educated and employed in jobs with workplace pensions, a great many are not, which places them on the direct path to precarity.

“It’s a huge social problem,” Susan says. “I have a lot of friends who are semi-professional, and there’s not a lot of padding between them and poverty. I was a single mom. I spent all my money on my son, and we had a fantastic life. But I have no savings.”

It is a sign of unaffordable times, she believes, and an unavoidable reality for women. Not all, of course, but many.

Pick any option: divorce, single parenthood, the inability to afford an education, limited career advancement, or a job without a company pension. Whatever the reason, too many end up with little money to show for all those decades of effort. No one tells you this in the busy years, racing out of a downtown office to pick up children from daycare, make dinner, and drive to hockey or gymnastics in time for the warm-up. No raises are forthcoming in those prime working years, with none requested. So, you pay for soccer tournaments and dance recitals with a line of credit or money that could have gone to the mortgage, and it’s all good, of course, because the well-being of our children is priceless. 

It doesn’t arrive until much later, the moment of realizing your financial precarity. Those who came before us know all of this and more.

In her Facebook messages, Susan tells other women her number one tip for surviving on the financial edge. “Before paying for housing and food, pay for your car,” she says. “Always own a car because the difference between being homeless with a car and without a car is truly day and night.”