Here it is, February 7th, 2025. While I am still bunkered down at my home base in Iowa and would prefer to be out there ‘Exploring The Real America’, I still try to stay on top of the latest information and viewpoints related to the RV lifestyle. One of the daily reads is the information posted on RV Travel.
Today they had an editorial by Dave Helgeson that caught my eye entitled: ‘Should Homeless RVers Observe The Same Rules As Other RVers?’.
The main focus of his piece was the ’14 Day Limit’ for people staying at one spot. This rule has been established for years for several reasons including to prevent people from ‘hogging’ a place indefinitely, preventing others from enjoying the view or peaceful setting as well. After reading his point of view, I had a few thoughts of my own.
I doubt that Dave was trying to label homeless people as the only ones violating the 14 Day limit, that rule has been broken by people who come from all categories of people. Plenty of people like Dave have favorite spots to enjoy nature, and return there from time to time to re-capture those memories.
Some favorite spots/areas are now getting ‘crowded’ as the word spreads about how great they are, even if everyone abided by the 14 day rule. Of course, there are many artcles written from RVers about how crowded Public Lands are becoming, that it’s ruining their experience of peace and serenity when they try to ‘get away from it all’.
I gathered up some information from ‘official’ sites and did some math. (I’m Old School so I wasn’t influenced by the progressive education system).
The latest estimates of the population of The United States is 350,000,000. The latest estimates of our homeless population was listed as 771,480. That figure seemed low to me so I bumped it up to 1 million. The number of homeless living in cars or rvs was between 100,000 and 290,000. I bumped that up to 500,000
The amount of Bureau of Land Management acreage that can be used for camping (all types) is 75% of the entire acreage of public lands (243,000,000) which equals 180,000,000 acres. That would mean that if every man, woman, and child were to camp on their own parcel of available public land, they would have about 1/2 acre of land to themselves.
Obviously, not every man, woman, and child in the U.S. would be camping in available public lands at the same time (that would means all cities, towns and villages would be empty), so the notion that camping on public land is ‘crowded’ doesn’t hold water. The places most people seem to gravitate to would no doubt be a different story.
One could argue that the 14 day rule should be scrapped, and/or some of the other rules and restriction imposed for public land usage might be archaic or unnecessary, but we can also attest to the fact that people of all economic statuses have been guilty of ignoring the policies set up to help keep our public lands clean, safe, and available for the public to enjoy.
How to enforce these rules and regulations to maintain as pristine conditions as possible and allow access to everyone who wishes to experience the sights is another issue to explore at a later time.
For now, I’ll just say that we have an abundance of land for all of us to explore and appreciate, provided everyone respects what we have and all our neighbors.
