Far off the grid in the Antelope Valley, RVers make a mess — and elude the homeless count

The spiderweb of dirt roads etched into the desert north of Pearblossom Highway encompasses some of the trashiest scenes in Los Angeles County: piles of tires, bags of used diapers, car parts, whole burned-out cars, couches, office chairs, dining chairs, dressers, motor oil containers, dump truck-sized mounds of unidentifiable rubble and, oddest of all, giant sheets of plastic draped over Joshua trees.

Navigating his red pickup over the rutted roads, Christopher Minsal, council president in the unincorporated community of Pearblossom, pointed out a source of the plastic — a distant white dome protruding from the carpet-like canopy of gray-green desert flora.

“You see the plastic in the distance?” he said. “That’s a marijuana grow.”

This downtrodden expanse of the Antelope Valley unexpectedly achieved a remarkable turnaround last year, reducing by more than half the number of recreational vehicles squatting on its back roads. At least it did so on paper.

According to the annual homeless count, only 671 recreational vehicles remained in the 400 square miles of desert beyond the incorporated cities of Palmdale and Lancaster. That was down 1,432 from the prior year. The reduction accounted for three-fourths of a 21% countywide decrease in RVs that kept the countywide 1.2% increase in homelessness from being worse.

If only it were true.

Minsal and other locals interviewed by The Times wonder where nearly 800 RVs disappeared to. They didn’t see them being towed away, they say.

“The numbers are definitely wrong,” said Jose Centeno, another Pearblossom Town Council member. “The number hasn’t gone down. If anything, it’s increased.”

The record suggests a miscount, possibly several miscounts among Pearblossom and its neighboring desert hamlets stretching east to the San Bernardino County line: Littlerock, Llano, Lake Los Angeles and Sun Village. Tallies for Littlerock/Pearblossom, for example, jumped last year to 349 from only four the year before, then dropped to 253; in Llano, they more than tripled to 631 last year, then more than halved this year to 298.

These wild swings in the numbers came while residents here didn’t notice any change to the slow but steady arrival of newcomers in dilapidated coaches.

A three-year average points to a likely overcount in 2025, compounded by an undercount in 2024. Skipping last year, the two-year increase of 164 reflects a change locals find believable. The effect on this year’s overall increase is impossible to calculate, but it probably would have pushed it up.

Some of the RV dwellers lack permits, addresses and hookups. The trash is just one element of a collage of homelessness, lawlessness and the pursuit of the American dream.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority did not dispute that assessment but defended its method for counting an area “unique because of the vast, often desolate terrain.”

“Over the last few years, a combination of outreach teams, the Palmdale Police Department’s drone, and a consistent group of local volunteers with unique knowledge of the areas they cover has conducted the region’s count,” the agency said in a statement.

Minsal, who led the teams that canvassed three large census tracts with the greatest variation, said he recalls their 2025 count being lower and thinks a digital glitch doubled it.

The apparently illusory swings show the difficulty of accurately counting homeless people in the expanse of north Los Angeles County. At a deeper level, it challenges the accepted meaning of homelessness.

Minsal, a desert-loving, kilt-wearing muralist of Mexican-Scottish descent, painted a layered picture of social pressure and government neglect that have turned his childhood paradise into what he calls an ecological disaster.

“I used to be able to walk barefoot from here to my house,” he said, his truck kicking up dust on a road a few miles from his home. “Never step on a piece of trash.”

Today, he says, the trash is just one element of a collage of homelessness, lawlessness and the pursuit of the American dream co-existing, or clashing, off the grid in a vast space far from the attention of anyone but the locals who know its back roads intimately.

Minsal befriends some RV dwellers. Even while acknowledging they can’t legally live where they do — no permits, no addresses, no hookups — he sees them as productive members of his community of just under 2,500.

“These people here are trying to live the American dream,” he said, driving by a cluster of RVs in a fenced yard landscaped with young trees. “There are kids who live there that go to my kids’ school. See how they’re planting trees? People don’t put trees on their property if they don’t care about it. But guess what. Those six trailers over there, they’re all homeless people. They don’t have an address.”

Minsal pointed out other vehicles so wretched that he had no qualms about classifying their inhabitants as homeless squatters and likely heavy drug users. Others, with flapping doors and broken windows, were surely abandoned, he said.

He looks for telltale signs of habitation. “Is there a small generator? Are all the windows intact? Is there fresh trash? Is there plastic on the roof?”

He passed several forks in the road blocked by handmade plywood signs warning, some in English and some Spanish, that the roads were closed.

Some of the vehicles appear abandoned. Chopped-up bodies were found at one compound last year.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“They’ll go to take over a spot,” he said. “They’ll close the road. A lot of them huddle up. The reason they huddle up is because it’s dangerous.”

Deeper into the desert he drove by several blocklong compounds carved into the creosote and Joshua trees and hidden behind walls of found objects, such as one surrounded by maybe a hundred castoff garage doors and another with a two-story plywood structure rising above its perimeter fence.

“This is a pure 100% illegal compound,” Minsal said of one. “This is people squatting on someone’s land.”

He suspected some of the larger compounds are probably connected to Mexican cartels operating in the Antelope Valley, although there is no way to know. He pointed out one compound as the infamous spot where chopped-up bodies were found last year.

All of them — RVs, makeshift shelters, a few shipping containers and one compound of discarded school bungalows — fall within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development definition of homelessness as living in “a public or private place not meant for human habitation.”

Charles Bostwick, Antelope Valley field deputy for Supervisor Kathryn Barger, sees them in a liminal space between homelessness and housed.

“The vast majority are not classic homeless people,” he said. “Most own property or are paying a real estate company with the intention of buying. It’s not squatters. It’s people who own or buy the land. Sometimes they let their friends move in. You have a motor home or trailer and four cars.”

Bostwick finds it hard to generalize about them.

“I agree that some people are just trying to find a place to live they can afford,” he said. “Others are methamphetamine users. They steal copper, tear down the phone line, accept payments for dumping construction waste, organic waste on their property.”

Minsal believes it’s possible to balance tougher code enforcement against the criminal element with legalization of those who are “surviving, just trying to do their best.”

He proposes a quick, low-cost, process for people to establish an address.

“We’re going to have to allow hauled water,” he said. “We’re going to have to allow off-grid living. All of them live off grid. They’re not criminals. They’re not bad. There should be a formula for that.”

That formula, he contends, should include trash collection.

“There’s no trash service out here,” he said. “You can’t get trash service unless you have an address.”

Bostwick sees little hope for that plan.

“You couldn’t give them an address,” he said. “They’re not really on a road. They’re just on a path that twists through the desert. They violate all sorts of fire codes, health laws, state laws. They don’t have power. They have unpermitted solar panels that catch fire and burn the place up. The RVs are old and the systems in them don’t work. Nothing there is fit or approved for human habitation.”

“People don’t put trees on their property if they don’t care about it,” said Minsal, the Pearblossom council official. He believes it’s possible to balance tougher code enforcement against the criminal element with legalization of those who are “surviving, just trying to do their best.”

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The intractable source of the problem, Bostwick said, is that the desert is for sale and real estate operations, some out-of-state, buy and then resell online. He described a conversation with a constituent who asked for help getting an address for an RV. She found the property on Google and was making payments by getting prepaid debit cards and transferring the code by phone. To access a legitimate road, she’d have to bulldoze a driveway across two other parcels.

He told her she couldn’t live legally in an RV.

“She said the real estate guy told her she could,” Bostwick said.

Besides the painful consequences for deceived buyers, code enforcement has the limitation of due process, Bostwick said.

“You’ve got people who own that land,” he said. “They get orders to remove themselves from that land. They won’t obey. We could try to charge them criminally. I don’t know how easy it would be to convince a Lancaster jury to convict somebody of living in their RV.”

A spokeswoman from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works said the agency has authority to order inoperable or unoccupied vehicles removed from private property but uses it only in response to complaints. It took no actions against any RVs in unincorporated Antelope Valley in 2025, she said.

Public Works addresses waste left in the public right-of-way on county-maintained roads but can’t work on private property or off road except in conjunction with a code violation and enforcement action, the spokeswoman said.

Bostwick said the most recent county cleanups ejected a handful of RVs from Pearblossom in 2022 and Sun Valley and 2023. Most of those dislodged from the town centers probably relocated elsewhere in the desert, he said.

Lancaster and Palmdale, the two incorporated cities of Antelope Valley about 15 miles west of Pearblossom, also attract unauthorized RVs. But there they get more attention.

Pathway Home, Los Angeles County’s encampment removal program, has conducted 10 operations in the two cities and their immediate unincorporated islands, bringing a total of 303 people off the streets. RVs weren’t distinguished in the numbers, but at least two major operations removed RV encampments. Each action involves months of preparation, developing a by-name list of people in the encampment and offering shelter at a county-purchased motel in Lancaster.

One recent morning, four county cars pulled out of that motel on Sierra Highway.

Some of the homeless are squatters who close a road to take over a spot, and they huddle together because it’s dangerous, Minsal said.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

In an undeveloped eastern part of the city, the caravan turned off the pavement and bumped along a dirt road to an opening in the Joshua trees where a broken-down recreational vehicle came into view.

“Anyone here?” Letre Kelly, an outreach worker, called out. No one replied.

Through a cloud of dust, the caravan moved on another quarter of a mile to an RV showing clear signs of habitation: two lines of clothes hung to dry and a broken child’s pedal car in the dirt.

A young man with bobbed hair and an ankle monitor emerged. Outreach workers in green shirts handed him bottled water and hygiene kits.

He told them his partner inside the van was pregnant. Standing in 100-degree plus heat, outreach worker Dawn Hollins talked on her cellphone searching for a place to take her in.

“This is no place for a pregnant woman,” Kelly said.

They said they’d have to return that afternoon to confirm her condition before anyone would take her. The team submitted a referral to Valley Oasis, a provider of trauma and homeless services and housing, a spokesman for the county Department of Homeless Services and Housing said.

The outreach team and Valley Oasis tried several times to contact the couple but were unsuccessful.