This session reviews legal and economic constraints on people who inhabit vehicles in public parking. Point-in-time counts of unsheltered people across the Western United States show a growing population who inhabit vehicles, often parked for extended periods in public areas. Some of the largest Western US communities report that one-third to one-half of individuals and families who sleep in public spaces reside in a vehicle such as a car, van, commercial-sized truck, recreational vehicle (RV), detached trailer, or bus. People who live in vehicles as their primary accommodation, vehicle residents, are often on limited- or fixed-incomes and choose this form of shelter as an affordable long-term option to maintain a connection to familiar communities, employment, healthcare and social services. Though they may not self-identify as homeless, vehicle residents in urban spaces often live for over one year in public parking and report disabling conditions, meeting the federal definition of chronically homeless. With no access to private places to locate their home, vehicle residents experience persistent criminalization and banishment from public areas through ticketing, property seizure, and restrictive signs. Anti-vehicle residency legal policies, ordinances, and enforcement are forms of structural violence that shape and police public spaces. Such criminalization and banishment tends to operate with impunity because its harmful outcomes are presupposed as justified to maintain a status quo. This session examines why and how people use vehicle residency as an adaptive strategy to local conditions. It demonstrates how the criminalization and banishment of vehicle residency operate as forms of structural violence that exclude displaced people from their communities.