Park Here.
Work Here.
Build Here.

In Memo 005 we laid out the problem without editorializing: jobs that exist, workers who are willing, a housing market that makes conventional living economically impossible, and municipal ordinances that criminalize the one adaptation those workers have found for themselves. The pattern holds across Moab, Jackson Hole, Telluride, Sedona, and dozens of communities like them. The restaurants close. The lots sit empty. The town wonders what went wrong and writes another parking ban.

Now here is where Tymmber stands — and more importantly, here is what we think actually works.

What the City Needs, and How to Give It to Them

The objections cities raise to vehicle dwelling are not entirely invented. A municipality has legitimate interests in sanitation, public safety, and maintaining a tax and administrative relationship with the people who use its services. These are real concerns. They are also entirely solvable concerns — and the fact that most cities have chosen the ban rather than the solution tells you something about institutional imagination, not about the nature of the problem.

The framework that actually works looks like this: a designated overnight parking program, run either by the city or by a private operator under a city permit, with a simple weekly registration fee tied to workforce participation. The worker registers their vehicle. They receive a permit. They park in a designated safe zone — in by 10 p.m., out by 7 a.m. — and the city now has exactly what it said it needed: a trackable, fee-paying administrative relationship with a mobile resident. No lease required. No apartment that does not exist. A light-touch system that costs the city almost nothing to administer and solves, at a stroke, the argument that vehicle dwellers contribute nothing to the tax base.

The weekly fee should be modest — calibrated to a hospitality wage, not a vacation rental rate. If the worker is enrolled in a local workforce program — employed by a participating business, paying income tax, contributing to the local economy — the fee drops further. The city gets a revenue stream and a workforce it was about to lose. The worker gets legal standing, a safe place to sleep, and the dignity of not being treated as a problem to be moved along.

Government has a role to play here. Not as the builder or the operator — that is the private sector's job — but as the permitting authority that makes this possible, and as the regulator willing to create the framework rather than default to the ban. A city council that passes a designated overnight parking ordinance is not abandoning its responsibilities. It is exercising them with more imagination than its predecessor did.

The Infrastructure Problem, and Its Solution

The legitimate sanitation objection to vehicle dwelling dissolves entirely when adequate infrastructure exists nearby. A worker who has access to a clean shower, a laundry facility, and a workspace within reasonable distance of their parking zone is not a public health concern. They are a resident who happens to sleep in a vehicle instead of an apartment. The difference between those two things is almost entirely a function of available infrastructure — not of the person.

This is where Prosperity Place enters the picture — not as a charity program or a government service, but as a private-sector platform designed to close exactly this gap.

Prosperity Place is a campus-based facility that provides the infrastructure a mobile workforce needs to live with dignity and function as full economic participants: showers, laundry, workspace, connectivity, and — critically — proximity to the overnight parking zone that makes the whole system work. A worker parks legally, uses the Prosperity Place facility in the morning to clean up before their shift, works their job, earns their wage, and saves money at a rate that apartment living would make impossible. The campus is not free — it operates on a fee model that makes it self-sustaining — but the fees are calibrated to what a working person can afford, because a facility priced for convenience travelers is not actually solving the problem.

The overnight parking zone and the Prosperity Place facility are designed to work as a system, not as separate amenities. Together they provide what vehicle dwelling alone cannot: the hygiene infrastructure that transforms "living in a van" from a survival situation into a deliberate, dignified lifestyle choice that is indistinguishable in its daily function from conventional housing — except that it costs a fraction of what conventional housing costs, and it allows a worker to save instead of tread water.

The Drive-In 2.0 — A Model America Already Proved

There is a version of Prosperity Place that most Americans over forty remember with genuine affection — and it solved every objection cities raise about overnight vehicle parking before those objections were ever invented.

The Drive-In Theater. Seven dollars a car. You pulled in, hung the speaker on the window, walked to the concession building for a Coke and popcorn and a hamburger, and watched the movie. When it ended, you drove home. Nobody filed a sanitation complaint. Nobody passed an ordinance banning vehicles from the lot after dark. Cities permitted them everywhere — suburban parcels, rural fields, edge-of-town land that wasn't good for much else. They ran profitably for forty years. Families loved them. Communities built memories around them.

Now update the model for 2026. Same lot. Same per-vehicle revenue — except the admission covers overnight parking, not just a two-hour film. Same concession building — except the building now has showers and laundry alongside the popcorn. Same defined hours — in by dark, out by morning. Same community atmosphere. Except instead of a single screen, the attraction is the canyon outside Moab, the ski mountain above Telluride, or the red rock country around Sedona. The worker pulls in after their shift. Grabs dinner from the concession. Showers. Does a load of laundry. Watches whatever is playing. Goes to sleep in their truck. Wakes up, drives to work. Repeats.

The Drive-In 2.0 operates as both a standalone entry point and as an activation layer within a full Prosperity Place campus. A municipality not yet ready for the complete platform can start here — a parking lot, a screen, a concession building with showers added — and generate the revenue, the community support, and the proof of concept that grows into the fuller vision. The barrier to entry is a parcel, a permit, and an operator. Tymmber Outdoor is looking for both.

The Regulatory Ask

What we are asking of local governments is specific and bounded. It is not a blank check, an unfunded mandate, or a demand that cities abandon their legitimate interests. It is four things.

We have put all four of these asks — plus a model ordinance, a 30-day quick-start checklist, and an infrastructure guide — into a single downloadable document that any city manager can hand to their city attorney Monday morning. It is free. It requires no subscription, no partnership agreement, and no commitment to Tymmber Outdoor. Download the Mobile Workforce Housing Policy Framework →

The Business Model Is Already There

Critics of this framework will say that private operators will not invest in workforce support infrastructure because the margins are too thin and the population too transient. We disagree — and we are prepared to demonstrate why.

A Prosperity Place facility serving 80 registered vehicle-dwelling workers at a weekly facility fee generates recurring revenue from a population with stable local employment and zero rent burden — meaning they have more disposable income relative to their wage than any conventional renter in the same market. The population is transient in season and relatively stable over a multi-year horizon, because the economics that brought them there do not change. The facility that earns their trust — that is clean, safe, well-run, and priced fairly — retains them. That is a business, not a charity.

The overnight parking permit program generates additional fee revenue that can offset municipal administration costs. The businesses that retain workers they would otherwise lose generate more tax revenue than they would have with the perpetual understaffing the alternative produces. The economic case for this framework is stronger than the case for the ordinances currently on the books in every one of the communities that needs it most.

The Life This Makes Possible

We want to be direct about what this system is actually for — not in the abstract, but in the lived experience of a real person it is designed to serve.

She drives into town in a well-outfitted truck — a RAAK modular kitchen system in the bed, a KANOPY overhead for shade on the days she is not working, a setup that is organized, self-sufficient, and designed for exactly this kind of life. She registers her vehicle on Monday. She starts her shift at the lodge on Tuesday. She showers at Prosperity Place before work and uses the workspace on her days off to take an online course she is working through. She saves more money in six months than she saved in two years paying rent in the city she came from. In eighteen months she has a down payment. In three years she has options she did not have before.

That is not a vanlife fantasy. That is an economic strategy that works — if the city will permit her to park.

The towns that make that choice will have workers. They will have open restaurants and staffed lodges and businesses that survive the season. The towns that do not will have parking bans and empty storefronts — and they will still be writing op-eds about the workforce crisis, wondering why the solution never came.

It came. They banned it from the parking lot.

That is what this circle is for — to say plainly what the industry will not, and to build what the institutions have not.