Why vehicle living, gig work, and private-property rules eventually collide
Yesterday I talked about no-trespass notices: what they mean, how corporations can apply them across properties they own or control, and how somebody can get themselves into trouble by assuming that being banned from one location has nothing to do with another location under the same corporate umbrella.
Today, I want to take that one step further.
Because there is another group of people who can run directly into this problem without necessarily thinking about it:
People who live, sleep, or spend extended periods of time in their vehicles.
I understand modern society.
Housing is expensive. Travel is expensive. Hotels are expensive. Some people live in vehicles because they have no other realistic option.
Other people deliberately choose van life, RV life, car camping, or some variation of being mobile.
Those are not all the same situation.
I have a place to live.
My friend—the advantage player I have been talking about who has spent roughly the last year traveling around the country and accumulating casino no-trespass notices—also has a place to live.
So this isn’t me pretending everybody sleeping in a vehicle has the same circumstances.
But regardless of why you’re doing it, there is one basic fact that does not change:
Your vehicle may belong to you. The property underneath it probably doesn’t.
“I Was Just Taking a Nap”
Anybody who has worked security has heard variations of the same explanations.
“I was just taking a nap.”
“I was just sitting here.”
“I was just waiting for somebody.”
“I was just charging my phone.”
“I was just eating.”
“I was only going to be here for a few hours.”
Maybe every one of those statements is completely true.
That still doesn’t automatically give you permission to remain on somebody else’s property.
If a casino, shopping center, hotel, hospital, university, warehouse, retailer, or other private property owner decides that people cannot use its parking lot as overnight accommodations, that is something you have to take seriously.
You may disagree with the rule.
You may think the parking lot is enormous and nobody is using that corner.
You may believe you are bothering absolutely nobody.
None of those things automatically make the property yours to use however you want.
A Casino Parking Lot Is Not Free Lodging
Casinos are an especially obvious example because many operate twenty-four hours a day.
That can create the illusion that the property is essentially always open for anybody to use.
It isn’t.
The casino wants customers coming and going throughout the night.
That does not necessarily mean it wants somebody setting up residence in the parking garage for three days.
There is a difference between:
Parking your car while using the business
and
using the business’s property as your temporary residence.
Casino security is also paying attention.
They’re watching vehicles.
They’re watching people entering and leaving.
They’re watching patterns.
And if the same vehicle keeps appearing in the same part of the property overnight, eventually somebody may ask what is going on.
That should not be shocking.
It is literally part of what security is there to do.
“But I’m Not Doing Anything Illegal”
That is another argument people tend to make.
And it misses the point.
You don’t necessarily have to commit a crime before a private property owner tells you that you are no longer welcome.
A no-trespass notice can be the property owner’s way of telling you:
Your permission to be here has ended.
What happens after that is where the legal situation can become much more serious.
If security tells you to leave and not return, continuing to argue that you weren’t doing anything wrong doesn’t magically restore permission.
The original behavior and what happens after the notice are two different issues.
That was one of the points in yesterday’s article.
Corporate Properties Make This More Complicated
Now imagine you do this repeatedly at properties belonging to the same corporation.
You sleep in one casino parking lot until security asks you to leave.
Then you go to another casino owned or operated by the same organization.
Then another.
At some point, you should not be surprised if Corporate Security decides it is done dealing with the situation one property at a time.
Depending upon the jurisdiction, the company’s authority over those locations, and the language of the actual notice, a corporate trespass notification may be written to cover multiple properties owned, leased, operated, managed, or controlled by that organization.
That does not mean every notice automatically applies to every company sharing a similar logo.
It does mean you should not assume that Property B knows nothing about what happened at Property A.
And you definitely should not assume:
“They only kicked me out of that one parking lot, so I’ll just go to the next one.”
Corporate security systems are specifically designed so every location does not have to learn the same lesson independently.
My Friend Already Demonstrated This
That brings me back to my advantage-player friend.
He had already been formally trespassed from Mohegan Sun in Connecticut.
Then he went to Mohegan Pennsylvania.
He was surprised when they recognized him and handed him another no-trespass notice.
I wasn’t.
Whether the Connecticut notice itself legally covered the Pennsylvania property is something you would have to determine from the actual language, the corporate authority involved, and applicable law.
But should he have expected that one Mohegan property might know what happened at another Mohegan property?
Absolutely.
That’s modern corporate security.
And if somebody spending months traveling from casino to casino playing blackjack can be identified across properties, somebody repeatedly using corporate parking lots as overnight accommodations shouldn’t assume they’re invisible either.
Your License Plate Doesn’t Forget Where You’ve Been
Modern properties use cameras.
Many use license-plate recognition.
Security incident reports can include vehicle descriptions and plate information.
Properties can maintain internal records.
Large organizations can share security information through whatever systems and policies they operate.
That does not mean every company is maintaining some giant nationwide blacklist of everybody who ever slept in a parking lot.
It means you should stop thinking about a large corporate property as though it were an isolated convenience store where nobody knows what happened yesterday.
If security has already dealt with you at one property, there is at least the possibility that another property within the same organization can know about it.
Gig Workers Need to Understand This Too
This is where this becomes another Gig Man’s Life issue.
Gig workers spend an enormous amount of time sitting in vehicles on other people’s property.
We wait for rides.
We wait between rides.
We sit in restaurant parking lots.
We sit near airports.
We sit near hotels.
We sit near universities.
We wait outside apartment buildings.
And sometimes drivers fall asleep.
There is nothing inherently bizarre about being tired after driving for hours and needing rest.
In fact, if you are too tired to drive safely, you should stop driving.
But where you stop matters.
Pulling into the first private parking lot you see and deciding that this is now your sleeping location does not guarantee that the property owner is going to agree.
There’s also a difference between unintentionally falling asleep for twenty minutes while waiting for a ride and repeatedly treating the same parking lot as your overnight sleeping location.
Security personnel tend to notice patterns.
“But Uber Sent Me Here”
Just like yesterday’s discussion, an app doesn’t override the property owner.
Uber can send you to a hotel.
Lyft can send you to a casino.
DoorDash can send you to a shopping center.
Roadie can send you to a warehouse.
Your charging app can send you to a charger located inside a private parking lot.
That does not mean Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Roadie, Tesla, ChargePoint, or anybody else automatically has the authority to grant you unlimited access to the property.
The app is giving you directions.
It isn’t issuing a deed.
Vehicle Living Has to Include Property Planning
This is the part I think some of the vehicle-living conversation misses.
If you are going to live out of a car, van, truck, or RV, finding legal and permitted places to park needs to be part of the plan.
Not an afterthought.
You need to know:
Where overnight parking is permitted.
Where it is prohibited.
Whether a business allows overnight stays.
Whether a municipality has restrictions.
Whether a campground, rest area, truck stop, or other property has specific rules.
Whether you need permission.
And whether you have previously been told not to return.
You cannot build a long-term living strategy around hoping nobody notices.
Eventually somebody probably will.
There Is Also a Difference Between Necessity and Entitlement
This is where I want to be careful.
Somebody who has nowhere else to go is dealing with a very different problem from somebody who simply decides:
“I don’t want to pay for a campsite, so I’m going to use this casino parking garage.”
I can understand the first person’s circumstances without pretending the property owner has surrendered its rights.
And I can understand why somebody deliberately living mobile wants inexpensive places to stop without pretending that every large parking lot is automatically available for that purpose.
Those two things can both be true.
You can have sympathy for somebody’s circumstances and still understand why a property owner has rules.
Once They Tell You to Leave, Leave
This is probably the simplest practical point in the entire discussion.
If legitimate security or property management tells you that you cannot remain there:
Leave.
Don’t turn it into a forty-minute argument.
Don’t start explaining why you technically weren’t hurting anybody.
Don’t leave and come back an hour later to see if a different guard is working.
And if they formally tell you not to return, take the notice seriously.
Keep the paperwork.
Read the scope.
Understand what property it covers.
If you believe the notice is legally improper, that is something to challenge through whatever lawful process is available to you.
Walking back onto the property to prove your point is usually a terrible way to test your legal theory.
One Property Can Become Several
This is the part I want people to remember from both articles.
A no-trespass notice is not necessarily about one doorway.
Large corporations may control multiple hotels, casinos, shopping centers, warehouses, stores, offices, garages, or other facilities.
Depending upon the corporate structure, the authority of the entity issuing the notice, the wording of the notice, and the jurisdiction involved, an exclusion may reach more than the exact location where the initial incident occurred.
So if you have already been formally told that you are not welcome on properties owned or controlled by a particular company, don’t assume traveling twenty miles to another property resets the clock.
It may not.
And saying:
“I didn’t know they owned this one too”
is a situation that is much better avoided than argued about afterward.
Your Vehicle Is Private Property. The Ground Under It Isn’t.
That’s probably the easiest way to summarize all of this.
Your car is yours.
Your van is yours.
Your RV is yours.
What you have inside it is generally your business, subject to applicable law.
But when you park that vehicle on somebody else’s land, another set of rights enters the equation.
Whether you’re an advantage player traveling between casinos, a gig worker waiting between trips, somebody living out of a van by choice, or somebody sleeping in a vehicle because life has put you in a difficult situation, you still have to pay attention to where you are.
Because “I was just sleeping” may explain what you were doing.
It does not automatically answer the other question:
Did you have permission to be there?
And once the answer to that question becomes no, especially after somebody has directly told you so, pretending the next property will never know about the last one is not much of a plan.
Property and trespass laws vary by state, municipality, and other jurisdiction, and corporate ownership or management structures can affect the scope of any particular notice. This article discusses general property and security principles, not legal advice.