Every night at dusk in this wealthy California coastal town, Barbara Harvey puts down food for her golden retrievers, Phoebe and Ranger, and watches as they go for their evening walk.
Not long afterwards, the 66-year-old mother-of-three clambers into the back of her white Honda CR-V, pulls up a blanket, and beds down for the night, snuggling next to her beloved dogs for comfort.
"For the most part I sleep okay," says Harvey. "But it is very cramped. And my dogs are big.
The CR-V wasn't designed for people to sleep in."
This was not quite the old age Harvey had been hoping for. Until recently she rented an apartment that featured a garden bristling with roses and heavy with the scent of jasmine.
But when Harvey's job as a 37,000-dollar-a-year (23,600 euros) notary evaporated in the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, she found herself penniless and destitute in a town where the average price of a home is one million dollars.
Harvey's nightly "home" now is the quiet carpark of the historic Santa Barbara Mission, one of 12 sites around the town that is part of a safe parking program run by a non-profit outreach group, New Beginnings.
According to Michael Stoops, executive director of the Washington-based National Coalition for the Homeless, Harvey's experience is not exceptional.
"We are receiving reports from different agencies and individuals in the field that it is becoming more common," Stoops said. "It's definitely a trend.
"For people who lose their homes or their jobs their worst nightmare is to end up living on the streets, literally homeless. So for many it is preferable to live in their vehicles."
In Santa Barbara, the traditional middle-class has all but disappeared as property prices have soared, according to Gary Linker, executive director of New Beginnings.
New Beginnings has sought to help people who are living out of their vehicles, like Harvey, by organizing a network of safe overnight parking havens, mostly in church and public carparks.
Based on what he has seen, however, Linker is skeptical about suggestions of middle-class homelessness reaching epidemic proportions.
"I wouldn't use the word many, but there are some (middle class)," Linker told AFP.
"We are seeing more people, who I wouldn't call classic middle class, but more accurately are lower middle class, versus people who are chronically homeless and bouncing around for 10-15 years."
New Beginnings has received a flood of donations from all over the United States as a result of the publicity surrounding Harvey's case, evidence perhaps that her story has struck a chord in difficult times, Linker says.
"She could be anybody in this country who is essentially one paycheck away from losing their home," Linker said. "That is what resonates with people."
New Beginnings manages 12 parking lots across Santa Barbara, which are currently filled by some 55 vehicles.
Linker said that the profile of people enrolled in the program varies.
"There are clusters, people who are disabled, people who are mentally ill, substance abusers, people who are war veterans," he said.
Perhaps surprisingly, around half of the people have jobs.
"In our last appraisal, just around half are working. We have electricians, plumbers, bus drivers.
We had one case where a woman had nothing -- and now she is the night supervisor at one of our local supermarkets," he said.
"People of all walks of life working lower-income jobs are in our program."
While the ultimate aim of the program is to place people in permanent housing, some in the safe-parking scheme are in no hurry to leave.
Guy Trevor, a 53-year-old British-born interior designer who lost his home and his job in the mortgage crisis, says he spent three months living in a pick-up truck before entering the parking scheme.
"The real difference is you're not sneaking around any more," Trevor said. "You feel safe. It's nice to feel safe."
Former software engineer and dotcom CEO, Jess Jessop, 54, has lived with his two sons in a converted school bus for the past four years, three of them in Santa Barbara. He says the parking scheme is a "life-saver."
"Wherever else we've, it's almost always okay for one day, maybe two. But nobody wants you to stay, so you're constantly being forced -- usually in the middle of the night -- to move on. And that's pretty tough," he told AFP.
"But here with this program we've had a stable home for over three years, and my kids are part of the community."
Single parent Jessop, who saw his career implode after the 2001 dot-com crash, says the situation in Santa Barbara has attracted national attention as America's economic problems have deepened.
"In 2001 there were a bunch of us in the dot-com community who suddenly found out what it was like to be out of work, out of the picture, not earning," Jessop said.
"Right now there's a whole new crop of people facing that. There are so many people on the edge of the same situation."
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