For decades, life in California has revolved around the automobile: You can't live on the coast without a car, the saying goes. Now the homeless in San Francisco are taking this tenet one step further: They say they can't afford to live anywhere but in their cars, and they want the city to provide a space for parking.

A group of about 150 supporters of the idea have formed the Vehicularly Housed Residents Association, which Judy Appel, staff attorney for the Coalition on Homelessness, an advocacy group, calls 'a neighborhood group without the neighborhood.'

Guinea Apollos, in the polite terms of San Francisco's homeless advocates, is a "vehicularly housed resident." In the less polite terms of the police, she is someone living illegally in a car on city streets.

All is quiet now along Terry A. Francois Boulevard on San Francisco's waterfront. The community of poor people who lived there in funky campers and vans and old school buses has been scattered, another chapter in the city's long-running battle over how to treat the homeless or those who are '"vehicularly housed.'"