The Sedona City Council and residents have spent numerous hours talking about homelessness over the years, but residents rarely hear publicly from any individuals who are themselves homeless.

Jesse Clutterbuck, originally from Flagstaff, has been panhandling in Sedona and living the van life since 2016.

“In 2016, I was dating this girl that lived up in the canyon who lived across from Indian Gardens. At that time, the traffic was different and they didn’t have all those guardrails. The traffic would back up like five miles,” Clutterbuck recalled. “I’d sit right in front of the Sedona sign there. I usually fly a sign that says ‘hungry,’ so that allows me to get fed and money in my pocket. In 2016, I was making a minimum of like $30 an hour sitting up there in the canyon. One day I made $765. It’s one of my biggest scores. In a total of 10 hours. I’d just sit up there for five hours on Saturday and five hours on Sunday.”

Clutterbuck has worked as an electrician and construction laborer but has had difficulty holding regular jobs due to a range of medical issues including herniated disks, an autoimmune disorder, thyroid problems and early-onset osteoarthritis. He was unable to hold down a job several years ago due to being between vans at the has been panhandling in Sedona and living the van life since 2016. time and having nowhere to keep his dog during the day. He also recently worked for a Cottonwood electrician for one day before being let go for failure to pass a background check due to a misdemeanor conviction from a fight with another transient in July.

‘A Little Scientific’

“I specifically fly a sign, I don’t walk up to people and ask them for money. That’s not my style,” Clutterbuck said. “I literally have like 20 signs in my van. I just have a sign for whatever I need. If I need propane for my heater, one says ‘Need propane’; if I need dog food, one says ‘Need dog food’ … I go to the gas station on the outside with a 5-gallon gas can and I have a sign that says ‘need gas.’”

He makes minimal use of government and private homeless services.

“I occasionally eat at the Cottonwood mission or the Flagstaff soup kitchen. I do get food stamps,” Clutterbuck said. “I utilize St. Vincent de Pauls in every town that has them. They’ll buy auto parts for me.”

“I’m a little scientific about it,” Clutterbuck said. “I use Google to help me indicate when to go fly a sign. Google has live data statistics on the corporate stores, the grocery stores, and if the bar graph is higher than usual, I’ll try to get there. Eighty f ive percent of the time, I use Google traffic maps to go fly a sign. Starbucks is always going to be real busy in the morning.”

Presentation is also important. “Generally people don’t like seeing down-and out people, so I act happy as hell. I wave, my friends say I even do a little dance,” Clutterbuck described. “I feel like there’s an abundance of stuff in America, and I feel like we’re all spoiled in a way, and I feel like I’ve learned to live off the spoils of society. I’m by no means getting rich, I’m just sustaining life.”

Minimalism

Although medical problems led to Clutterbuck’s initial panhandling, he also spoke of the advantages of his lifestyle.

“You only need a lot of money if you have an expensive lifestyle. That I don’t,” Clutterbuck said. “Buddhist nuns and monks live off the generosity of others, they’re basically beggars. I would consider myself Taoist and I would consider this not a problem in society, begging.”

“The majority of us aren’t living within our means. We just want more, more. We’re a society of hyper-consumerism,” Clutterbuck said. “People are constantly trying to give me stuff. I’m like, I can’t take that, ‘cause I don’t have room for it, for one, and second, I don’t want it.”

Clutterbuck said that his rate of return from panhandling is superior to what local businesses are offering in terms of wages.

“Seven out of 10 times I go to the corner, I make $30 an hour. I just got this job working as an electrician, and they want to start me at $19, which is a joke,” Clutterbuck said. “If I get like $30, I’m satisfied. That’s all I need. I don’t have to pay for gas if I don’t want.”

His van, which is also his home, costs him $145 a year in insurance premiums, or $12.08 per month.

“I bought another van this past summer, like an ’87 Dodge,” Clutterbuck recounted. “I got it for $1,500. Then when I started thinking about it, I put too much money into this van I currently own, it’s like my girlfriend that I know how it rides. I decided I was going to try to flip the other van. And then I decided I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of trying to sell it, so I saw some traveling kids with like two dogs up at Walmart in Flagstaff and I just ended up giving them the van … People have helped me out a lot in my life and I figured I’d pay it forward.”

‘Very Incognito’

“I try to park in a different spot every night, very incognito. The cops do know me in Sedona on a personal basis,” Clutterbuck said. “I’ve been there doing it since 2016 and someone is always calling the cops on me for something.”

“As for the cops waking people up at night, I don’t hear of it happening too often. If you stay in a spot for too long they’ll do that,” Clutterbuck continued. “I’ve honestly gotten woken more by security guards than I have police officers … they’re not there unless someone calls.

“Typically the cops don’t care. As long as you’re minding your own business and don’t cause any trouble, you can pretty much sleep anywhere.”

“I’ve got my little spots where they don’t know,” Clutterbuck added. “I don’t like to waste my gas, so I just stay in town a lot.”

He noted that the flexibility of panhandling permits a seasonal lifestyle.

“We move seasonally because of the weather. There’s this whole migration thing,” Clutterbuck said. “I’m usually in Lake Havasu in the winter.”

Housing Costs

“There’s no way I would move into a house and pay the amount of rent that they want,” Clutterbuck said when asked if he would consider moving back into a fixed residence. “If I were to go back to a place, I’d have to find something cheap, like $500 for a room. I live off very little money, but even if I had a stable job, I would want to try to build my wealth up. I don’t like paying bills.”

While Clutterback called out short-term rentals as a contributing factor to the difficulty of housing in the area, a new survey from the Sedona-Verde Valley Association of Realtors showed that 61% of STR owners would be unlikely to or definitely would not rent to locals even if STRs were banned, with another 21% on the fence.

“I don’t know what the solution is,” Clutterbuck said. “Stop being greedy?”

He also expressed interest in the city of Sedona’s proposal for a car camp at the Sedona Cultural Park, access to which would have been limited to individuals employed in Sedona and willing to make a commitment to move back into fixed housing eventually.

“If they don’t want a spot for the people, just give them a free pass,” Clutterbuck suggested. “This is a worker, it’s OK for them to park their vehicle here and sleep overnight. Not per se on private property … but on a public street. Maybe a designated street where it’s OK … If they’re working a job or whatever, and they work like eight hours a day and they’re trying to save money … there’s no reason why they should have to drive out of city limits to park for the night and drive back in the morning.”

“If they just like park on the side of the road and they’re not bothering anybody, what does it hurt?” Clutterbuck asked.

“I think it’s an old-school way of thinking. I think they need to evolve a little bit,” Clutterbuck said. “Have they actually sat down with someone who lives in a van like me and discussed why or what?”