Dawn Robinson, a founding member of the 1990s R&B group En Vogue, reveals she is homeless and embracing “car life” after coping with personal struggles over the years.
In a YouTube video posted March 11, the 58-year-old told fans she has been living in her car for the past three years, a scenario she never expected but is making the best of.
“You guys, for the past three, almost three years, I have been living in my car. ... I said it. Oh, my God, it’s out,” she said with a sigh of relief.
The singer said that after initially living with her parents in Las Vegas in 2020, she became at odds with her mother and decided to move out.
At the suggestion of her former co-manager, she relocated to Los Angeles. He had offered to let her stay with him but instead arranged for her to stay in a hotel.
Robinson spent eight months at the hotel, struggling to find apartments and in the process started researching “car life,” and in 2022 drove to Malibu, California, to begin her leap of faith.
“This whole community of people that live in their cars … in their RVs, and a whole community of people that live in vans. … And I loved what I was seeing. I just thought, wow, these people, I can do that,” she said.
“I felt free. That was a sense of freedom that I had. ... I felt like I was on a camping trip.”
En Vogue is considered one of the world’s best-selling girl groups of all time, with chart-topping hits including “Hold On” and “Free Your Mind,” and six Grammy nominations.
Having at one point reached peak stardom with the group, Robinson said she felt compelled to share her current story, not for sympathy but hopefully to inspire others in tough situations.
“People are like, ‘You shouldn’t talk about it, because you’re a celebrity, and what if they judge you?’ So what? What if they judge me? Life is life. ... Part of being human is being vulnerable,” she said.
“I’m learning who I am as a person, as a woman,” she continued. “We say we can’t do certain things before we even know that we’re capable. ... I’m glad that I made this choice, because I needed to go through this fire.”
Formed in 1989, En Vogue featured Robinson alongside Cindy Herron, Terry Ellis, and Maxine Jones. Robinson left the group in 1997.
She released her solo album, “Dawn,” in 2002, and returned to En Vogue for brief stints in 2005 and 2009.
According to a study published by the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, over 40 percent of Los Angeles County’s unsheltered population, about 14,000 people, lived in vehicles as of 2022, which includes cars, vans, and RVs.
The increase in vehicular homelessness is in part caused by rising rents and a severe shortage of affordable housing in the state, according to the study.
