SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – For four years, the only life Paula Corb and her two daughters have known is the one inside their 2000 Mazda minivan – stopping once in a while for take-out, groceries and gas.

Corb and the girls Alice and Emily are among 214,000 "unsheltered" homeless people in America, meaning they sleep in places not intended for human beings to sleep, like bus stations, abandoned buildings, parks or cars. For them, making a pit stop for gas is the equivalent of paying rent.

"We go on about a four-block radius," Corb explained. "It’s $5 to $10 a day. You see, that’s $70 a week times four. I mean, that’s more than we really have got.”

The vast majority of the country's 71,000 homeless families live in shelters, but almost 10,000 are living life like the Corbs.

For two decades, Paula Corb, her engineer ex-husband and two daughters lived in a four-bedroom house just outside of Santa Barbara. She described their life as a "fairy tale." But after her eight-year divorce, Corb went broke. The money from selling the house – at the bottom of the housing market – went to her debts and her lawyers. And as a homemaker for more than 20 years, she's had trouble finding work. The family packed up their stuff and moved into the van, where they live off of food stamps, gift cards for gas and food and Alice receives a Social Security disability check.

“It was scary. It was depressing,” said Alice Corb, 22, the older daughter, of the first night living in the van. “I just kept thinking, ‘How could this have possibly happened?’ And this mantra in my head just repeated over and over: 'I want to go home.' And I just kept avoiding this one thought in my head that says, ‘You don’t have a home to go back to.’”

Paula Corb gets maybe four hours of sleep before she’s awake and doing the family’s laundry in a church annex. To avoid the crowds, she’s started around 3 a.m. She uses a suitcase and microwave stacked on the passenger to stretch out her legs to sleep.