Acco during fieldwork

To the social scientists here who do fieldwork based research — what do you do for living arrangements? I’m hoping to go back and forth to some extent — 2-3 month stints away doing fieldwork, and then 2 months in Oxford and so on. My college basically told me that they cannot assure me short term (termly) acco and that I basically have to get in touch with them the month of, to find out if they have availability. The other option would be to sign a year’s agreement, even with a private agency, but considering I don’t know exactly what my fieldwork will look like, that seems a bit unrealistic because I don’t know whether I’ll find a person to sublease it although there’s plenty of visiting scholars every term. But what do y’all do and how do you manage?

Living out of a suitcase for the entirety of fieldwork year sounds really crappy, but I’m wondering if that’s my only option. Please help, any and all advice is appreciated.