Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

After the financial meltdown of 2008, traffic to CheapRVLiving.com exploded. “I started getting emails almost daily from people who had lost their jobs, their savings were running out, and they were facing foreclosure on their home,” he later wrote. Cast out of the middle class, these readers were trying to learn how to survive. Googling phrases such as “budget living” and “living in a car or van” brought them to Bob’s website. And in a culture where economic misfortune was blamed largely on its victims, Bob offered them encouragement instead of opprobrium. “At one time there was a social contract that if you played by the rules (went to school, got a job, and worked hard) everything would be fine,” he told readers. “That’s no longer true today. You can do everything right, just the way society wants you to do it, and still end up broke, alone, and homeless.” By moving into vans and other vehicles, he suggested, people could become conscientious objectors to the system that had failed them. They could be reborn into lives of freedom and adventure. ALL OF THIS HAD A PRECEDENT. In the mid-1930s, with America in the grip of the Great Depression, house trailers went into mass production for the first time. Hobbyists and small-batch builders had been constructing the curious contraptions for years, but now their popularity skyrocketed. “At first . . . the trailer was just something different in camping . . . then people discovered you could live in them,” Fortune Magazine recou...