Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

The last free place in America is a parking spot.

there are only a dozen counties and one metro area in America where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent. You’d

A wage worker is not middle class.tho, never waa

factory jobs offered workers a sure footing in the middle class and the chance to raise a family without fear of displacement.

Working class also not middle, but the secutity of favtory jobs enabled them to educate their children so they could move to middle class

members of the “precariat”: temporary laborers doing short-term jobs in exchange for low wages.

Some hadn’t been able to create enough of a safety net to withstand otherwise survivable traumas: divorce, illness, injury.

The RV parks were jammed with workers who had fallen a long, long way from the middle-class comforts they had always taken for granted. These were standard-bearers for every economic misadventure to afflict Americans in recent decades.

part of a demographic that in recent years has grown with alarming speed: downwardly mobile older Americans.

Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, spoke with me about the unprecedented nature of this change. “We’re facing the first-ever reversal in retirement security in modern U.S. history,” she explained. “Starting with the younger baby boomers, each successive generation is now doing worse than previous generations in terms of their ability to retire without seeing a drop in living standards.”

although most older Americans still view retirement as “a time of leisure,” only 17 percent anticipate not working at all in their later years.

Many industrialized nations followed Germany in adopting some form of old-age insurance. But the United States, land of the rugged individualist, lagged. By the early twentieth century,

This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of those legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less.

401(k) plans, which often rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices, 401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism. Translation: 401(k)s are vastly cheaper for companies than pension plans.

“Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families,” Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker writes in his book The Great Risk Shift. The overarching message: “You are on your own.”

“Instead of a three-legged stool, we have a pogo stick,” quipped economist Peter Brady of the Investment Company Institute.

Nearly half of middle-class workers may be forced to live on a food budget of as little as $5 a day when they retire,

“I never talk about this issue in terms of ‘retirement,’” she said. Americans traditionally abhor “the idea that you are mooching or you’re not productive.”

“greedy geezer”: a boogeyman conjured by critics of Social Security at the turn of the twenty-first century, foremost among them ex–U.S. Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming. The “greedy geezer” spends his golden years in affluent leisure while draining the lifeblood from younger generations. He’s a geriatric vampire, a septuagenarian version of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen.” Except that she drove a Cadillac, and the caricature Alan Simpson described drives a Lexus. Simpson also famously railed against the “Pink Panthers,” a pro–Social Security lobbying group that does not actually exist; he invented it as a straw man—or straw woman?—to make an argument.

Honda Prius

??

they began to form the kind of improvised clans that the novelist Armistead Maupin called “logical”—rather than “biological”—family.

every occupant had brought his life into focus by compressing it into the minimum space, a miracle of internal arrangement plus mobility. —E. B. WHITE

“We can have that guy who rides up on a bike with his dog on a leash and throws down his tent next to a guy in a $500,000 custom-built motorhome, and they get along just fine,” Bill told me. “That ability to coexist is based simply on their desire to enjoy the public land, and the fact that it belongs equally to the guy riding the bicycle as to the guy in the motorhome.”

“It is ironic that before air conditioning, people were content to camp out in the desert for six months. Now as soon as it hits 100, folks are in a mad rush to go somewhere else,” he said, adding that “the demographics of winter visitors are changing. The World War II generation was content to play bingo, go to dances, go rockhounding, and volunteer in our several community service organizations. As the Baby Boomers replace them, we observe that they want more things to do or they get bored.”

Mike told me that transient old folks flock to Quartzsite because it’s “a low-income retirement town” and “a cheap place to hide.” Hide from what? I asked. His answers: shame, poverty, cold weather.

Romani,

Roma

didn’t know a damn thing about living in a van. The learning curve was steep and it never really tapered off, since the circumstances kept changing.

In America, if you don’t have an address, you’re not a real person.

For many nomads I met, missing teeth were the badge of poverty of which they were most ashamed. Some tried to avoid smiling when my camera came out, or asked me not to share pictures that revealed empty sockets.

(It’s sad—but not surprising—that teeth have become a status symbol in a country where more than one in three citizens lack dental coverage, which isn’t included with standard medical insurance.)

America makes it hard enough for people to live nomadically, regardless of race. Stealth camping in residential areas, in particular, is way outside the mainstream. Often it involves breaking local ordinances against sleeping in cars. Avoiding trouble—hassles with cops and suspicious passersby—can be challenging, even with the Get Out of Jail Free card of white privilege. And in an era when unarmed African Americans are getting shot by police during traffic stops, living in a vehicle seems like an especially dangerous gambit for anyone who might become a victim of racial profiling.

Paul Bowles wrote a book called The Sheltering Sky. He described the difference between tourists and travelers.”

He suggests vandwellers are conscientious objectors from a broken, corrupting social order. Whether or not they chose their lifestyle, they have embraced

Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five: America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves . . . Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.

For years, nomads had been establishing residency by using the addresses of local mail-forwarding services. Now many DMV clerks had started looking up each address online. If it belonged to a business, they demanded an actual residential address. Intended to root out terrorism, this also made things harder for nomads, pushing them to come up with bogus information—to claim they lived at a family or friend’s place or borrow the address of a random property they’d seen was for sale. “The

“Around this time every night it hits me that this isn’t a vacation or a trip,” he told me. “This is it.”

The last time she worked for CamperForce, her base wage had been $11.50, before add-ons for night work and overtime. Now it was $10.75.

cardinal rule of nonfiction writing: The story keeps unfolding into the future, but at some point you step away.

More camper vans and an occasional RV dock at the edge of Prospect Park. They cluster near low-slung warehouses in Gowanus and Crown Heights, where there are no neighbors to complain. These mobile shelters are everywhere—an invisible city, hidden in plain sight.

In the widening gap between credits and debits hangs a question: What parts of this life are you willing to give up, so you can keep on living? Most who face this dilemma will not end up dwelling in vehicles. Those who do are analogous to what biologists call an “indicator species”—sensitive organisms with the capacity to signal much larger shifts in an ecosystem.

These indignities underscore a larger question: When do impossible choices start to tear people—a society—apart?

This is not a wage gap—it’s a chasm.

deepening class divide makes social mobility all but impossible. The result is a de facto caste system. This is not only morally wrong but also tremendously wasteful. Denying access to opportunity for large segments of the population means throwing away vast reserves of talent and brainpower.