HOME ON THE RANGE
Priced out of their houses, these Americans moved into camper vans and started looking for work on the road
THEYgo by many names: travelers, gypsies, nomads and rubber tramps. They’ll accept “vandwellers” — it’s a statement of fact — and even houseless. But don’t you dare call them homeless. For her new book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century” (Norton), Columbia University journalism professor Jessica Bruder immersed herself in the lives of a fringe but rapidly growing demographic: those who have given up their traditional homes in exchange for trailers, campers and RVs. These itinerant folk, many of them over the age of 65, travel the county year-round, chasing hospitable weather and seasonal, low-wage jobs. It’s a difficult existence, especially for the elderly — these jobs often require backbreaking physical labor, and life on the road presents a number of serious challenges. However, it has one major, and undeniable benefit: It’s cheap.
Or, as Bruder puts it, “The last free place in America is a parking spot.”
For seniors who have been bankrupted by illness, or who have seen their retirement savings dissolve in the Great Recession, the opportunity to unload their single most expensive asset — their home — is frightening but also, ultimately, liberating. “One in six American households [puts] more than half of what they make into shelter,” Bruder writes, which forces citizens to live in debt. When the worst-case scenario happens, as it did to 67-year-old LaVonne Ellis, a radical shift in her thinking was required to find a semblance of financial security and inner peace.
Ellis worked as a broadcast and radio journalist before getting laid off in her 50s. When she — an aging, single mother — couldn’t find another salaried job, she took a gig reading traffic reports that paid $10 an hour to support herself and her son.
Then, illness struck; perpetual migraines made her eight hours a day at the office unbearable. She went on welfare and disability, lost her home and had to move in with her older son and his wife.
I found my people. After a lifetime of chasing the American dream, they had concluded it was nothing but a big con. —‘vandweller’ LaVonne Ellis
LaVonne was miserable until she found “LaVanne”: a 2003 GMC Safari that she bought for $4,995. Like many of the people Bruder met over her three years of reporting, Ellis managed to turn her terrible luck into a personal mission statement.
“I found my people,” she wrote on her blog, “a ragtag group of misfits who surrounded me with love and acceptance . . . After a lifetime of chasing the American dream, they had come to the conclusion that it was all nothing but a big con.”
Like Ellis, the majority of Bruder’s subjects are casualties of a fraying social safety net. Bob Wells, a bearded evangelist for the houseless community, who founded and runs the popular website CheapRVLiving.com, started sleeping in a Chevy box truck after his divorce left him with only $1,200 a month to live on. At first, he couldn’t believe that he had fallen so low, and “crying [him]self to sleep
was a routine event.” But even- tually, Wells made his truck more comfortable and started to see his new lifestyle as a way to escape the crushing realities of a cutthroat, unrecognizable America.
“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 wrote on CheapRVLiving.com. “That’s no longer true.”
As Bruder sees it, investing in “wheel estate” helps vandwellers stop feeling like victims and become empowered. They’re “conscientious objectors to the system that had failed them.” But even without the expenses associated with permanent dwellings, these road-bound retirees still need income to cover cellphone bills, monthly gym memberships — which is how many of them manage to shower regularly — and, of course, gas and groceries.
Job options for aging migrant workers are limited, but they do exist. There’s camp hosting, which involves checking in visitors and maintaining the campsites by picking up trash and cleaning outhouses. There’s beet picking in the Red River Valley, short-term seasonal work that becomes available every October, as the sugar industry rushes to extract its most critical crop before the ground freezes over. And then there’s Amazon. The tech giant recruits roving laborers, or “workampers,” in the busy fall months before Christmas to staff their warehouses. Amazon calls this program CamperForce, and temporary employees come from all over the country to flood the nearby RV parks and work long, difficult shifts in Amazon’s various fulfillment centers, making $11.50 an hour.
As the 37-year-old Bruder found out when she signed up for the job, the work is exhausting, and one Desert Storm veteran who lost his home in the crash of 2008 compared CamperForce to the Army. But it’s still an honest paycheck, which helps those who choose to go houseless feel that they’re still productive members of society. As many of Bruder’s subjects admit, there’s a razor-thin line between rejecting the system and feeling hopelessly rejected by it. “The economy is not getting better,” one online commenter on a vandwelling group told her. “You have a choice — you can be free, or you can be homeless.”