Economic instability

Economic instability in this account is a cumulative condition, not a brief interruption between secure periods. Low wages collide with rising housing costs; injury, illness, layoffs, and vanished savings deepen the pressure; and inadequate retirement income leaves people working or improvising homes well into old age. Linda May’s trajectory makes that accumulation visible, while the wider community of vehicle dwellers shows how private hardship connects to a broader failure of housing and employment security.

Structural Pressure: Wages, Housing, and Work

The economic trap facing many of the people followed in the book begins with a mismatch: rents and housing costs rise while wages remain comparatively flat. For workers with little room to save, demanding jobs can consume nearly all available time and still fail to provide stable housing or a credible path to retirement. The reporting places that predicament against a stark measure of affordability: at the time described, a full-time minimum-wage worker could afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair-market rent in only twelve counties and one metropolitan area. The hourly wage needed to rent such an apartment while keeping housing costs within the recommended 30 percent of income was $16.35, more than twice the federal minimum wage. One in six American households spent over half its income on shelter, leaving many low-income families with little for food, medication, and other essentials.

The same pressures appear in Linda May’s job history. At sixty, she was living in a trailer in New River, Arizona, without electricity or running water because she could not afford the utility bill. Her unemployment benefits had ended, and the family she had lived with for years had moved into a smaller apartment without room for her. A couple of years later, in Lake Elsinore, California, she was a Home Depot cashier earning $10.50 an hour, sometimes scheduled for only twenty to twenty-five hours a week. Her trailer rent was $600 a month. She had two degrees in construction and had previously worked at Home Depot in Las Vegas as an expeditor, earning about $15 an hour in a role that used her problem-solving experience. At the register, she still advised customers on building materials, but that knowledge did not translate into financial stability. The work she could obtain paid less and used less of what she knew.

How Insecurity Accumulates Across a Life

Linda May’s instability was not simply a matter of one bad job. Before her life as a nomad began, she had held a series of low-wage positions without building lasting financial security or a pension. She began collecting Social Security at sixty-two, when the first check arrived, because the benefit seemed too small for delaying it to make a meaningful difference. The book connects her situation to wider disparities affecting older women: in 2015, more than one in six older women living alone was below the poverty line, and the number of elderly women in poverty was nearly twice the number of elderly men. Women’s average Social Security benefits were $341 a month lower, reflecting lower lifetime payroll contributions; lower earnings and unpaid caregiving also left less opportunity to build savings, while longer average lifespans meant those resources had to last longer.

Family care and financial strain intersected again when Linda May stayed with her daughter Audra, son-in-law Collin, and grandchildren in Mission Viejo. The crowded household had limited space, and Linda slept on the couch by the front door. Though she loved her family, dependence on their home made her feel stranded and diminished her autonomy. Her family was also managing serious health problems: one granddaughter had been weak and intermittently bedridden for years before testing positive for Sjogren’s syndrome; her grandson Julian had type 1 diabetes; Audra had arthritis; and Collin’s migraines and vertigo had forced him out of his office job. The household’s needs left little room for Linda to rely on relatives without adding to their burdens.

The fragility of that arrangement became explicit when the family was evicted from its rental home. Collin had lost the short-term disability benefits he had received after leaving his job, and the family could not pay the rent. Linda gave them her stored twenty-eight-foot El Dorado motorhome, which she had nearly sold earlier that summer. It was a practical transfer of shelter, but not a simple solution: two adults, three teenagers, and four dogs would have to fit inside. As the family sold its possessions, a yard sale raised $1,000. Linda helped organize it, then acknowledged that she was exhausted and had begun to pull back from the effort. Economic insecurity moved through the family as a shared crisis, met partly with the resources each relative could still provide.

Mobility as a Cost-Cutting Strategy

For people who felt that conventional housing and employment had locked them into an unwinnable arrangement, living in a van, recreational vehicle, or trailer offered a way to lower housing costs and follow seasonal work. The trade was not freedom from economic need: residents still had to keep vehicles running, buy fuel, find jobs, and secure places to stay. Workamping could provide wages, a parking space, or both, but opportunities varied. Some positions paid modestly after requiring substantial labor; others offered a site and hookups in exchange for work without wages. The annual sugar beet harvest, for example, brought hundreds of recreational-vehicle dwellers to the northern plains for day-and-night shifts, with a starting wage of $12 an hour plus overtime and a place to park.

Mobility also depends on administrative arrangements that make people legible to institutions despite their movement. Nomads must maintain a state domicile for vehicle registration, licenses, taxes, voting, jury service, and other obligations. Many choose states with fewer administrative burdens or no state income tax and use mail-forwarding services. South Dakota’s process could be completed by spending one night at a local motel, registering with a mail-forwarding service, and presenting the receipts to the state department of public safety. Such arrangements enable life on the road, but also reveal its contradiction: a person may live nowhere in a stable residential sense while still needing an official address to participate in ordinary civic systems.

Public land offered another way to make mobility affordable, though access came with rules. Around Quartzsite, Arizona, free federal camping allowed stays of up to two weeks, after which campers had to move at least twenty-five miles or use the La Posa Long Term Visitor Area. That longer-stay option cost $40 for two weeks or $180 for as many as seven months. A permit sticker on a windshield could identify a vehicle as part of this dispersed community; elsewhere, the same visible sign of repeated camping could draw official scrutiny. In Coconino National Forest, rangers questioned some van and RV campers about their home addresses, and people judged to be making residential use of the forest could be ticketed and evicted. The possibility of movement therefore rested not only on having a vehicle, but on being allowed to stop.

Collective Hardship and Unequal Security

The economic troubles among Amazon CamperForce workers reflected several routes into insecurity. Bob and Anita Apperley had expected to fund retirement aboard a sailboat with the equity in their home. They bought a three-bedroom house for $340,000 and invested another $20,000, but after the housing crash its value fell to $260,000. Rather than continue paying a loan worth more than the house, they bought a fifth-wheel trailer and left. Their savings and plans had been built around the assumption that housing values would keep rising; when that assumption failed, the loss altered their understanding of financial security. In the encampments, the Apperleys were not exceptional: workers described foreclosures, depleted investments and retirement accounts, layoffs, failed businesses, divorce, illness, injury, and student debt. Some younger workers had lost jobs or had never found work that made their degrees useful.

Older workers faced the same insecurity through bodies and careers shaped by earlier periods of work. Chuck Stout, seventy, walked an estimated thirteen miles a day as an Amazon warehouse picker. He had spent forty-five years at McDonald’s, including work as a white-collar employee and director of product development, but bankruptcy followed after $410,000 disappeared in the stock-market crash. He and his wife, Barbara, lost their house and moved into a motor coach. Other workers described repetitive strain and daily aches; Linda May herself had developed a wrist injury while doing warehouse work with a handheld barcode scanner, leaving her unable to lift even a light cup without pain. For her, the injury closed off a possible return to that job just as money was short. The warehouse and seasonal labor that helped sustain mobile life could also wear down the people who depended on it.

The Limits of a Moving Home

The book’s recurring image of nomads moving with the seasons captures both possibility and compulsion. At the end of seasonal jobs, travelers pack up and cross the country in search of another job, warmer weather, friends, or family. They rest in Walmart parking lots, on quiet streets, and at truck stops, then return to the highway before attracting notice. A parking space can become a temporary refuge, but it is not equivalent to secure housing: it offers a place to stop without guaranteeing that the person may remain there.

Linda May’s own movements make that conditionality concrete. After her family’s eviction, her old motorhome became their shelter while she continued her separate plans and travels. Later, her grandchildren stayed in a tent beside an RV; a storm lifted the rain fly, water entered from below, and duct tape was used to patch holes made while vacuuming sand from the tent floor. Linda faced her own practical obstacles on the road, including a black spot in her vision at night, a broken speedometer, and the loss of a camp-hosting position she had believed secured. The road offered a means of adapting when ordinary housing and stable work failed, but weather, health, employment decisions, vehicle condition, and land-use rules could all narrow her choices again. Economic instability thus appears not as a problem mobility solves once and for all, but as the force that repeatedly sets people moving—and the constraint that follows them from one stop to the next.