Country of Exiles (11 page)

It has been these two groups—an avaricious, flexible elite and a large pool of poor, flexible immigrants—who have created the informal economy of New York City (as well as of
the other cities). Without such an economy, which elected officials and policymakers throughout the state have done much to condone and even to decriminalize (including acquiescing to illegal immigration), that city could not function. New York City’s own government spent $32.1 million in 1994, a record sum, on temporary workers, in an attempt to cut the public payroll.
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For free marketeers, such work conditions proved ideal because they exerted a strong “disciplinary effect on American workers” and kept wages down.
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But they also stirred up corrosive insecurity, and it was around regions such as this that one could nearly feel it—the raw vitality, the struggle of many people, the anxiety on the subways or the streets. Following a pattern set years ago by other immigrants, the new migrants, the labor pools, also tended to form neighborhoods from which many hoped to escape, leaving behind spaces to be filled by more, similar, migrants, thus perpetuating the cycle.
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Another outcome of the growing landscape of the temporary has been the rise of newer kinds of housing for the affluent as well as the poor.

Temporary housing, of course, has always transcended class but never more so than in the past few decades. It has come in the form of “trophy homes” for wealthy entertainers and sports stars who buy goliath houses one year, only to trade them in the next for something bigger or more eye-catching.
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Realtors have helped traveling dads, like CEO Michael Lorelli, find temporary housing, usually cookie-cutter colonial or French Renaissance mansions devoid of any personal touches introduced by occupants, homes which can be conveniently marketed any time the owners move on to their next job, state, or country.
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After 1980 an array of luxury master-planned communities also opened up in suburbs, with golf courses and swimming pools, courting millions of affluent Americans
“who move a lot” and want “instant community.”
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Designers and architects, too, have “rethought the home” and its furniture—“collapsible, lightweight, high-end design,” “nothing heavy,” to satisfy the flexible style of “the new professionals, just out of college, changing jobs every couple of years, people who are on the move.”
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The lodging industry has also been busy serving the needs of mobile professionals and managers. Over the past ten years, American firms have built numerous chains of mid-level and economy hotels—from the merged Hospitality Franchises, Inc. (owner of Days Inn and Ramada Hotel), and Marriott International to the new “extended-stay hotels” such as Homestead Village, Wingate Hotels, and Extended Stay America. These chains have added thousands of new units to the world’s supply, not only in the United States but also throughout Europe and in such countries as India, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, and China.
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By the late nineties, businesspeople could travel almost anywhere and find reasonably priced hotels, comfortable places to hop into and out of, each one like the other, often with the same electronic tools (computers and voice mail), each reproducing the same air-conditioned, streamlined style dictated by their temporary nature.
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There are nests of these chains near every major airport and train terminal, around every conference center—temporary housing through which pass droves of flexible computer nerds, consultants on short-term assignments, global migrants, and high-level managers with their remembering machines.

These homes resemble the ones many professional Americans themselves live in when they are not traveling, utilitarian places to inhabit, leave, and recirculate. Far more than any other group of people anywhere, American businessmen (and most have been men) have been inclined to create a landscape of temporary housing because they themselves treat their own
homes as temporary dwellings (despite their worship of home ownership). Years ago, many Americans did not think of their homes in this way, because such homes, especially farmhouses, embraced many things, from spiritual observance and cooking to childcare and apprenticeships. Such activities endowed the home with the power to “root people to the landscape,” to quote J. B. Jackson again. Many people loved their homes, because they truly
lived
in them.
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In modern times, the home—even as it has gotten obscenely bigger and families much smaller—has lost much of this character and, therefore, its capacity to connect people to place.
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Such a situation explains why it has become so easy for so many people to leave their homes behind (since so little of any substance happens in them); and it also helps explain why so many Americans—not Europeans, not Asians—have been so temperamentally well suited to building the world’s biggest hospitality empire.
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Temporary housing of all kinds, then, has been cropping up since the late 1970s, but because of its relative invisibility, most Americans think nothing of it. Other kinds of housing, however, for a different group of people, have not been so hidden from view. One can see them throughout the country but especially in the South (Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia) and the West and the Southwest (Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, and California). They dot highways and rural byways, forming agglomerations on a small scale, one might say. These mobile homes and trailer parks have often met the needs of poor and working-class Americans, many tied in some way to the demands of the casual labor market.

Mobile homes have long been a feature of this society, especially after 1960.
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In the 1960s and seventies, however, skilled people—mechanics, electricians, carpenters, engineers, even a few dentists and doctors—were the largest group of
owners, followed in number by: military personnel and their families, who moved from base to base; retired people looking for security in contained enclaves; and people who vacationed with small (and sometimes long) travel trailers.
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In the early 1960s, novelist John Steinbeck journeyed across the country in a mobile home with his poodle dog, Charley, a trip that formed the basis for his book
Travels With Charley
. Somewhere in Maine, he encountered a young family living in a big air-conditioned aluminum mobile home, fitted with an “immaculate kitchen, walled in plastic tile, stainless-steel sinks and ovens and stoves flush with the wall.” He interviewed the young owner, a successful mechanic and welder and son of Italian immigrants. Steinbeck and his new friend talked of “roots” and of staying fixed in one place. But in a way that put him squarely in the mainstream of American culture, this man hated roots and fixity. He hated permanence and saw his mobile home as the best thing in the world.

“My father came from Italy,” he told Steinbeck. “He grew up in Tuscany in a house where his family had lived maybe a thousand years. That’s roots for you, no running water, no toilet, and they cooked with charcoal or vine clippings.” “Fact is, he cut his roots and came to America.” Steinbeck asked if he missed “permanence.” “Who’s got permanence?” he responded. “You got roots you sit and starve. You take the pioneers in the history books. They were movers. Take up land, sell it, move on.” Steinbeck seemed persuaded. “Perhaps we have overrated roots as a psychic need,” he said. Yet a few pages later, he complained about the weakening of “the poetry of place” or of local differences, which he blamed on the impact of “radio and television speech,” as “standardized” as “white bread.” “I who love words and the endless possibility of words am saddened by [this]. For with local accent will disappear
local tempo. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go.… Localness is not gone but it is going.”
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Since Steinbeck’s day, the main occupants of trailer parks have not been prospering welders or professionals but blue-collar Americans with a median income (in 1991) of $19,500.
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The rise in the number of unskilled working-class owners after 1980, in fact, had transformed mobile homes into the fastest-growing sector of the housing market; by 1991, in nineteen states, at least one home in every ten was a mobile home, most bought by the working poor.
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Elderly Americans, of course, still filled the trailer parks in Florida and elsewhere, often living in communities of considerable luxury and security; upscale recreational vehicles also remained popular for both the Wall Street and Hollywood rich.
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But most of the trailer folk were poor; and the homes they owned were, of course, not very mobile at all but fixed in place. They did suit, however, the needs of the mobile people in them, people ready to change homes at a moment’s notice.

J. B. Jackson, in his 1994 book
A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time
, said that trailers also resembled automobiles, impersonal and “easy to trade and sell.” “When a better job becomes available somewhere else, the family can at least consider the wisdom of selling, and of finding similar accommodations wherever they go.”
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Jackson also noted what he thought were the many blessings of the trailer parks: the low costs, the ease of financing and maintenance, the convenience and comfort, and the fact that trailer living “brings with it no new responsibilities, no change or expansion in the traditional routine.”
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But Jackson went further than this in an effort, partly, to counter those critics with grimmer, often more condescending thoughts about “trailer trash.” He claimed that many of the new trailer parks (he focused particularly on parks in New
Mexico) actually represented new kinds of blue-collar “villages” that fostered openness and hospitality among people. They encouraged people to “go outside” rather than to stay inside and to rely on one another in the public square for pleasure and comfort. Such villages, Jackson argued, compared favorably with middle-class dwellings, which were divided into discrete spaces to ensure isolation, privacy, and limited interaction with neighbors. Mobile homes, on the other hand, were too confining to keep their owners holed up inside for very long. Vernacular rather than planned spaces, they were products of everyday uses, and they brought people together into something of an organic community, into a “super-family,” or an “us,” carved out of what Jackson called elsewhere “the landscape of the temporary.”

John Brinckerhoff Jackson was perhaps the first American thinker to devote an entire intellectual career to the exploration of “the landscape of the temporary.” Almost single-handedly, in his books, through his magazine
Landscape
, and in his college courses at Harvard and Berkeley, he taught his students to “see” landscapes not as pretty pictures but as “a system of man-made surfaces on the surface of the earth.”
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He also knew better than anyone how highways and roads defined America. He made a ritual of ending his college course “The History of the American Cultural Landscape” (fondly known by his students as “Gas Stations”) with an assessment of the superhighway.

The son of wealthy American bluebloods, he was born in Dinard, France, in 1909, and educated at Harvard. Almost from the time he learned to walk, he had a love affair with mobility.
“I am very pro-automobile, pro-car, and pro-truck,” he said as an old man.
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As a boy in the 1920s, he flew on airplanes in France; as a youth, he toured Europe almost annually—even on his first motorbike, a Christmas present in 1933. In his sixties, he often criss-crossed the country on a motorcycle. When asked in 1975 what kind of “new man” might appear in the future, he proposed “the man on the skateboard, in a kind of ecstasy of mobility, physical grace, and awareness.”
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Jackson wrote about “mobility sports,” from skiing to hot-rodding, in almost religious terms, believing that they offered moments of such “intoxication”—in a “new landscape shorn” of the “gentler human traits” and “of all memory and sentiment”—that one might experience “a temporary reshaping of our being.” “To the perceptive individual,” he said, “there can be an almost mystical quality to the experience: his identity seems for the moment to be transmuted.”
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Like many other Americans, he sexualized mobility. He was an antinomian of the highway, seeking solitary insight in “a world of flowing movement, blurred light, rushing wind and water.”
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Such a vision of motion relates to another possible source for Jackson’s romance with this landscape. Unmarried and self-contained, he seems to have felt like a wanderer himself, which must have sensitized him to the temporary; and he identified with strangers. In an essay, “The Stranger’s Path,” written in 1957, he wrote eloquently of that part of the city which begins at the point “where strangers first disembark”—at the city bus terminals, truckstops, and rail depots—and ends with the “zone of transients” or that “special part of town” filled with “dives and small catch-penny businesses.” Jackson showed little interest in the residential part of the city, occupied mostly by families. “Why have I always been glad to leave?” he asked. “Was it a painful realization that I was excluded from these rows and rows of (presumably) happy and comfortable homes
that made me want to beat a retreat to the city proper?” In contrast, he wrote effusively about this Path, populated, he said, in “greater part” by “unattached men”—“men looking for a job or on their way to a job; men come to buy or sell one item in their line of business, men on a brief holiday.” Where other observers might have shunned this urban zone as “more than a little shady,” Jackson saw it as the “prime” entry point for “a ceaseless influx of new wants, new ideas, new manners, new strengths” into urban America, without which city life would die.
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