Digging in the Trash
I grew up in the deep south, and my folks were the first generation in my family to move out of the trailer park (technically, their parents lived in mill villages, which was a similar indicator of poverty, but the first several years of their marriage was spent in a trailer). They made it out before I was born, so I had a lower middle class upbringing most of my life. Many of my friends were in the same situation; their folks bought houses and moved out of trailers during their childhood. There was a general trend upward, out of the trailer park and into middle class lifestyles.<p>What&#x27;s alarming, to me, is that <i>many</i> of those same friends are back in trailer parks, or slumlord-run apartments, today. The trend today is pushing people down and out of the middle class and back into poverty. Poor folks could scrabble their way out of poverty through the 70s to early 90s, even though we don&#x27;t regard all of that time as a &quot;good economy&quot;, my recollection was that the average family was coming up, rather than falling down. That doesn&#x27;t seem to be working anymore.<p>The numbers seem to agree with this: the American middle class is shrinking. Some are climbing up into the upper class, but I suspect that&#x27;s mostly people who never knew poverty. I think past poverty has a gravity that pulls folks back down, if anything goes awry.<p>Health problems have been a leading indicator among my old friends. When people get sick in America, it can be an economic disaster. Less so with ACA, but it&#x27;s still too much if you&#x27;re barely hanging onto your house, your car, etc.<p>I live in RV parks quite a bit these days, as I live in an RV and travel kinda full-time (in a leisurely manner, after many years of constant travel), and I meet a lot of people who are &quot;choosing&quot; to live a more minimal lifestyle in an RV. But, the reality is, they often don&#x27;t have the option to live in a house; at least not one they own. The Tiny House movement seems to be a lot of the same: people who can&#x27;t afford a traditional suburban home, but still have dreams of home ownership. I see the Tiny House &quot;movement&quot; being criticized a lot as &quot;fetishizing poverty&quot;, but I think that misses the point that a lot of the people choosing to live in Tiny Houses aren&#x27;t fetishizing being poor...they&#x27;re just poor. They come from middle class backgrounds, so people just don&#x27;t recognize it as poverty.<p>I worry that the economic divide in the US is a disaster waiting to happen for the country as a whole, but it&#x27;s already causing significant pain among the people who come from a poor background and don&#x27;t have family safety net to help lift them back up, when things go wrong. They just keep falling, and trailer parks, RV parks, slumlord-run apartments, etc., is where they end up. And, getting back out again is harder than it&#x27;s been in a long time.