The "New" Urban Nomad: the Mobile Homeless, Pt.1

On Venice Blvd 2012

There is a category of Urban Nomad which is serious and growing: the Mobile Homeless. No, this isn't a joke and it doesn't mean those who have no cell coverage. The Mobile Homeless are a group of nomads who have lost their homes and find shelter in RVs, campers and cars. Well, the lucky ones are in RVs and campers, parked where they can find space on the streets. The less-than-lucky are in their cars; the unlucky, on the streets. The victims of the housing crisis are mounting in numbers unprecedented in US history. Most of us, living in our houses, are unaware just how large this community has grown.

The Mobile Homeless need to move everyday. They are in an all-consuming and constant search for survival, dependent on the streets to provide electricity, water and a place to park. Society is not kind to them, as a general rule. They play a "cat and mouse" game with the police. Neighbors complain about RVs and unruly vagrants on their blocks. Police are called in to move and/or ticket them. In Venice Beach, CA a federal lawsuit against the city and LAPD claimed that cops were not only rousting RV dwellers based on the kind of vehicle they were in but also that dilapidated motor homes were targeted for traffic stops and tickets. 

This video was made in 2008, four years ago. At that time, they were claiming that "since the beginning of the mortgage crisis, one and a half million Americans have lost their homes." According the the NY Times, all told, "roughly four million families lost their homes to foreclosure between the beginning of 2007 and early 2012." (April 2, 2012) Contrary to reports of economic revival, this situation has not gotten better. In California, it has worsened dramatically.
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Coming in Part 2: Mobile Parks?

Miami 2012

We used to say that "the best thing about Miami was its proximity to the United States." Having recently returned for our first guerrilla-type house-hunting trip, I can say that things haven't changed so much since we left that contiguous land nearly nine years ago. Foreign territory it remains.


Spanish is still the first language that greets you. But our favorite Cuban "cafeteria" in Miami Beach is now serving schnitzel and beer. It is called the "Hofbrau Miami"and claims to be the best German Bavarian Restaurant and Beerhall in the county. Our favorite fish market underneath the Julia Tuttle Bridge, gone. Alrighty then!


Miami architecture used to be known for either its Deco pastels or its "too much is never enough" style of Morris Lapidus and his peers who built the iconic behemoths of the 1950s and 60s like the Fountainbleu and Eden Roc hotels. The blues and greens of the 1980s defined by Michael Mann's Miami Vice brought in a whole other design that propelled the city for the next two decades. Well, times have changed and a new trend has risen. I'll simply call it Steroidal Construction. Buildings on steroids. The  downtown area, which used to be a charming (and yes, seedy, in certain areas) series of blocks running down the Biscayne corridor to Brickell,  is now a canyon of architecturally rockstar buildings, all nestled next to each other in disharmonious clutter. RitzCarlton, W, JWMarriott, Viceroy, Setai, Mandarin Oriental, even Canyon Ranch have set up shop in Miami or Miami Beach.  Frank Gehry built a concert hall. Adrienne Arsht who used to own TotalBank is now the name of the Opera House and Center for the Arts straddling downtown's main thoroughfare. It's hard to see all of the new landmarks, squashed as they are,   competing for your attention in the glistening sun and steel. A decade ago there weren't enough rooms; today, the competition is fierce, although the service still remains "foreign." 


There seem to be more Haitians, Brazilians, Argentines visiting and young Northerners looking to party.


But we had a mission on this last trip: see the changes and gauge how we felt in anticipation of a possible next move.  So after viewing dozens of open houses, dilapidated condos, school interviews, foreclosure lists, our guerrilla search made us realize something very important: to a couple of middle-aging Urban Nomads, Miami is still...home.

Looking for a Great Read...or Two?

This year,  two novels I poured through were each so clever, so extraordinarily allegorical yet reality-driven, so funny and yet so enlightening that each one gave rise to simultaneous jealousy and joy to this reader. Jealousy because I don't believe I am capable of the kind of prose exhibited in each, although I will die trying. Absolute joy in reading because each transformed the present condition into a series of farcical, satirical circumstances that ultimately seemed plausible.

These books are Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin (Penguin Press 2006) and  Super Sad Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (2010).  Each novel exhibits a wholly nomadic spirit of travel and discovery. Misunderstandings become the underpinnings of world conflict and on occasion, haphazardly create harmony and symbiosis. Helprin and Shteyngart are satirists of the best kind, with deep insights into the human condition and abilities to create distopian worlds with utopian moments. The main characters are outsiders, yet ultimately leaders who get it "right."

In Freddy and Fredericka, a peculiar English royal family in the not-so-distant future is at a crossroads. They are not sure whether Freddy, the crowned Prince, is mad or sane and are convinced that the heir to the thrown must succeed in a quest and prove himself before being able to be elevated in succession. His mission is simple: be propelled like a missile into the United States in order to single-handedly conquer the lost colonies and bring them back into the fray under British rule. Naked, without funds, he and his fashionista wife parachute into the States, landing in what they think is a "heath" that turns out to be the swampland of New Jersey.

Lenny, the protagonist of Shteyngart's Super Sad Love Story (a title which I can never keep straight) is a forty- something year old "hack" who returns from his nice ex-pat job in Italy to New York, which is now a perpetually hip, distopian society obsessed with youth, immortality and technology. The Chinese have taken over. The dollar is worth nothing. Books have mostly been destroyed. English is reduced to acronyms, slang-slinging and text messaging short-hand. Everyone has his "apparatus" on at all times which displays the wearer's emotions. (Talk about wearing your heart on your sleeve!)

Kudos to both authors. Reality crosses paths with blind determination in each book. Original, brilliant concepts, executed well plus a love story. Really, what more could any reader want??