Some lost their savings some thought they would retire on the equity in their homes, but their homes dropped in value dramatically, while the cost of traditional housing kept going up. It felt so strange to me, so I started talking to RV'ers outside Amazon warehouses in Nevada and Kansas. Some for Amazon's CamperForce said if you come, you'll make friends. And a lot of the recruiting materials for these jobs made them look like summer camps. But nobody had been looking at it in context of the retirement crisis in the wake of the Great Recession.

These are not easy jobs or the kind typically associated with people in older stages. I started doing some research and learned there was a whole spectrum of thousands of employers hiring people in similar situations - in oil feels, harvesting sugar beets and helping out at amusement parks. After all, they call them 'recreational' vehicles.

I regarded it as a life of luxury and a neat retirement choice. I went 'Goodness!' Call me naive, but when I see a RV, I assume it's owned by one of the last of great pensioners enjoying retirement and going to see the National Parks. I had read a story in Mother Jones and it mentioned a woman working in a warehouse who was living in a RV and said she couldn't afford to retire.

Jessica Bruder: It grew out of a story I wrote for Harper’s in 2014. Next Avenue: How did you come to write Nomadland? I recently interviewed Bruder to learn more about the lives in Nomadland and what the future holds for these people: They're downwardly mobile older Americans in mobile homes.ĭuring her three years doing research for the book, conducting hundreds of interviews and traversing 15,000 miles, Bruder even tried living the difficult nomad life she lasted one workweek. As Bruder writes, these are “people who never imagined being nomads.” Many saw their savings wiped out during the Great Recession or were foreclosure victims and, writes Bruder, 'felt they'd spent too long losing a rigged game.' Some were laid off from high-paying professional jobs. Living on less than $1,000 a month, in certain cases, some have no hot showers. The 'workamper' jobs range from helping harvest sugar beets to flipping burgers at baseball spring training games to Amazon’s “CamperForce,” seasonal employees who can walk the equivalent of 15 miles a day during Christmas season pulling items off warehouse shelves and then returning to frigid campgrounds at night.

The book nomadland