Residents call life at
Pismo Dunes Senior Park
“Pismodise.” Park manager Louise Payne calls it “a holding tank for the
great beyond.” Louise has short hair and blunt bleached bangs that give
her the air of a preteen skateboarder, but at 72 she’s often found
rolling by the park’s 333 trailers in her electric golf cart,
alternating between her roles as mother hen and whip-cracker. California
is a notoriously youthful culture, but eventually the perpetually young
get very old. If they’re lucky enough to live in Pismodise, which is on
the Central Coast, they can exit its palm-lined entrance, cross the
road, amble across the capacious sand of
Pismo State Beach, and dip their toes in the Pacific Ocean while contemplating eternity (or a cocktail).
To move into Pismodise you must meet
four conditions:
Be 55 or older, keep your dog under 20 pounds, be present when guests
stay at your home, and be comfortable with what most Americans consider a
very small house. “If you need more than 800 square feet I can’t help
you,” says Louise with a shrug. There seems to be some leeway on the
dog’s weight. The unofficial rules are no less definite: If you are
attending the late-afternoon cocktail session on the porch of Space 329,
bring your own can, bottle, or box to drink. If you are fighting with
other residents, you still have to greet them when you run into them.
Make your peace with the word “trailer trash.”
“I have very wealthy people here. They think it’s the coolest thing there is.”
No one in California aspires to be old or to live in a trailer, but
we need to be more open to the possibilities inherent in both. Every day
since January 1, 2011, some 10,000 American baby boomers have retired,
and that will continue until 2030, when people over 65 will make up 19
percent of the population (up from 13 percent today). Old is the new
boom and it is changing the culture and the conversation. (Have you seen
all the sexy talk in
Betty White’s reality show?)
In Washington, D.C., anxiety about the decreasing proportion of workers
to retirees underlies the frenzied discussion of “entitlement reform.”
Baby boomers aren’t going to retire the way their parents did. They
are poorer and more likely to live alone. They can’t depend on pensions,
and the real-estate bubble destroyed almost 50 percent of their wealth.
Today
one in six seniors lives in poverty, and that proportion is rising; the generation of Americans now facing retirement is so financially ill prepared that
half of them have less than $10,000 in the bank.
The coming swell of retirees will strain our current system to its
limits—in terms of not only health care, but also incidental things like
road signs, which are hard for drivers over 65 to read in a majority of
American cities and towns.
Emily Greenfield, an assistant professor at the
Rutgers School of Social Work,
who researchers elder-care networks, says a change is occurring under
our feet, whether we see it or not: “Baby boomers have critical
mass—they’re covertly revolutionizing society again” as they retire.
One of the biggest questions facing the nation with regard to aging
boomers is: Where are they going to live? The options amount to a tangle
of euphemisms and politically correct titles: independent living,
nursing homes, aging-in-place, naturally occurring retirement
communities (
NORCs),
retirement village, memory-care units, age-restricted communities. All
this complexity disguises a simple fact about money, happiness, and
aging: Seniors who can live on their own cost the country relatively
little—they even contribute to the economy. But those who move into
nursing homes start to run up a significant tab—starting at $52,000 a
year. People who are isolated and lonely end up in nursing homes sooner.
Hence, finding ways to keep people living on their own, socially
engaged, healthy, happy, and out of care isn’t just a personal or family
goal—it’s a national priority. Among seniors’ living options, there is
one we overlook: mobile homes. Time-tested, inhabited by no fewer than
three million seniors already, but notoriously underloved,
manufactured-homes can provide organic communities and a lifestyle that
is healthy, affordable, and green, and not incidentally, fun. But in
order to really see their charms, we need to change a mix of bad
policies and prejudice.
LOUISE AND I GET in her golf cart and zip down the
street in front of a row of homes, each one six feet from the next, most
decorated differently and elaborately: There are rocks, nautical
themes, many angels, some pelicans, some sunflowers. There are lots of
signs: every day is a gift, old farts at play. One house, near the
little grassy dog run at one end of the park, is surrounded by potted
plants. Nearby is a fence, followed by a railroad track and a view of
the Los Padres mountains. All is orderly, quiet, and attractive. The
streets are a smooth ribbon of black asphalt—perfect for pushing a
walker.
Louise has lived in the park for 12 years and managed it with brusque
efficiency for the last seven. After raising a family and owning houses
in the Central Valley, she found a “cute” unit in the park, bought it,
and fixed it up with the sort of attention people give to tricking out
their cars. She sees Pismo Dunes as a community, and as we move along,
she points out the units where retired firefighters live, and then takes
me to visit Ferne, a bright 92-year-old who recently rode on a zip line
during a visit to a winery.
As we wind through the park’s little streets, I realize Louise is not
just managing relationships with the living. She points out a unit
where the owner is ailing, and another where the owner’s husband had
recently died; park employees had sat with the woman until the coroner
arrived. As for retirement, it’s not in Louise’s future, and neither is
leaving Pismo Dunes: “They’ll carry me out of here in a box.”
TRAILER PARKS HAVE REPUTATIONS: they’re considered
havens of crime, perches for transients; they’re flimsy rusting
structures, dangerous during disasters—”blight” that brings down
neighborhood property values. Legally and financially, manufactured
homes have a second-class existence. They are not treated as real
estate, but as chattel or personal property. Owners don’t get the same
rights or financial benefits as do other homeowners. For this reason,
sociologists have described trailer parks as “
quasi-homelessness” and “
a kind of serfdom.”
Among the few recent pieces of research about parks is a paper
describing the strategies residents use to “manage” the “stigma” of
living in a trailer park. Included: dressing well, not telling people
where they live, and disparaging other trailer parks as worse than
theirs. We all have an ugly prejudice when it comes to the trailer park.
“Trailer trash jokes are still acceptable in polite circles where other
prejudicial humor wouldn’t be considered funny,” says
Paul Bradley, the president of New Hampshire’s
ROC USA, a non-profit that helps residents buy their parks and turn them into co-ops.
This prejudice prevents us from seeing a modest but otherwise
pleasant house. Travel-trailers evolved into mobile homes, which
eventually lost their wheels and became manufactured housing. By any
name, they are the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in
the country. There are seven million manufactured homes housing 18
million people. In some counties they make up 60 percent of dwellings.
Approximately one out of every 12 Floridians lives in a manufactured
home. Units built since 1976, when the
Department of Housing and Urban Development
started regulating their construction, can last as long as site-built
homes when they’re well built and maintained. Yet they cost far less:
$41 per square foot versus $85 per square foot and up. At least one
study, from the
University of Illinois-Chicago,
on trailer parks in Omaha, Nebraska, found that crime rates in
mobile-home parks are the same as the rest of the community; the parks
do not cause crime nearby; and that the parks appear to depress crime
levels because residents own their homes. In one survey, nine out of 10
owners of manufactured homes said they were satisfied with their
dwellings. They’ve found a housing option that suited their budget and
needs.
Like a number of trailer parks, Pismo Dunes started as a camper park
in the 1970s. Some of those campers stayed in place, and concrete blocks
surrounded their wheels as they became layered with porches, awnings,
sunrooms, and carports. Some have been replaced with new factory-built
homes that resemble townhouses—but still have wheels hidden underneath,
because Pismo Dunes is still technically an RV park. Though the home
have changed dramatically from the trailers they once were, the business
model has not: Residents own their homes but not the land under them.
If you want to buy here you can go through Louise (who has a license to
sell RVs) or buy directly from the owner, but you can’t buy or sell
using a realtor. Louise is advertising units that start at $6,500 (for
an old camper) to $185,000 (for a nearly new, splashy vinyl-sided
Chariot Eagle one-bedroom manufactured house with a loft). Everyone also
pays rent to Louise’s employer, the park owner, of between $400 and
$700 a month, depending on the space and how long they’ve occupied it.
The homes are taxed as automobiles, and fees are paid to the DMV. The
park still has community showers and bathrooms, a remnant of earlier
days, but most folks use the ones in their homes. Residents can hobnob
at a clubhouse that hosts games every night and serves lunch twice a
week.
Louise
and Ernie laugh about the time she thought she had found him dead in
his trailer. Turns out he just wasn’t wearing his hearing aid. (PHOTO:
LISA MARGONELLI)
ERNIE LINK, 93, IS sitting in front of his trailer
wearing shades and trying to flirt with whoever will play along. “I get
slapped a lot, but what the hell,” he tells me. Ernie’s yard is a happy
jumble of plants, a flag, and a sun catcher. His house was originally a
small travel trailer but he’s added a sunroom and a carport, now
occupied by an electric golf cart. In 1990, after 40 years as a railroad
conductor based in Pocatello, Idaho, and several years of nursing his
wife through a brutal and losing battle with breast cancer, he moved to
Pismodise. His daughter lives nearby, but he still wants to live alone.
His biggest worry is falling, which is how his best friend and drinking
buddy ended up in a nursing home. “He didn’t lift his feet,” Ernie
explains. But his neighbors check on him a few times a day. And every
day he sets out for an excursion down the park’s streets to the mail
room, slowly lifting his feet behind his walker, greeted by everyone he
passes. “I don’t think I could have it any better,” he says. “I got a
little trailer, but if I fall it’s not far.”
Ernie’s trailer gives him physical and financial independence. Pismo
Beach’s residents are 36 percent seniors, a third of whom live in
mobile-home parks. In 2010, a city survey found seniors in mobile homes
spent a smaller percentage of their income on housing than renters or
homeowners, even though their incomes were lower. The Department of
Housing and Urban Development found that mobile-home dwellers “do
substantially better,” nationally, than owners and renters at keeping
housing costs below 30 percent of their income.
What surprises me is the wide range of incomes in the park—more than
in subsidized housing, for example, or a retirement community. Little
trailers like Ernie’s nestle next to much more impressive house-like
units with bay windows, fancy porches, and nice cars in the drive.
Louise tells me that some residents of Pismo Dunes survive on less than
$900 a month, while others have monthly incomes of $15,000. For half of
the residents, this is their second home. This is not a fluke:
Farmers Insurance
surveyed seniors in mobile homes in 2012 and found that while 30
percent have assets under $25,000, nine percent had more than $250,000
and some had more than $500,000. “When you consider we’re called trailer
trash, it’s a joke,” says Louise. “I have very wealthy people here.
They think it’s the coolest thing there is.” Lunches at the clubhouse
are priced at $5 so that those who would never ask for help can bring
home leftovers, those who are better off can put a little extra in the
jar. One resident likens the diverse incomes and classes in the park to
the old canard about nudist camps—everybody’s naked so you can’t see the
differences. “In here we’re all equal. Some can hardly afford food.
It’s all over the playing field. There’s no tension because some of the
trailers are run-down. Who cares? It’s their home.”
Deenah: “Carolyn saves the crossword puzzles and brings them to me at seven every morning.” (PHOTO: LUCAS AZNAR MILES)
JUST BEFORE SUNSET, LOUISE and I make our way to the
evening’s “therapy session” at Space 329, at the junction of the two
biggest streets in the park. Deenah and Ronnie Stockton have an elevated
porch that allows them to see everyone coming and going. They also own
another house in Bakersfield, California. The evening was peppered with
their own brand of banter, well-worn and most often directed at their
50-year marriage. (“I tried but the gun jammed!”) Today’s conversation
meanders from topic to topic: a neighbor’s overweight King Charles
spaniel, the ambulance that came to the park earlier in the day, a
neighbor’s renovation that includes a Jimmy Buffett-inspired sign that
says “it’s five o’clock somewhere.” Someone tells a story about noticing
the park’s flag was at half-mast and asking Louise if it was in memory
of someone who died in the park. “Are you kidding? That would be down
all the time,” she replied, to much laughter. Deenah tells a story about
the time Carolyn Kolthoff, a 90-year-old neighbor, called to ask for a
cup of coffee. Deenah made the coffee and dutifully took it across the
street, only to discover that Carolyn had fallen. Turns out she felt
better asking for a cup of coffee than a hand to get up. Around 7 p.m.
or so, the group drifts off after making plans for their morning walk.
“Therapy” in these circles is meant as a joke, except it happens to
be true. One of the longest-running studies of aging, conducted over a
period of 34 years in Alameda County, California, found that among
the predictors of healthy aging
are: not smoking, moderate drinking, having five or more friends,
avoiding depression, and walking for exercise. Older people who do two
out of the three last activities (friends, avoiding depression, and
walking) are more likely to spend their next six years in a sort of
golden old age, without becoming dependent upon others—or, god forbid,
nursing homes—for the basics of daily living. In other words, sitting on
the porch, drinking and yakking, is exactly what the doctor suggests.
(It’s also good for all that residents can drink without driving.)
When I come back to the park just before 7 a.m. the next day, seven
women are waiting for me. We set off at a brisk pace, walking all the
roads of the park and waving to anyone who’s looking out the window or
is on the porch. Walking—on the smooth and safe streets, to the beach,
and to the market in town—is a big part of the culture of Pismo Dunes.
This makes park residents exceptional: less than 25 percent of older
adults say they walk regularly.
Most places in America make it hard to grow old. Older people in
neighborhoods with high crime, lots of traffic, and poor lighting have
been found to “lose functioning” (in other words, need nursing homes)
earlier than those who live where they can walk. Those who live in the
suburbs lose their social networks when they stop driving and become
isolated. Loneliness is a killer: Over a six-year period, lonely seniors
are 45 percent more likely to die and 59 percent more likely to decline
than those who aren’t lonely, according to a
University of California-San Francisco
study. Pismo provides no formal services to elders, no health care, no
exercise room. To the extent there’s a safety net here, it’s made by
residents themselves.
Carolyn:
“Louise is tops as a person and a manager; you know where you stand and
she doesn’t pull any punches.” (PHOTO: LUCAS AZNAR MILES)
ONE AFTERNOON, I GO to meet Deenah’s neighbor
Carolyn, who moved into the park 23 years ago because her mother lived
here. Carolyn has vivid eyes and an impish sense of humor. She laughs
about her reason for choosing her unit: “My husband was a talker, and
this corner is a good location—you can see everything. Louise says I’m
nosy.” Her old trailer was cold and expensive to heat, so last year
Carolyn bought a “park model.” Her home is small and spotless. A loft
contains a few dolls, nothing much else. Clutter, she says, is not
possible here. Most days, Carolyn gives Deenah crossword puzzles she’s
cut from her paper in the morning and babysits Louise’s dachshund,
Sadie. Sadie happens to be lying on the carpet, dressed in a small
lavender coat, and her eyes follow Carolyn’s slow movements around the
home. For four years, Carolyn walked the dachshund to town every day.
Recently, though, she’s felt unsteady so she’s started getting around in
a golf cart that Louise brought her.
Rutgers researcher
Emily Greenfield
is working with a team to examine community-based initiatives such as
“villages” that are designed to make it possible for older people to
live longer on their own. The work is in its early stages, but
Greenfield says it’s hard to quantify the clinical impact of Carolyn’s
relationship with Louise, or Deenah’s willingness to run over with a cup
of coffee and give her a hand up, or Sadie. “Dog sitting! How could an
agency track that kind of interaction?” asks Greenfield.
We don’t do a great job of stitching people together through families
or institutions in the United States, and that shows up in how we treat
elders.
U.C. Berkeley social welfare professor
Andrew Scharlach,
who is studying how to create communities as people age at home, says
that in the U.S. aging is seen as an “individual problem,” rather than a
societal one. He tells me that in this country, a third of elderly
people who are disabled don’t have adequate help dressing, but in
Sweden, where policies and communities are more integrated, less than
five percent lack such basic care. Scharlach says American negligence is
an embarrassment: “Swedes look at me like, What’s wrong with you
people?” Pismodise—a for-profit, down-market entity without a
professional staff—pretty much organically fills some of the smaller
holes in the American system.
I don’t have any hard numbers on aging in the Pismo Dunes, or even
more than a dozen interviews over a couple of two-day-long visits, but I
can say that sitting on Deenah and Ronnie’s porch, drinking rosé, I
felt better about getting old. I wanted to find out more about what made
the place tick. What made this miniature trailer park more than just a
cheap and funky place to live, more than a nice environment to push a
walker? Everyone asked if I’d talked to Charlie and Margaret.
Charlie
and Margaret: “We look at each other and say ‘Can you believe this
happened?’ When I lost my husband I thought it would be like that
forever.” (PHOTO: LUCAS AZNAR MILES)
CHARLIE HENSON STARTED COMING to the park for
vacations with his wife in the 1970s. He moved in full time after he
retired in 1985 from maintenance work at a refinery in Taft, California.
In his sunroom, a stuffed panda sits under a painting of an oil
derrick. He’s been fixing something with a cold chisel, which he’s left
on the kitchen table. Charlie is active on the residents’ committee,
cajoling management to improve the park. He makes the rounds, checking
on people. (He’s found several people who had passed away in their
homes.) And residents check on him. When his wife was ill with cancer,
neighbors dropped by all the time. In the mornings Charlie likes to
dance to Nat King Cole, with a broom. One morning his neighbors knocked,
making sure he was okay. “Since we’ve been here all these years we help
each other.” Even with inevitable tensions in the park, he says, hardly
anyone locks their doors.
Margaret Julkowski walks in, tallish and luminous in Charlie’s dark
house.
Margaret and Charlie fell in love a year ago, and they still
glow. Margaret was a social worker in California’s Central Valley. She
moved to the park five years ago with her husband, who died six months
later. “People were good to me even though they didn’t know me,” she
says. One woman convinced her to come to clubhouse, where she played
cards with Charlie and his wife. When Charlie’s wife passed away, he and
Margaret started taking sandwiches out to where they could look at the
ocean. They told me they were amazed to find out they were in love. And
then word traveled fast. Residents gossiped that they’d seen Charlie
kiss Margaret good night. “It’s a small
Peyton Place,” Margaret says. In her golf cart, she whispers to me that now she kisses Charlie anytime she wants to.
Gossip is the currency of the kind of community that doesn’t form on
Facebook. Here people watch each other, and they know they’re being
watched: bad behavior is noted, people who “do the right thing” are
admired. Pismo Dunes, with its little streets, is a virtuous circle
where you can bank social capital. Margaret has a serious respiratory
condition, and she’d ended up in the hospital for weeks at a time. Her
daughter had qualms about letting Margaret move back to the park, but
when she saw the parade of visitors, some carrying food, she realized
Margaret was likely in the best hands here.
And another thing that unites Pismodise is death. Outside, dying is
essentially a taboo topic. Here, people bring it up, in one way or
another, every 15 minutes. Margaret and Charlie shared the deaths of
their spouses, as well as their current lives. I’ve never been in such a
vibrant, deathly place. “We’re living to the fullest because we know
mortality is close,” Margaret tells me.
“Therapy
session:” The term is used in jest for the daily late-afternoon porch
party at Pismo Dunes, but studies show that having friends, moderate
drinking, avoiding depression, and walking are predictors of a happy,
independent old age. (PHOTO: ARNALDO ABBA)
WHEN PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY professor
Andrée Tremoulet
held focus groups with seniors in mobile-home parks, she was surprised
that so many said they’d do it all over again. In a paper published in
the
Journal of Housing for the Elderly,
Tremoulet speculates that mobile-home parks can, for some seniors, do a
better job of meeting needs than more-traditional arrangements in
apartment buildings or in the suburbs. The design of the community
allows seniors to own and modify their homes, have dogs, and putter
around with hobbies like gardening in a way they couldn’t in an
apartment building. Meanwhile, because parks have boundaries and
streets, they function a bit like a gated community, where residents
feel safe and have an easier time making friends than in either an
apartment or a suburb. Mobile-home parks give residents a lot of control
over their desire to be alone or to be social, Tremoulet found.
But buyer beware, all is not right in the mobile-home park: Residents
have to contend with a parallel world of second-class legal rights and
financing that needs to be changed before manufactured homes are a
really good investment. The legal problems start with the parks
themselves. Because most residents own their homes but not the land
under them, they have the rights of neither renters nor homeowners. Rent
control is rare in mobile-home parks. (Pismo Dunes’ owner managed to
fight rent control in 2002 because of the park’s designation as an RV
park.) But residents don’t really have the ability to move if landlords
raise rents because moving a full-size manufactured home can cost as
much as $25,000. Sometimes park owners can raise rates indiscriminately
and even take over homes or sell the land under the park for another
purpose. “A park in the hands of the wrong owner can be milked for
income. The power is primarily in the hands of the landowner,” Tremoulet
says.
The financial system, meanwhile, treats manufactured homes more like
cars than houses—which means they depreciate like cars rather than
gaining value the way houses do. New manufactured homes are sold by
dealers on lots, similar to cars, with similar high-pressure sales
tactics. In most states, buyers can’t get a real-estate mortgage for a
mobile home. Rather, they have to get a personal loan for “chattel,”
with higher interest rates than a mortgage’s. Even though manufactured
homes last as long as conventional site-built houses, they start losing
value as soon as the buyer moves in. Likewise, in some areas,
manufactured homes have been excluded from projects that weatherize
low-income homes. (Some homes at Pismo Dunes, however, have received
government assistant for weatherizing and disability access.) Insurance
can also be a struggle; in hurricane-prone areas like Florida it is
impossible to insure some mobile homes.
Bradley, who runs the non-profit ROC USA, calls manufactured housing
finance and regulation “sick.” Conventional real-estate markets—with
their systematized regulation and finance—build wealth, he says, but
excluding this permanent form of housing from that conventional system
depletes capital from people who live in manufactured homes. Bradley
sees the current market structure as a holdover from the days when
trailers were really trailers. The homes have changed; regulations have
not kept up.
ROC USA has leveraged money from banks and foundations to help more
than 100 groups of mobile-home owners organize to buy the trailer parks
under their houses. The non-profit essentially provides the guarantee on
the capital, while residents make payments on the loan just as they
would pay rent on their spaces. Also, in some parts of the country there
are parks that work more like condominiums, where buyers own their
houses and a share of the land. (One version of this is the Blue Skies
Village that Bing Crosby started in Palm Springs, California.) Seattle
non-profit developer
HomeSight literally stacked sections of manufactured homes together to build a complex of affordable two-story duplexes named
Noji Gardens,
and made it possible for 75 families to buy their own homes. Still,
Bradley doesn’t see baby boomers flocking to manufactured housing until
the business model and the regulations are updated to reduce the risks.
And that’s too bad, because in many cases, new manufactured houses
can solve another problem: they offer greener housing than other
options. An elaborate 2012 report published by ROC USA and underwritten
by HUD found that mobile homes use, on average, far less energy and
water than conventional homes or condos (the mobile homes in the study
were 940 square feet, larger than those at Pismo Dunes). While models
built before 1976, when federal regulations kicked in, sometimes have
exorbitant utility bills, newer models made to
Energy-Star
efficiency standards can reduce the combined costs of electricity, gas,
and water to well below $1,000 a year, even in the hottest and coldest
parts of the country. And manufacturing the homes in factories cuts
construction waste by 30 percent. The efficient layout of a mobile-home
park helps conserve water and reduces storm runoff. And in some
locations, residents are able to share vehicles, or get around without
them, which saves money.
Jennifer Siegal,
a Los Angeles-based architect who is working to create communities of
cheap and green manufactured homes, reminds me that in a generation
we’ve gone from storing our memories in boxes in the attic to keeping
them on hard drives. Our houses can catch up with our lifestyle, but
until the marketing, financing, and regulations are changed, home
manufacturers can’t reach new customers. ROC’s Bradley says
manufacturers are caught between innovating faster to provide a better
product, and innovating to provide an even cheaper house that fits with
the current market structure. It turns out a prejudicial market—a
stigma—dooms manufactured homes to stay as trailer parks.
At Pismo Dunes, the gang walks at 7 a.m. every day; only 25 percent of American retirees walk regularly. (PHOTO: ARNALDO ABBA)
THE U.S. HAS AN impressive crowd of people working
to provide affordable housing through infrastructure bonds, HUD loans,
and IRS tax credits.
Ironically, a lot of effort and money are put into
federally-funded programs that have created a few hundred thousand
units, while manufactured homes provide housing to almost three million
seniors. “The problem is there’s a huge stigma,” says
Rodney Harrell, a senior strategic policy advisor for
AARP.
“As a housing person myself, I had to learn a lot to appreciate that
manufactured homes could be a good choice.” The image of the trailer as a
rusting hulk, a blight on the landscape, and a scam-laden investment
aimed at poor people make activists and policy makers shy away from
changing the very policies that could make it a better investment.
Tremoulet thinks some of the prejudice is the result of HUD incentives
themselves, which offer carrots to builders of low-income housing but
not of manufactured housing. And then there are the residents, often
stereotyped as blue-collar whites, who may be “less interesting” to
foundations and non-profits looking to help marginalized communities
like the homeless, Tremoulet says. “The whole culture has a spiraling
effect,” says Harrell, which perpetuates a cycle of bad policies.
Harrell believes that if policies were dramatically changed,
manufactured-home parks could offer low-cost housing while serving as
hubs that provide health care, recreation, and other services. “But
getting over that stigma is step one—before the policies and the
financing can change, you have to convince policy makers that there’s
something good there.”
As I got off the phone with Harrell, it crossed my mind that, as
Mayberry RFD
was to small towns in the ’60s, Pismo Dunes Senior Park it to
mobile-home parks. Call it Mayberry NORC if you like—Louise and her
staff may be closer to the mythically benevolent Sheriff Andy Taylor
than the usual park managers and staff. And the diminutive size of its
RV-derived manufactured homes, and its sunny California beach location
just add to its charmed air. The owners of Pismo Dunes, who have kept
the park in their family for more than a generation, seem to be in no
hurry to cash out, which is the opposite of the national trend. Pismo
Dunes is the mobile-home park as it could be.
I returned to Pismo Dunes for another visit last November. Experts
had warned me against using the term “trailer park.” One sociologist
published a paper saying that in 45 ethnographic interviews, she never
heard anyone reclaim the word trailer trash the way the words queer and
redneck have almost become badges of pride.
They hadn’t met Louise, who threw a “trailer trash” party a few years
ago. “We had bras hanging from clotheslines in the clubhouse. Fried
potatoes! Fried Spam! Pickled eggs and okra! We even got an outhouse for
the decorations.” Guests ate out of pie tines and drank out of pint
jars. By addressing the prejudice head on, the park has embraced the
word, even enjoys it. When I met up with Louise in November, she was at a
storage area examining the park’s 350 electric Christmas trees, dozens
of inflatable Santa installations (including one of Santa in a trailer),
and many, many electric reindeer. “That’s my 11-foot reindeer,” she
said, pointing at one of the multitude of decorations hanging from the
ceiling. Louise spent the month installing most of what was in storage.
Already the clubhouse lawn was studded with pink pigs carrying presents
on their backs, white bears, angels, a mechanical “crane” bearing
presents, a troop of leaping dolphins in Santa hats, and a constellation
of pink and purple Christmas trees, some upside down. They shimmered
against the green grass. It was a boisterous show of community, pride,
and one-upmanship: The park has won the Pismo Beach Clam award for
decorations so many times that Louise says the town had to create
another award so someone else could win something too.
When I went back to visit with Charlie and Margaret, she was thin and
weak, preparing to go back to the hospital. Margaret told me that they
were blessed to have found each other and, “We always say how blessed we
are to have reasonable rent of $400 to $450 a month this close to the
ocean,” she added. “I don’t know where we could live for that much
unless it was subsidized senior housing. And as someone who worked for
the welfare department, I never wanted to live in one of those places.”
At Ronnie and Deenah’s, the therapy session is well under way and the
rosé is flowing. The park’s security officer, a gregarious woman in her
40s, gets teased for “stopping crime by being too sexy.” The friends
sit around discussing their grandkids, holiday plans, soup night at the
clubhouse, depression, cancer, and Christmas lights, as the gloaming
settles in and the plastic icicles on the edge of the roof wink on.
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