fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Mobile Homeless

America’s professional gypsies

Jim Link was paying his way through Texas A&M tending bar. Darker than Kathy Kessler and two inches taller, he was serving drinks on the patio of a student pub. She thought him a goofball and younger than she, though he was seven months older. He thought her distant and dazzling.

They married three years later, in 1988. Kathy became a technical editor for a company that made flight simulators. Jim went to the Prudential Insurance Company to sell insurance, annuities, and mutual funds.

The Links bought their first home in the master-planned community of Clear Lake City, now a part of Houston. Kathy juggled career and family after their daughters Kelsey and Kristina were born. But in 1994, when T. Rowe Price hired Jim and sent him to its headquarters in Baltimore to manage sales of 401(k) retirement plans to businesses, she was expecting their third child, and she stopped working. It made sense, with Jim’s transfer.

The Links had become Relos.

I had never heard the word Relo until a visit to Alpharetta, Georgia, in early 2004. Then I heard it on every lawn. I came upon a Memorial Day fair in Medlock Bridge, a subdivision of 636 homes. Jim, still the affable bartender, was manning the beer cooler. In the past ten years, the Links had moved from Houston to Baltimore to Rochester, New York, and, in 2000, to Alpharetta. In 25 years, Alpharetta had grown from 3,000 people dispersed over cotton fields to a checkerboard of fresh asphalt and tidy subdivisions with 40,000 people.

Young and middle-aged families at the fair, all with kids, all into sports, all with spacious late-model houses and late-model SUV’s, were calling themselves Relos. “Relo” was a noun, a verb, and adjective. Relos were Relo-ed by a Relo company. They found homes through the “Relo Man” or “Relo Woman,” a special breed of real estate agent who catered to them. Relos got Relo mortgages, geared to buyers who expected to sell in just a few years.

They are an affluent, hard-striving class. They inflate the American Dream and put it on wheels. Following the money as they migrate through the suburbs of Atlanta, Denver, and Dallas and the expatriate villages of Beijing and Mumbai, they create an insular, portable, and parallel culture with little-recognized but real implications for American society at large.

Relos have been around for a while. In the 1600s, Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company and East India Company began dispatching their traders and accountants across the Americas and Asia. In A Nation of Strangers, social critic Vance Packard spotted Relo pioneers encamped in the New York suburb of Darien, Connecticut. A “transfer town,” he called it, and a “fine prototype of the town for company gypsies.”

But the number of Relos was small then, no more than a few hundred thousand. Aspiring managers starting out at companies like United States Steel or General Motors could rise through the hierarchy without ever leaving the mothership in Pittsburgh or Detroit. Today, a young accounts payable clerk at United Parcel Service in Atlanta would never be anything else without leaving town.

Stalling only during the economic crisis in 2008 and 2009, companies’ need for Relos has ballooned with the mind-boggling surge in foreign trade, which leaped from $374 billion in 1970 to $3.3 trillion in 2007. Someone knocked on doors to buy and sell all those goods and services, negotiate contracts, run marketing and advertising campaigns, and balance books. Many of those knocking were Relos.

Never staying long in one place and often leapfrogging through a succession of employers, Relos are characters in the West’s transformation from an economy built on a bedrock of durable institutions and relationships into a postindustrial economy built on airplanes, ships, the Internet, and short-term arrangements. “Marriage vows, the homestead, corporate stability, and job security—all have suffered in the ever-evolving world” of international commerce and the Internet, writes Ellen Dunham-Jones, head of the architecture program at Georgia Tech. Homes, subdivisions, factories, malls, office parks, and employees, too, become “disposable assets” covered by “temporary contracts.”

“Temporary contracts—of all kinds—are based on consuming rather than sustaining relationships,” Dunham-Jones says. “The more one’s life, property, and landscape consist of temporary contracts, the more one operates as a lone nomad, a sole proprietor within the overwhelming structure of global capital. The lack of constraining relationships affords tremendous individual freedom—but at a cost. A world of temporary contracts inhibits sustained belonging of any kind, inhibits bonding to either people of place.” She adds, “The exchange of long-term relationships for short-term transactions has left us a crowd of perpetual strangers who often fail to recognize the value of shared needs and aspirations.”

The Census Bureau has found that employers transfer or recruit and move about 4 million Americans, including children and spouses, each year. Reports of moving-van operators and companies that manage relocations for employers suggest that active Relos—people who were moved in the last year or two and will be moved again soon—come to around 10 million, or 3 percent of the U.S. population.

Whatever their numbers, Relos’ sway over the economy dwarfs them. Because Relos concentrate in affluent, fast-growing communities where their companies have built headquarters and branch offices, they exert disproportionate influence over the look and character of towns that become models for much of suburbia. “The short-term people don’t give a damn,” says Fred Adam, a 64-year-old lawyer in Castle Rock, Colorado. “They don’t plant trees, they don’t plant bushes.”

Home from the Memorial Day fair, Jim Link admitted that what made Medlock Bridge so comfortable left it flavorless. He was living among clones of himself. “You play tennis with them,” he said. “You have them over to dinner. You go to the same parties. We’re never challenged to learn much about other economic groups. … It doesn’t give you much of a perspective.”

Relos tend to be economically homogenous, with mid-career incomes of $100,000 to $200,000 a year. They differentiate themselves by their kids’ activities and by the disposable tokens of their success—the leased car and the home du jour. Some find their salaries, toys, and perks compensating. But they often complain of stress and anomie. They trade a home in one place for a job anyplace.

Perched in their Relovilles, they have little in the way of community ties or big, older city amenities like mass transit, museums, zoos, stadiums, and live theater. Outside the gates of their own subdivisions, Relos are ghosts. With the father on the road most weekdays and another move always looming, Relos have neither time nor need to sit on town boards or run in local elections or join the church vestry or the Rotary Club. A Relo breadwinner’s community is the company and his professional associations. Relos build networks of contacts and colleagues across the Internet and see them at conferences. They can tell you the way to the airport but not to city hall.

On a drive through Alpharetta’s subdivisions, Bradd Shore, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, made a novel observation: “The American family lasts only a generation and a half.” He said that families tend to keep up their rituals after the children move out and begin having children. But when the second generation of children starts leaving, the original family disintegrates unless it makes great efforts to preserve itself. The disintegration, Shore said, is most pronounced among families who abandon their generational moorings.

• • •

May 2004 found Ashley Cottrell, age 11, and her sister Kasey, 10, playing Capture the Flag in the backyard of their house in Providence Oaks subdivision in Alpharetta like it had always been home. In fact, it was the girls’ third home, following Indianapolis, where they were born and their father, Phil, and their mother divorced, and Sussex, New Jersey, where his company had first moved them. They had spent half of their short lives in Alpharetta, trick-or-treating among neighbors each Halloween, learning to ride bikes on the suburban streets. They knew everyone at Alpharetta Elementary School.

Phil called, “Come on inside. We need to talk.”

The girls froze. “Oh-oh,” Ashley said. “We’re in trouble.” There would be trouble, but it was none of their doing.

“I have some news,” Phil said. “We’ll be moving to Pittsburgh.” By the following Sunday, a “For Sale by Owner” sign stood in front of 2175 Providence Oaks Street. Phil sat at the entrance to the garage facing a listless cul-de-sac, waiting for someone to stop by his moving sale. As he gazed over his family’s leavings, he seemed pleased with his Relo career. At 35, he had reached the career-ladder rung at which ambitious young managers vie for the opportunities that can propel them to the top executive plateau. For that, he and the girls would have to move again. “Relocation is a rite of passage,” he said, conjuring the Relo variation on the American Dream of ever better jobs, wages, and homes. Phil decided he needed a master’s of business administration from a top business school, singled out computational marketing, and identified the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. So he was moving to Pittsburgh for three years, where he would enroll at Tepper and telecommute full-time to work at ACNielsen, the market research firm based in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg.

Unlike Ashley and Kasey, Phil had no particular fondness for Providence Oaks. It was simply a place to park. “There are people in this subdivision—I don’t know them—ten, twenty families who get involved,” he said. “Most of the rest of us keep to ourselves. Several took advantage of the increased equity in their homes and moved to the next level. But that’s not the rule. Most are corporate relocations. They come in on Relo and go out on Relo.” That September, the family moved to Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, an affluent suburb 20 miles north of Pittsburgh.

On a Monday in early February 2007, six inches of shimmering ice-coated snow paved the hilly Treesdale development’s wide lawns. The house was barely six years old when the Cottrells moved there two and a half years earlier, and by then it had already seen two previous owners, presumably also Relos.

At 5,000 square feet, brick with beige trim, the house was more than twice the size of the one they had left in Alpharetta. Tall oak double doors opened to a cavernous echo chamber of space. It felt big enough for a church but was only half furnished.

Ashley and Kasey, 14 and 13 now, were finding their way at the area schools, wide, low-slung, unadorned buildings that looked indistinguishable from their brick-and-mortar kin across most young and affluent suburbs. For Kasey, the social transition had been tough: “Moving here was a horror. I’m not that social. I get scared around new people. The first few days were embarrassing. I don’t know how to make friends.”

In Restless Nation, James Jasper asked, “What do kids lose by moving? A ‘place’ in the local culture; in the pecking order; including friendships which reinforce that place. They are still figuring out their first identity, and are hardly ready to start over with a second.” Two researchers for the National Center for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Gloria A. Simpson and Mary Glenn Fowler, found in a 1988 survey of 10,362 school-age children that, compared to children who had never moved, those who moved three or more times “were 2.3 times more likely to have had emotional/behavioral problems, 2.2 times more likely to have received psychological help, 1.7 times more likely to have repeated a grade, and 1.9 times more likely to have been suspended or expelled.”

With a half year to go at Tepper, Phil was confronting a hostile economy and the limits of a Relo career. He thought he might value something more. Rootless and striving for 15 years, and almost 40 years old, he said, “I’ve been looking back in Indiana. I would like to buy an old homestead. It was built in the 1830s.” At 55 maybe, maybe sooner, he thought he could move to the homestead and retire or telecommute.

But that was a while off, and Phil was hitting some bumps. His second wife, who helped care for the girls, was preoccupied with their daughter, then 3. That and Phil’s absorption with work and his two nights a week in class shattered the intimacy of their marriage. “We agreed fairly amicably to split,” he said. “The marriage dissolved as a direct result of this move.”

After they left, Ashley and Kasey were happy to have bathrooms of their own but felt lonelier. Most days, one or the other would call their mother in Ohio. A caseworker advised that Phil wasn’t home enough for the girls, and in January 2008, a family court judge ruled that their mother should have full custody.

Around the same time, the real estate market pummeled the house, by then pointless to keep with just Phil haunting its 5,000 square feet. He had bought it for $674,000, almost twice what he got for the house in Alpharetta, and listed it for sale at $989,000. He dropped it to $939,000 as the market declined, then to $899,000, and $799,000, and still there were no takers. Finally, around Thanksgiving, Nielsen let him go.

A company in New York that scheduled a job interview called to cancel. A company in Chicago that looked promising kept putting him off. In early March 2009, his outlook brightened. A company in San Francisco wanted him to come out for a second interview, but he tried to keep cool. “I want to make sure that the career moves in the direction it has to move.”

• • •

Places define people. A place—a town or a neighborhood with a latitude and a longitude, with walls, windows, and doors, seasons and soil—forms our accents and values, our preferences and references, our learning, aspirations, and diversions, our senses of belonging and continuity. Roots in a place sustain us in youth and old age.

Like most Americans, Relos value their health, homes, jobs, weekends, and immediate neighbors—at least, that is, while they are among them. They get Christmas cards from the last subdivision, but after a couple of years, the cards stop. Relos don’t have accents. Wherever they go, they don’t belong. Their kids don’t know where they are from. Relos don’t know where their funerals will be or who might come. Relos tend to know mostly other Relos, from their offices, subdivisions, PTA’s, and kids’ soccer teams. When I visited Reloville megachurches, which rival Las Vegas for pyrotechnic stagecraft, none of the parishioners acknowledged me. Then I noticed that no one acknowledged anyone. 
__________________________________________

Peter T. Kilborn was a reporter for the New York Times for 30 years. This essay is adapted from Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America’s New Rootless Professional Class, copyright 2009 by Peter T. Kilborn. By arrangement with Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

The American Conservative welcomes letters to the editor.
Send letters to: letters@amconmag.com

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here