Hiding in Plain Sight: America’s Working Poverty Epidemic
by Marina Gorbis, Institute for the Future Executive Director
During the 1930s, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and other photographers traveled around America to document the lives of people living in poverty. The photographers were recruited by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration to bring into the public eye the haunting reality of rural poverty and thus gain support for government assistance to agricultural areas hard hit by the Depression. Lange’s 1936 portrait of Florence Thompson, a 32-year-old Dust Bowl migrant, surrounded by several of her seven starving children, became an iconic image of the era that hasn’t lost its power to tell a story of destitution without words.
Almost a century later, I am not sure that a new generation of artists is needed to show us what modern-day poverty looks like. This time the images are not hidden in faraway rural places, they are right in front of us — in our cities, often the most prosperous ones, like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. They are easy to see in tent cities that have sprung up under bridges and highway overpasses, in campers and cars parked on our streets, in doorways or park benches that serve as sleeping spaces.
For an artistic rendering of contemporary poverty, watch the Oscar-nominated movie Nomadland. For a deeper view of the people and the causes of the epidemic, read Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book of the same name or refer to the research that Institute for the Future (IFTF) has done on modern working poverty, which reveals that 35% of all workers in California and 50% of Hispanic workers earn less than $15 an hour. According to the California Department of Labor’s Future of Work Commission, these workers “earn wages below what would be required to afford minimum standards of living.” This is how those lucky enough to have a vehicle can end up living in it. But unlike Fern, the protagonist of Nomadland, most people living this way don’t get to travel around the country, visiting beautiful sites like the Grand Canyon along the way.
For too many of today’s working poor, home is where you park your car, and this means moving from parking spot to parking spot within the city where work is located.
Most of the working poor are less “nomads” and more “parkers,” less driven by the dreams of freedom and open roads, and more the constant anxiety of finding a place to park where they will not be driven out or given a ticket. For a glimpse of what this parker population might look like in 2030, our IFTF short film “Life on Wheels”* imagines a world in which “parker living” has become a default way of life for millions of people. Borne of research about real working and economic conditions in the state, the six-minute film depicts the daily life of a working single parent and her child living in a vehicle residency lot.
I first encountered parkers in 2016 while driving an out-of-town friend to his hotel in Palo Alto, California one evening. As we passed by Stanford University, I noticed a fleet of camper vans and RVs parked on the street along El Camino Real. These were not vacationers or tailgaters seen around Stanford during the football season. They were regular hard-working people who could not afford a place to live in the Bay Area.
The realization that hundreds of working families are forced to live in cars and vans in the heart of Silicon Valley, one of the wealthiest areas of the country, stunned me. Who are the people living this way? Why? How do they go about their daily lives and routines? Where do they take showers? Are they counted in the Census? Are they registered to vote anywhere? What about the kids? Do they go to school?
In futures work at IFTF, we often talk about “signals” — things that are happening today but do not fit into our current mental frameworks and narratives. Often the signals we see as futurists seem to be strange or weird, but they are important to pay attention to because they give us a glimpse of something that is likely to grow in importance and potentially become mainstream. A perfect signal is something that you can’t stop thinking about, it stuns you because it does not fit into your view of the world or how things work or should work. For me “working people forced to live in vehicles in a wealthy Bay Area city” was a major signal. I could not stop thinking about what I saw that night.
Thus, as a researcher, I started digging into data and talking to people. I found Amazon CamperForce ads promising retirees free and adventurous living, as well as sites geared to “modern nomads” where people shared first-hand experiences of working at Amazon warehouses (get in good physical shape before you start, wear comfortable shoes, be prepared for physically exhausting daily routines). I also learned that one-third of the students in the East Palo Alto school district, a town neighboring Facebook headquarters and separated by one pedestrian bridge from wealthy Palo Alto, are homeless. The lucky ones lived in vans their families had converted into homes, while others lived in shelters or on the street. The school superintendent proposed opening up the school parking lot to RVs so the families and students could sleep undisturbed. She was concerned that the lack of sleep and stress were contributing to her district’s low test scores. She also wanted to install washing machines in schools for those without homes.
Since I first saw mobile encampments in Palo Alto five years ago, the situation has only gotten worse, exacerbated by the pandemic. Many more people are now losing homes and having to work multiple insecure low-paying jobs. They often must make difficult tradeoffs between having better access to work in more affluent areas and being unable to afford housing and many other amenities in these same areas.
It is remarkable to contemplate that close to a century after the Farm Security Administration documented the devastations of poverty on families, children, and communities, we are experiencing another poverty epidemic. This time the poverty isn’t “on the farm,” though. It’s staring us in the face wherever we look. All we have to do is open our eyes and pay attention to what’s around us. Once we’re aware of this growing crisis, we need to engage in FDR-style bold policy reforms to restore the dignity, health, and well-being of our neighbors. Between 1933 and 1939 FDR’s New Deal encompassed hundreds of programs, regulatory instruments, and investment efforts. It enacted the Gold Reserve Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, and the Social Security Act. It improved lives by providing people with jobs and providing labor unions with legal protections. It modernized the national infrastructure and provided price stability to farmers. As a result of this all-out effort, during which federal expenditures tripled, the country rose out of the Great Depression. The current crisis calls for this level of boldness. Anything less will lead us down the path of an ever-increasing “parker” population.
Poverty may look different today, but it is as corrosive and inhumane as it was in the 1930s when Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans captured it in the faces of the working poor. In his 1964 Nobel Prize lecture, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.” We have the resources today. Now we must find the political will to take the bold steps necessary to make the dream of America achievable for everyone.
* IFTF’s “Life on Wheels” was made possible with a grant from the Blue Shield of California Foundation to study how work and economic conditions in the state are impacting the health of workers, their families, and the communities where they are working, in the report The Future of Work and Its Impact on Health.
