In 2009, a writer in Slate said that the James McMurtry song Choctaw Bingo should be the new national anthem, because it describes life for the majority of Americans in the post financial downturn gig economy. The music is not much to listen to, but the lyrics are brilliant. In the song, McMurtry (son of the other McMurtry, Larry) describes a family reunion in southern Oklahoma. He starts by giving a snapshot of how the younger generation of the family pacifies their children when they take them for the drive and then by describing the patriarch, Uncle Slayton:
Strap them kids in
Give ’em a little bit of vodka in a cherry coke
We’re going to Oklahoma to the family reunion for the first time in years
It’s up at uncle Slayton’s cause he’s getting on in years
You know he no longer travels but he’s still pretty spry
He’s not much on talking and he’s just too mean to die.
He gives us a little color about how Slayton lives:
Uncle Slayton’s got his Texan pride
Back in the thickets with his Asian bride
He’s got a Airstream trailer and a Holstein cow
He still makes whiskey ’cause he still knows how….
He cooks that crystal meth because the shine don’t sell
You know he likes his money he don’t mind the smell.
There is a digression about race relations (Slayton seems to be attracted to women of color):
My cousin Roscoe Slayton’s oldest boy from his second marriage up in Illinois
He was raised in East St. Louis by his momma’s people
Where they do things different
Thought he’d just come on down.
There is a disquisition about gun control:
Bob and Mae come up from little town
Way down by lake Texoma where he coaches football…
And he stopped off in Tushka at that “Pop’s Knife and Gun” place
Bought a SKS rifle and a couple a full cases of that steel core ammo
With the berdan primers from some East bloc nation that no longer needs ’em
And a Desert Eagle that’s one great big ol’ pistol
I mean .50 caliber made by badass Hebrews
And some surplus tracers for that old BAR of Slayton’s…
A discussion of young love:
Ruth Ann and Lynn they wear them cut off britches and those skinny little halters
And they’re second cousins to me
Man I don’t care I want to get between ’em
With a great big ol’ hard on like a old bois d’ arc fence post
You could hang a pipe rail gait from
Do some twisted sisters ’til the cows come home.[1]
But he gives the final word to a description of some of Slayton’s business dealings. Remember what the editor said: ‘Put the good shit first, the best shit last, and all the other shit in the middle’:
Uncle Slayton’s got his Texan pride
Back in the thickets with his Asian bride
He’s cut that corner pasture into acre lots
He sells ’em owner financed
Strictly to them that’s got no kind of credit ’cause he knows they’re slackers
When they miss that payment
Then he takes it back.
Sound familiar? That’s how bad actors in the manufactured housing business make money.
One of the powerful aspects of the song is that it does not shy away from discussing money as part of the warp and woof of everyday life. Most people engaged in business write badly, and most literary types are not very bright about money. That is a loss for us, because money is as much a part of life as are memory, consciousness, sex, violence, love, death, whale oil, harpoons and pickup trucks. McMurtry helps fill that void.[2]
In torts class, we were taught that auto makers and insurance companies put a dollar figure on human lives. The remedy for a wrongful death suit is money. Families of 9-11 victims received cash payouts that were valued by a special master. Engineers at Ford knew that the position of the gas tank in the Pinto made it vulnerable to immolation, but they put it there because the design that they settled on lowered the price. The negative utility of losing one or two or three lives was outweighed by the benefit provided to hundreds of thousands of lives by cheap transportation.
Art is valued, boxed up and commodified all the time. Publishers and authors haggle over advances. Paintings and sculptures are priced like barrels of oil. Private lenders at institutions like Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley lend money secured by artwork as collateral. The way a dancer stands on point, bends her elbows, or maintains eye contact with her partner determines her annual income.
When the issue of valuing human lives came up, our torts professor said, ‘It is terrible to do this – but we have to do it’, because the alternative is that tort claimants would have no access to justice. The same is true for valuing art. Surely the way light reflects off of water, or the folds in a Nereid’s dress, is priceless. It is a terrible thing to put a price on the memories stirred by a picture of, say, a bowl of fruit or a man and a woman in swimwear lounging by a suburban pool. But dancers, painters and writers need to pay the mortgage. It is odious to put a price tag on art – but we need to do that.
Vital functions are auctioned off. To buy food in grocery stores you need to pay with money. Insulin costs money. Doctors train for a long time and work hard; they do not, and should not, work for free. Even therapists – the people you pour your heart out to – end their sessions by asking, ‘Cash, check or charge?’ The market is a terrible system. It reduces the most basic, most personal aspects of human existence, to one dimension. But we recognize, grudgingly, that it is better than any other system that we have tried yet.
Except housing. Housing touches a nerve. People lose their shit when it comes to housing.
A recent article in The Guardian discusses life in a mobile home park owned by Sam Zell’s REIT. Here’s the gist: (i) Sam Zell owns a lot of mobile home parks, and (ii) how dare he.
Because Zell did not respond to interview requests, the viewpoint presented in the article is one-sided. The author notes that the people who live in manufactured housing communities tend to consist of the most vulnerable tranche of society. Lot rents have gone up. Non-payers have been evicted. Zell has skimped on repairs, and when repairs are done, he drags his feet. Zell and his shareholders only care about money. Because of the foregoing, Zell is naughty.
Since Zell has not spoken up, I feel obligated to address these points on his behalf. Like the Lorax, I speak for Sam:
- Vulnerable People Live in Mobile Home Parks This is very true. Poor people need affordable housing. Manufactured housing is affordable. Unlike the author of the article, I do not see that as a bad thing. Instead, I see it as an opportunity for park owners to provide clean, safe and affordable housing to the people who need it most.
It should be acknowledged that this vulnerability can be exploited by bad actors. Bad actors do exist. That said, Sam did not make his customers vulnerable; they came to him like that. And the potential for exploitation should not be confused with actual exploitation.
- Lot Rents Have Gone Up In real terms, lot rents in Zell’s parks have remained steady. The year-over-year increase in the Consumer Price Index for 2021 was 7.5%, and for 2022 it was 8.4%. For February 2023, it was 6.0%. The article says that lot rent increased by 7.5% last year at one of Zell’s parks in Florida. That is not an increase. That is a way for lot rents to remain steady in terms of purchasing power.
- Non-Payers Have Been Evicted Non-payers should be evicted. A lease is a contract. A contract sets out the rights and liabilities of both parties. When a resident and a land-owner enter into a lease, the landowner agrees to make his or her land available for the resident’s use, and the resident agrees to pay a fee. If the resident does not pay that fee, the landowner should no longer be obligated to provide the use of the land.
Imagine a man goes to a restaurant. He orders a hamburger. He does not pay. Should he have the right to eat the hamburger?
No.
- Zell Has Skimped on Repairs Since Zell’s viewpoint is not represented in the article, it is impossible to know whether this assertion is true. There is always an incentive for owners to lower costs. Zell’s company is a big organization whose property managers might be under-resourced. It is quite possible that some necessary repairs have not been done.
- When Zell Makes Repairs, He Drags His Feet This assertion should be taken with a grain of salt. Speaking from my own experience, repairs take time. Disasters tend to happen in clumps and coordinating contractors, helpers, electrical inspectors, Safe Dig, code enforcers, health department inspectors and me can be logistically difficult. Residents often expect us to wave a magic wand and make things happen instantaneously. Any claim of delay should be weighed with input from all interested parties.
- Zell Only Cares About Money Zell is a businessman. Businessmen are motivated by money. It is no more naughty for Zell to treat housing as a business than it is for supermarkets to treat food as inventory, or for galleries and hospitals to treat art or medical care the same way. At one level, it is shocking that home – the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in – is treated as a commodity. However, we need to distribute social resources in as just a way as possible and the market is the least-bad method of doing that that we have found yet. The task is not to point fingers and wring hands. Instead, it is to craft a system that produces the most positive externalities for the most vulnerable people in society, i.e. our residents.[3]
- Caring About Money is Naughty This statement isn’t right. It’s not even wrong. The relevant question is not whether park owners make money, or whether they are motivated by greed. Instead, it is whether park residents have a clean, safe and affordable place to live. So long as the incentives created by the market produce these results, none of us have standing to complain.
A similar ‘ick’ runs through Esther Sullivan’s book Manufactured Insecurity. Sullivan is deeply troubled by the fact that investors buy parks. Well, she should get over it! Housing is a business! The market is not perfect, but it works! The sooner we conquer our queasiness about this, the sooner we can turn to the real work, which is creating a good place for our residents to live.
As McMurtry has gotten older, he has written songs about aging. Canola Fields, a story about two older people ‘cashing in on a thirty-year crush’ is one of the most moving. I also like If It Don’t Bleed, a monologue by a guy speaking about, inter alia, brittle bones, loss of hearing, senior moments, and youthful stupidity. But he also works in money, public finance and game theory:
I learned to answer my calls and open my mail
I paid my taxes and I stayed out of jail
You stay in the game when you’re too broke to fail
That’s a fact.
If only civilians who write about the manufactured housing industry could be as perceptive.
[1] I did not know what bois d’arc wood was until I read the lyrics of the song. The bois d’arc (‘wood-of-the-bow’, pronounced bo-dark) tree grows in north-central Texas and the Red River basin. It bears inedible, electric-green fruit and is known for producing strong, supple wood. Natives prized its branches as material for bows. Historians report that a well-crafted bow of bois d’arc wood was worth a horse in a trade. European settlers used the wood for wagon-wheel rims and, well, fence-posts.
[2] Melville did not shy away from discussing money. Moby Dick is two novels told in alternating chapters, i.e. a literary novel about good, evil and perception, and another novel about the process of whaling. The story about the business begins with a description of how a deck hand finds a boat and ends with a description of how whale blubber is rendered into oil. There is a detailed chapter about compensation near the beginning of the book, when Ishmael and Queequeg sign on to the Pequod. Instead of receiving fixed pay, crew members received a percentage (a ‘lay’) of net profits. A small percentage was called a ‘long lay’. Since Ishmael was a greenhorn, he received a very long lay. Since Queequeg had a rare, essential skill, his lay was shorter. Because they shared in the net profits of the enterprise, sailors on a whaling ship would be treated as members receiving a carried interest in a partnership under contemporary federal income tax law. Since they did not put an up-front capital contribution at risk, query whether they would be able to benefit from depletion, depreciation, or disaster loss deductions.
[3] Reasonable people can differ about how this can be done. Most park owners are small government libertarians. I tend to think that the government can be a force for good, but only if laws and regulations are crafted well. If we want to protect park residents through regulations, they should be crafted with input from people who have experience running manufactured housing communities, i.e. park owners. Well-crafted regulation would allow for enforcement of reasonable park regulations, market-rate benchmarks for lot rents, indexing lot rent increases to inflation, and grants for infrastructure upgrades.