Mark Schone

What I’m saying is that Katon Dawson is an absolute poster child for the Republican Party’s long-term demographic ills. He exemplifies two trends in white Southern Republicanism that correspond precisely with a shrinking national political power base.

On Nov. 4 Obama won 55 of the 152 electoral votes of the 11 states of the old Confederacy. While he was winning in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, John McCain was outperforming George Bush throughout the region as a whole. The Republican vote in the South in 2008 actually increased over 2004. But the GOP did this by relying on two demographics that can no longer be counted on to deliver the once-solid South.

Specifically, McCain did well with two kinds of Southern whites: those who live in states with large numbers of black people, like South Carolina, and those who are native-born, like Katon Dawson. Those two trends explain why Republicans should have high hopes about retaining the electoral votes of Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina, at least for the near future, but may struggle to get back those crucial 55 electoral votes in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.

The link between white Republicanism and a high black population has already been noted, here and elsewhere. The 2008 election was true to form. Salon ran the numbers for the 11 states of the old Confederacy, Alabama through Virginia. The statistical correlation for blacks as a percentage of population and tendency of whites to vote for Obama, meaning the mathematical proof that as one goes up, the other goes down, was negative .717. The strongest possible correlation would’ve been negative 1, but a correlation of negative .717 is considered very strong. This election was further proof that the blacker a Southern state, the more Republican its whites.

Less has been said about what may be an even better predictor of Republicanism, a white Southern voter’s origins. Those white voters with roots in the South seem to be more Republican than those white voters who moved in from out of state. The correlation for native-born percentage of the white population and an Obama vote was a striking negative .758.

What emerges is a simple explanation for why only 14 percent of whites in Louisiana, 11 percent of whites in Mississippi, and 10 percent of whites in Alabama, according to exit polls, voted for Obama. Those shockingly low figures are, by far, the lowest percentages in the United States, where the overall figure for white support of Obama was around 43 percent. No other states come close. All three of those states have high black populations and relatively little white in-migration. The black population in those three states is 26 percent and above, topping out at Mississippi’s 37, the highest percentage in the nation. The percentage of native-born whites in each state, per the U.S. Census, is 66 percent and above.

Southern states that don’t have as many white people from outside — where the whites are still a homogenous religio-ethnic cohort — tend to behave as they did a half-century ago, albeit with the labels switched. The white population still votes en bloc like their parents and grandparents, except now instead of Bourbon Democrats, they’re Republicans. Perhaps “real” white Southerners see themselves, on some level, as engaged in a power struggle with the region’s other major ethnic group, African-Americans. (If not, then I must have misunderstood Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss when he made that ominous reference to “the other folks.”)

Katon Dawson’s home state of South Carolina occupies, with Georgia, a second tier of white Southern Republicanism. Both states have substantial in-migration of whites, but they also have black populations of about 30 percent. Georgia’s whites were the fourth most Republican in the nation, at 23 percent support for Obama, while South Carolina’s white support for Obama was 26. The results also show the long-term peril, in heavily black states, in relying on monolithic tribal solidarity among whites for a Republican victory. McCain won Georgia by only 5 points. The margin for error is not infinite, and any major demographic shift — like, say, the sudden appearance of a major Latino population — could rewrite the rules.

The three Southern states that voted for Obama this election, meanwhile, differ significantly from the eight that voted for McCain. In Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, the native-born white population ranged from 30 to 59 percent, and the black population from 16 to 22 percent, with Florida taking the lowest number each time and North Carolina the highest. In those states, the white vote for Obama approached the national average of 43 percent: 35 in North Carolina, 39 in Virginia, 42 in Florida.

While the white population in Virginia and North Carolina is not dominated by transplants like the population of Florida, both states have been resettled, in recent years, by the types of white people most likely to vote for Obama. The knowledge industries in Northern Virginia and North Carolina’s Research Triangle, the proximity to the Northeast, and the high quality of both states’ public university systems have pulled in large numbers of young, affluent, well-educated whites who prefer a Democrat like Obama to the Republican Party of Bush, McCain and Palin. States with lower numbers of white migrants — Mississippi, Louisiana — lack the kinds of industries and institutions that would attract these educated, affluent migrants. They also haven’t grown (and added electoral votes) the way Virginia and North Carolina have. The GOP’s continued hold on some of those states seems to hinge on stasis, on delaying the kind of progress most states want.

What does it all mean? It doesn’t mean that white transplants are necessarily Democrats or that white natives are Republicans. Forty years ago, in-migration of whites helped build the hitherto nonexistent Republican Party in the South. In my Virginia subdivision, far south of the Beltway, the Republicans I knew were likely to be new arrivals from places like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Not so long ago, and I know because I counted, the white Southern Democrats in the U.S. House were more likely to be natives of the region than were the white Southern Republicans. (See Newt Gingrich of Pennsylvania, Bob Barr of Iowa, Dick Armey of North Dakota, and so on.) The most prominent white Southern liberal Democrats, like Terry Sanford, Jimmy Carter and the now-forgotten hero of my youth Henry Howell, were natives. And people like Brad Miller and John Edwards still walk the earth.

But the numbers do tell a story, even if the anecdotes beg for an exception. As Chris Kromm and Bob Moser would hope, the numbers mean that, on the presidential level at least, the solid Republican South may be mortally wounded. The bluing of Virginia and North Carolina shows no signs of abating, and may be spreading to places like Nashville, Tennessee and the Atlanta suburbs. It’s just that this transformation is due to demographic change, both among white and non-white sectors of the population, not to any change of heart among white Southerners themselves. For the most part, they’re still a lot like Katon Dawson.

But “Our Lot” is also a reminder that our memories are short, and that the same mix of hope, greed, good intentions and bad policy has been inflating and popping real estate bubbles since the days of LBJ. Behind it all is a conviction shared by nearly all Americans, be they Democrats or Republicans, Wall Streeters or the ARMed and desperate masses, that home ownership is a good thing — good for the neighborhood, the country and the average citizen holding the deed and the debt. “Our Lot’s” long view is perhaps most unnerving for the doubt it casts on that timeworn belief. Salon interviewed Katz by phone.

Isn’t homeownership actually good for you? I thought it was the panacea for almost all social ills, it drove the crime rate down, educational achievement up, and so on.

Yes, well, homeownership is only as good as the amount of home you actually own, and I think the big problem in the last generation or so is that Americans have turned to more and more and more debt to reach for the American dream.

There’s a lot of great examples out there — the Nehemiah homes that transformed East New York in Brooklyn from a really devastated and dangerous place to someplace that’s still really poor and has a high crime rate but has an opportunity to really grow and have a stable bunch of families really invested in building a home there. So all that’s great. Certainly there’s a lot of evidence that homeowners do tend to stay in one place for longer, their kids perform better in school. They tended to be more involved in local politics, community affairs, and block cleanups. The problem is, it’s very hard to separate out the effects of homeownership itself from the fact that people who have a certain economic or social standing are more likely statistically to be homeowners in the first place.

Does this mean that we shouldn’t actively encourage homeownership, using government money or government policy?

I think there’s nothing wrong with using government money, policy, pressure, all those tools to make homeownership more of a possibility than it would otherwise be in the marketplace, simply because the market left to its own devices discriminates aggressively. It rewards people who already have wealth, who have already had a leg up economically, and it’s great to give other people the opportunity as well.

The problem is that homeownership is the only housing policy that this country has ever shown any commitment to. Renters are treated miserably.

And that’s one big distinction you see between the U.S. and European countries that also had very loosely regulated mortgage-security markets and have had problems there. I think one reason you’re not seeing mass foreclosures on quite the scale that you had in the U.S. is that for large proportions of the population in many European countries, including the Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland, renting is supported through government policies that, for instance, protect tenants so that they don’t have to worry about getting kicked out at the end of the year.

Whereas in the U.S., homeownership was always the only option. And anyone who can afford to, or thought they could afford to, would choose that option. So that’s really the problem here.

Whose fault is the mess that we’re in now? And how far back do we need to go to start tracing the blame?

I think the message of my book, unfortunately, is that it’s to some degree everybody’s fault, including, I should say, liberal activists, with whom I’m extremely sympathetic, and think were right.

But what we really had was a collision of ideologies over this question of: How do we make it possible for everyone to be a homeowner? How do we eradicate this horrible legacy of discrimination, which had left the homeownership rate for whites much, much higher than that for blacks and Latinos? There was real work that needed to be done there. So I think we really have to go back to the 1970s, when we started to see pretty aggressive policy measures on the part of the federal government to try to level the playing field.

You talk about another real estate bubble in the early ’70s, when everybody who wanted one could get a mortgage. The wreckage that was left behind looks totally familiar.

Yes. Rather infamously, the federal housing administration, which is the government agency that insures mortgages — it’s what built Levittown and all those 1950s suburbs after the war — discriminated very aggressively, on the basis of what was thought to be sound statistical evidence, that the insurance fund would only be safe if it were to insure suburban and overwhelmingly white areas.

So what happened in ’67 and ’68 was that federal housing officials reversed that entirely. They proclaimed, initially just in the riot areas and then more broadly across cities, that FHA, the Federal Housing Administration, would now be open everywhere! And in fact, as I note in the book, the only circumstances under which HUD did not insure mortgages is if the house is literally falling down.

Real estate agents and loan brokers descended on inner cities, trying to find borrowers who would be unlikely to pay their mortgages back, because the real-estate speculator would get paid in full by the federal government, and paid more quickly and more generously, because of forgone interest that they would get compensated for. The sooner that borrower went into foreclosure the more generously that entrepreneur would get paid.

When was that mess cleaned up?

About ’73, ’74. There were tens if not hundreds of thousands of abandoned houses all over the country as a result of the FHA debacle, and it got a lot of attention at the time and was almost forgotten to history after that.

And then we have the Reagan presidency and — correct me if I’m wrong — but that’s when the securities market for mortgages really blossoms, right?

Absolutely. Mortgage-backed securities had existed since about 1970. They existed in the ’20s too, and that was part of why the Depression happened — they had been made illegal after that. But they came back as a government product in 1970. As I recount in the book, Lewis Ranieri of Salomon Brothers, which was trading in government-backed securities, thought, “Couldn’t we just do this ourselves? Why do we need to have Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae in the middle, why don’t we create these securities?”

In order to do that, they needed to rewrite all those laws that had been passed following the crash in 1929 and thereafter, which was as much a housing and real estate bubble crash as it was a stock market crash. 

What did that do to the housing market?

It took a while for all the pieces to come into place. But once the tax laws changed in 1986 to allow the Wall Street mortgage-backed securities market to just explode, what you saw was the invention of subprime lending. Suddenly Wall Street banks were able to do their own thing, but they had to find their own niches. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac already had what were known as plain vanilla loans: You want a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, you’ve got great credit, you live in the suburbs.

So the Wall Street banks started looking for niches at the bottom and at the top of the food chain: at the top, what were known as jumbo loans, loans that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not allowed to buy, and then they created subprime. They created a loan product with high interest rates, high fees, adjustable interest rates, all these new features that would enable them to make money lending to people who never before would have qualified for a mortgage.

And then when Bill Clinton became president he did not shut that down?

That’s right. To the Clinton administration’s credit, his Federal Trade Commission, among other agencies, and the other banking regulators, did pretty aggressively go after some of the worst offenders, who would not just be putting out subprime loans but really engaging in predatory lending, setting up borrowers with loans they knew they could not pay.

But you had two, or three, or — one could keep counting — things that the Clinton administration did that really enabled the bubble. And I think it was with the best of intentions at the time, but a lot of sort of willful naiveté about what the consequences would be.

Number one, what it did was really just encourage homeownership very aggressively. This became a central theme of Clinton’s campaign for reelection in 1996, how almost every American can and should own their home. This was something that Clinton promoted out of a sense of his own political survival. You had Newt Gingrich and his Congress trying to eliminate HUD entirely. Homeownership was this apple pie issue that could help justify the agency’s existence.

Homeownership also became a way that Clinton pushed for a hotter economy. And what would happen as well, of course, is that he had Alan Greenspan as head of the Federal Reserve, willfully ignoring pleas that came as early as the early ’90s from consumer advocates who started to see the damage being wrought by predatory lending. They were hearing from Congress in ’93 legislation that passed that was supposed to stop predatory lending but couldn’t because of the way the industry was growing and metastasizing too fast.

That law, the Homeowner or Equity Protection Act (or HOEPA), asked the Federal Reserve to set guidelines. Congress said to the Federal Reserve, “We want you to regulate the subprime industry, you’re the only entity that can do this.” And the Federal Reserve never acted on it. Once consumer advocates tried to go to court to fight predatory lenders through lawsuits, judges — often Republican-appointed judges — would say, “You know, I’d love to rule in favor of you, but the Federal Reserve was supposed to help define this question of law that’s central to your case, and they never did, so we really can’t rule that this was a violation of HOEPA.”

So that was really the problem in the ’90s: that Alan Greenspan and his absolutist free-market approach to the mortgage markets, and the financial markets more broadly, completely defined everything that went on.

You also had community organizers and activists pushing Bill Clinton or pushing the Democratic Party to make housing more available, right?

The calamity that came to happen was enabled by this explosive growth that sucked all the customers from the government-sponsored market into the private one where they just became sitting ducks for every toxic product imaginable. Remember that the loans that went bad were people who had bought their homes, often with the help of the government programs, then refinancing with a subprime loan or with an adjustable rate loan.

There are clearly two competing narratives. You have the right-wing critique that blames the homeowners and you have the other side largely placing the blame on Wall Street. What responsibility do homeowners actually bear for the state we’re in now?

I think homeowners bear a lot of responsibility for their own wishful thinking. What you have is essentially a mass social mania. And it was infectious — you have a homeowner seeing their neighbor moving up to a bigger, better house because their broker is offering them a loan. Yes, the interest rate will adjust, but they can refinance in two years when it does. People wanted to believe. I traveled across the country for this book and interviewed many many, many homeowners and people who sold them mortgages and homes. And Americans’ capacity in general for delusional thinking, wishful thinking, fantastic thinking really just flourished.

This isn’t to say every homeowner was in this position. There was no shortage of horrifically exploitative practices, lenders who preyed and continued to prey on people’s financial desperation. This is all happening at a time when real wages are stagnant or declining, where people’s other expenses are going up. Trying to maintain a good standard of living and finding what seems like an easy way to do it. So it just became the new normal.

The book has a great number of anecdotal illustrations about the development of the market and the damage wrought. Let’s talk about a specific case: a homeowner named Charity Stewart.

Charity Stewart had bought a house for about $100,000 in 2004 because it was cheaper than renting. She was a single mom, single grandmother, and was 33 years old when she bought the home. She said she was driving around a neighborhood, saw a sign, said there was no money down — actually I think it was $500 down. She was able to get into that home for less, she told me, than it would be to put down a rent deposit.

When you rent a place, often a landlord will want to check out your finances, make sure they can get paid every month. Well, her lender, which was Argent Mortgage, now defunct, a spinoff from Ameriquest Mortgage, they asked for financial documentation — and she was allowed to count income that really shouldn’t have been counted. You know, her mom was on SSI and didn’t live with her but they added her mom’s income to her household income. So she ended up qualifying for a mortgage at a high interest rate that was much higher than she could pay for.

But it wasn’t only that that really struck me about Charity’s story because that has, I think, become very ordinary in the past couple of years. It was also that Charity had really no idea of what was involved in homeownership and no one had bothered to tell her. And so when the house, as often happens with these older city homes that were getting sold to first-time home-buyers, had some problems — it had a leak. And she didn’t know what to do. She had always lived as a tenant and could call the super or the landlord. And she actually tried to call Ameriquest when the leak started to get it fixed — she didn’t know what else to do and nobody told her. So by the time I came, which was about a year later, this leak had turned into this waterfall down the side of her living room and she stopped making mortgage payments, sort of in protest of her house falling apart. And she went into foreclosure that week that I visited her. 

What about the story of Lehigh Acres?

Lehigh Acres is an area near Fort Myers in Florida, and Fort Myers/Cape Coral is one of the hottest foreclosure hot spots in the country. The area became a Mecca for speculators. Lehigh Acres and Cape Coral were created by infomercial kingpins of the 1950s, these product pitchmen who had spent time during the winter in Florida and saw an opportunity to sell real estate the way they had sold rat killer and cosmetics on their TV shows. They decided to start selling land on the installment plan. So what you had in these areas in Florida, and still have, are just tens of thousands of these little housing lots in the middle of swamp that were created to sell on TV.

There were these organized investor schemes, these seminars that would go on road shows all over the country, encouraging middle-class Americans to make it in real estate — to be like Donald Trump. Buyers would have to put almost no money down, because they were getting set up with these construction loans. The idea was that they would get tenants in the homes and the tenants would eventually qualify for a subprime loan and owners could sell to them — but of course this isn’t how it worked out. These homes never ended up getting sold for the most part.

What I found was entire towns — I visited a town in Pennsylvania just outside Philly — where you’d have nine or 10 families from this one town and another six from down the road, and more from the next town over, all of them had gone to a seminar at a hotel in King of Prussia and seen how they could make this 14 percent return on Florida real estate. And these families just lost everything. They were really hoping only to send their children to college and to just get that leg up and this was how they hoped to get it. And so we talk about real estate investors and speculators and there’s often this stereotype of someone in that show “Flip This House” who sits in his SUV and is on his cellphone all day. But a lot of these investors were in fact ordinary middle-class Americans who had never invested in real estate before.

Is there anybody in this whole saga who stands out as both well intentioned and well informed, who was prescient about what was going to happen and said, “Stop”?

Oh gosh, quite a few along the way. So many consumer advocates, community organizers, folks in Washington, they’ve been working on this stuff for years and never drank the Kool-Aid. They were fighting discrimination but also really knew when the policies and the industry were going too far and called them on it, too. The kind of conscience and hero in my book is a now-deceased activist named Gail Cincotta, who is really central to all these progressive policy changes to help fight discrimination in mortgage lending, get the Community Reinvestment Act passed, urge more lending to credit-worthy and qualified low- and moderate-income people. She would go and testify in Congress year after year about how these programs were going and she would just call them out on it constantly and say, What are you doing? These loans are not helping people, they’re proving really harmful and you have a responsibility to do something. But by that point, this monster had already taken on a life of its own.

Is there anybody in Congress whom we should listen to, who has the right prescription or has been consistently right in the past?

For better and for worse –I think almost entirely for the better — we have Barney Frank. He is a favorite whipping boy on the right; for the believers it’s all the Community Reinvestment Act’s fault, it’s all Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae’s fault, and he is their prime evidence of that. He had an ex-boyfriend who worked for Fannie Mae and that’s part of the conspiracy theory behind this. That’s all baloney as far as what drives his policy decisions, what he’s trying to do. Frank, I think, is somebody who cares deeply about housing and about having a sane and functional mortgage market and he’s trying to do the best he can within what’s really possible in Congress right now.

I think part of the problem is that the Obama administration has been trying to play a very evenhanded role in setting the agenda going forward. So, for instance, Frank has been trying to push legislation that would outright bar a lot of predatory lending practices, but it was just a non-starter, certainly in the Senate. It passed the House thanks to the efforts of Frank and others, but in the Senate, Chris Dodd particularly, and others there are just really refusing to confront these issues head-on. So we’re sort of left now with the Obama administration’s new plan to overhaul the financial industry and its proposal for a new consumer financial products safety commission to carry that load going forward.

Has what the Obama administration has done to date about housing and lending helped or hurt?

Neither, which I guess is to its credit. I mean, it is trying to — not that successfully — keep the banking industry afloat while also keeping homeowners afloat. And the problem is you’ve got a zero-sum game.

So have we hit bottom yet?

Ask Jim Cramer [laughs], he says we’ve hit bottom. I’m not Jim Cramer.

Should I invest in real estate now?

Actually, that’s a really great question. There’s a lot of really great buys around the country right now because a lot of players who, in the past, did have money to throw around in real estate, are staying on the sidelines. So what you have in fact are sort of private equity funds  coming in, I guess you could call them vulture funds, they’re just coming in and buying up whatever they can. And prices for foreclosures — you can pick up places, especially in cities, for very very little money right now. And what you see is actually some kind of half-crazy or half-enterprising young people investors, entrepreneurs, some with good intentions and some that just want to make a buck, coming and buying up stuff cheap and fixing it up. There’s both good and bad coming out of that right now.

Sounds like the beginning of the next bubble, right?

[laughs] Well, the bubble’s only going to inflate if we choose to put air into it again. And if you look at what the Obama administration is putting out there, as far as what they want to see happening going forward, it puts a lot of very almost excessively thoughtful constraints on how that market will work. They’ve called for all these Ph.D.s to roam around and study exactly who will run into trouble if they have a pre-payment penalty or an adjustable rate and then regulate the product accordingly. It’s very, very, very wonky. That’s no guarantee that it’ll work. So I remain kind of admiring of the effort to craft this plan, but very skeptical that it will actually work as advertised.

What Grandma and Pop Pop really enjoyed about the RV, I think, was the companionship. There was a circuit, and they would meet up with their newfound RV friends in places like Arizona and unfold the folding chairs and talk. They even once joined a multi-land-yacht armada that sailed down the Pan-American Highway to Panama.

But if they were still alive and chatting with their RV friends around a campfire somewhere, their conversation would probably be taking a mournful turn. The RV industry is in dire trouble, and the whole RV subculture can feel it. Earlier this month, a survey conducted by the RVtravel.com newsletter determined that two-thirds of the 1,500 motor-home owners who responded think that fewer than half of America’s RV manufacturers will still be in business come January 2010.

Why so pessimistic? Perhaps because 18 percent of respondents to a February survey said that the makers of their own RV models had already gone out of business. In the past two years, at least a half-dozen RV manufacturers have ceased to be. In March alone, three different big-name RV brands went Chapter 11 — Fleetwood, Monaco and Country Coach. And on Thursday, the industry leader, Winnebago, announced an operating loss of $35 million for the first six months of fiscal 2009. The RV lifestyle goes on, but the RV business, starved by $4-a-gallon gas last year, is now reeling from the recession and a serious credit drought. An industry that has always been characterized by peaks and valleys, ultrasensitive to economic change, has entered the Valley of Death.

Since there have been gasoline-powered passenger vehicles, they have been modified so that their owners could sleep inside them. There really wasn’t an RV industry, however, till the 1960s. The industry’s iconic brand, Winnebago, was founded in 1958, but Winnebago did not manufacture its first true motor home, those things that look like miniature, parti-colored tour buses, till 1966. The Winnebago brand name was, for a long time, interchangeable with the genre. I can remember, in the early 1970s, my dad renting a 20-foot box with a big brown W on the side and a hokey Native American name and driving our family to the Smoky Mountains, our real, non-bobble-headed Chihuahua standing on the dash. (I can also remember that the box ate oceans of gas, but that the gas was so cheap I could have paid for it out of my allowance.)

Though there were down cycles in the industry, notably in 1979 and 1980 and 1989 to 1991, by the late 1990s there were as many as 9 million RVs from a myriad of manufacturers on the road. The RV had tapped into the seemingly contradictory American desire for comfort and freedom, and the accompanying American expectation that the gas needed to buy that mobility would always flow like water. The most current estimate for the number of RVs on the road is more than 8 million, camping at any of 16,000 RV parks, or simply squatting in the parking lots of friendly Wal-Marts.

Nowadays the typical RV includes such amenities as Wi-Fi, refrigerator, shower and microwave, and may even have a push-button slide-out feature that allows the living room to expand to 8 feet in width when the vehicle is parked. The typical RV owner moves up in category from something simple like a tow-behind pop-up trailer to the fully enclosed mobile palace with all mod cons.

The demographics of the typical RV owner, however, are a little fuzzier. Some hard facts are available. We know how old they are and how much money they make. The average age of an owner is around 49, and the average income is variously estimated to be $56,000 and $68,000. Ownership also seems to be concentrated in that income range, and to fall off above and below it. But who are these individuals? They tend to be empty nesters or retirees; about 60 percent of the owners of the more expensive, full-amenity motor homes are retired. So-called full-timers live on the road because they can, tethered to neither offspring nor occupation.

My grandparents fell within the fat part of the bell curve of the gray-haired, middle-class, wanderlusting RV owner. My grandfather had worked his way up through Mountain Bell to a vice-president’s position. My grandmother worked at the local art museum. They were adventurous types, having sailed the ocean in a freighter, visiting Angola “before it went socialist,” seeing the world when time and income permitted. Then, in their 70s, in their motor home, they went and saw America.

They may, however, have been a tad more affluent than the average RV snowbird. I wonder if the motor home didn’t also once represent an attainable dream for people of more modest means. Given the annual income figures, it would seem as if the RV population contains a lot of hobbyists and a lot of retirees who have little margin for fiscal error, who are uniquely sensitive to a wobbly economy, or combustible 401Ks and downsized pensions, or expensive gas.

For whatever reason, the RV industry began to decline before the weakness of the larger economy became obvious. RV sales increased every year this decade until 2006. After the peak year of 2006, however, when nearly 400,000 RVs were manufactured and shipped, the market began to tremble. Shipments of new units slipped slightly in 2007. And then the market collapsed. Shipments dropped 33 percent from 2007 to 2008, the year gas hit record prices. Projections for 2009 estimate that shipments will plunge another 45 percent, all the way down to 130,100 units. That would mean a return to the sales levels of 1980. Now, two years into the industry’s downturn, the long trail is already littered with RV dead: Rest in peace, Trail Wagons, Sunline Coach, National RV, Alfa Leisure, Ameri-Camp, Travel Supreme, Teton Homes, Weekend Warrior, Western RV, West Coast Leisure Homes.

The industry’s immediate problems are tied to the recession. The weak economy makes would-be RV owners skittish about buying. But RVs have also experienced a uniquely painful credit crunch, which makes loans hard to come by for those dreamers still willing to make the leap. Lenders are balking at doling out cash for a six-figure discretionary purchase. RVs are not cheap. Winnebago’s 11-model 2009 line includes five models with base prices over $100,000; the 39-foot Vectra starts at $302,000.  Analysts say the RV credit crunch may not ease for another 12 to 18 months. Meanwhile, the industry is suffering permanent damage; even those companies that remain are mass-producing pink slips. The industry has already shed 280,000 jobs, more than half its workforce, since mid-2007. In Elkhart, Ind., where more than 60 percent of all RV units are built, and one out of every four jobs is RV-related, unemployment is 18.3 percent.

RV manufacturers have placed some hopes in the economic stimulus package, which includes credit-easing provisions and tax breaks intended to goose RV sales. Longer-term, they have faith in the sheer statistical weight of baby boomers; the oldest post-World War II babies will turn 65 in 2010, and après them the deluge.

But in the short term, some shoppers are scared to buy RVs simply because they don’t know if the manufacturers will be around to honor service and parts warranties. And in the future, there is no reason to believe gas will stay as cheap as it is today, unless the economy is so bad that demand stays low. Either fork in the road promises hardship for the RV industry. RV blogger Jim Twamley, who predicted the recent deaths of Monaco, Fleetwood and Country Coach, has serious doubts that any RV manufacturers will last much longer. “I’m not sure anyone is going to survive,” Twamley told Salon. “Thor Industries has a good balance sheet. Forest River might survive, because they are backed by Warren Buffet. And I guess Winnebago. If anyone survives, it will be those three. But I won’t be surprised if no one does.”

What would get the motor home off life support? The answer may lie in doing what Detroit did not do until too late in the game. Downsize. Deep-six the land yachts. Build lighter, smaller vehicles that do not cost so much to buy or to maintain. Mark Polk, an RV expert who owns RV Education 101, a company that produces DIY RV books and videos, told Salon the industry is already thinking smaller. “The manufacturers,” said Polk, “will be trying to trim some of the cost off, and trying to get their vehicles into a range where the $40,000 a year earner will be comfortable with an RV payment.” Twamley says the new products will also be more environmentally friendly, incorporating some of the lightweight, composite materials used to build aircraft, and relying more on solar energy. “I think they [the new products] will be leaner and greener. The carbon footprint will be smaller.”

And even the pessimistic Twamley thinks the RV concept, if not any particular RV manufacturer, is eternal. “Americans love to RV. It is an American institution. It is firmly established and I am positive it will continue. It’s just that the industry will have to create new products to meet the new market demands.”

Born in Brooklyn in 1922, the regional chain moved, in body and spirit, to the Long Island suburbs, just like the upwardly mobile strivers who bought their jewelry, furniture and housewares there. There was a store on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, which proclaimed a different sort of aspiration, the desire to rub shoulders with Tiffany’s and the Plaza Hotel, but the store in Westbury, on Long Island, was the flagship and the mother ship. It anchored its own dowdy minimall, called the Mall at the Source, built around it in the 1990s. But the bridge-and-tunnel icon could not survive the tug of Target in one direction and more effete yup-scale retailers in the other, and is now in liquidation.

As with the demise of many 87-year-olds from Long Island, the death of Fortunoff was sad, but not unexpected. In February 2008, the owners who had bought the chain from the Fortunoff family filed for bankruptcy. Lord & Taylor’s rescued the brand and its 19 stores in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, but the second Chapter 11 filing came a year later. On Feb. 12, the company laid off 300 of its 1,800 headquarters staff in Westbury. Liquidators purchased nearly $100 million in inventory not long thereafter, and a chainwide clearance sale began the last week of February.

Clearance shoppers of a certain age interviewed by Long Island’s Newsday newspaper, tribune of all that is 516, evinced great nostalgia for the chain. William Friedrich of Queens, 69, was shopping for miniature trains. His wife was shopping for bridal gifts. “Now we’ll have to go to Target,” said Friedrich. Amalia Kanaras of Long Island, 68, had been shopping at Fortunoff for 40 years. She purchased a pearl necklace. Rosemarie Godfrey, also 68, also of Long Island, and a former Fortunoff employee, said, “I came to mourn.”