Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America's New Rootless Professional Class - Hardcover

1. Mobile Homeless

The psychology of place is essentially about belonging. Because it is a fundamental part of human psychological makeup, we know that all people need to belong. Each and every human being needs a place to call home.

—Mindy Thompson Fullilove,

The House of Joshua: Meditations on Family and Place

When I met Kathy Link in August 2004, she was forty- one, still a runner and straight as a spear. She was in the blond- streaked pigtails, red sun visor, and tennis whites she wore leading a ?tness class at the Forum Gym near her home in Medlock Bridge and winning a doubles match afterward.

Kathy runs her house hold with the attention to detail of her former work editing for an aerospace company, a career that was already ?ve years in the past. Tucked next to the seat of her white, eight- seat 2003 GMC Denali SUV was the week’s color- coded itinerary. Kaleigh, eight, is red. She is the most excitable of the girls. Deep- dimpled and gallant, she runs to open doors for adults. At soccer she is fast and ferociously focused and shimmers with sweat.

Kelsey, the oldest at thirteen, is yellow. Tall, strong, and un?inching, she plays stopper, or center fullback. She can pound the ball half the length of the ?eld. She got a concussion in a collision with an opponent weeks before. To keep playing she must wear a thick- cushioned headband for six months.

Kristina, eleven, is dark green. She can be distant and inscrutable. Left-footed, playing both right and left forward, her mission in life is outperforming and outgrowing Kelsey. She made a cheerleading squad. Pleased with herself, she said, “Kelsey tried out twice and didn’t make it.” But Kelsey has ?gured her out. In a charity road race, she sensed Kristina coming up behind, let her get close, and took off.

With school over that afternoon, Kathy (blue for work, light green for family and volunteering) had already dropped Kaleigh at her practice ?eld blocks from home. She had to take Katrina to her practice four miles north and Kelsey to hers fourteen miles south. Her husband, Jim (orange), couldn’t help much. Two to ?ve days a week, every week, he’s on the road seeing clients. For Monday and Tuesday, the itinerary said, “Jim in meetings, Charlotte.” For Wednesday, it said, “Jim in meetings, Philadelphia.”

Kathy surveyed the clotted intersection at the mouth of her 636house subdivision. After moving to Medlock Bridge four years ago and choking on traf?c, she made a rule: “Wherever I’m going has to be within one mile of the house.” But she breaks the rule two or three times a day, all days but Sunday, with ten- and ?fteen- mile trips. She does most of her mothering not at home but from the sidelines of soccer games and from her roost in the big Denali. She passes out snacks, water, Kleenex, Band-Aids, and medication, takes soundings of the girls’ spirits and school day, and talks through homework assignments.

Impatiently, she squeezed the wheel. “Go, people,” she pleaded. Her knuckles went white. Twice she tapped the horn. A timid driver in a gray van three cars ahead tiptoed into the Atlanta- bound avalanche along Medlock Bridge Road. Kathy pulled abreast, saying, “I have to see who she is.” A rookie Relo, she decided, someone new to north Fulton County’s chronically clogged traf?c.

Kathy herself is a veteran Relo. She had already moved three times inthe past ten years to help keep Jim’s career selling pension and employee-bene?t management ser vices on track.

As Relos, the Links are corporate relocatees, or career transferees. Employers like Microsoft, Intel, and Apple; Procter & Gamble and General Electric; PepsiCo and Coca- Cola; UPS and FedEx; and Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase move them every few years to ?y the corporate ?ag and work in far- ?ung factories and of?ces in the United States and abroad.

Americans working for American companies and Americans and foreigners working for one another’s companies, Relos are twenty- ?rst-century heirs of William S. Whyte’s Or ga ni za tion Man, who exchanged the promise of job security and a pension for his loyalty and toil. Relos exchange not so much their loyalty and toil as their friends, their family ties, and the comforts of a hometown for bigger money and a bigger job—or to hold on to a job. Like Sloan Wilson’s Tom Rath of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, they run on a corporate leash and sell out, too, but to the road.

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. Most go to state universities, disproportionately to schools of the Great Plains and the Midwest, where good jobs can be scarce, and many go on to graduate school. They vote two-to-one Republican (although in the 2008 presidential election, their votes for Barack Obama narrowed the gap). Most are Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, or nondenominational Protestant. The vast majority of Relo breadwinners are white men aged thirty to ?fty. In many Relovilles, unlike the nation as a whole, Asians tend to outnumber African Americans and Hispanics.

Some Relos ?nd their salaries, toys, and perks compensating— the schools with top SAT scores, tennis and golf clubs, parks for youth sports, and upscale shopping strips. But they often complain of stress and anomie. They trade a home in one place for a job that could be anyplace. Perched in their Relovilles, they have little in the way of community ties or big, older city amenities like mass transit, museums, zoos, professional sports stadiums, and live theater.

Outside the gates of their subdivisions, in the towns beyond, Relos are ghosts. They support their own subdivisions’ causes like runs to cure breast cancer or lupus, or fund drives to buy computers for their kids’ schools and gear for their teams. But with the father on the road most weekdays and another move always looming, Relos have neither the time nor the need to sit on town boards or run in local elections, or join the church vestry or the Rotary Club.

Mayors and chambers of commerce complain that Relos shun campaigns to build a museum, a theater, a stadium, or a homeless shelter. They know they will be gone before the cement is poured. 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 and conventions, when they ?nd a few hours for a round of golf. They can tell you the way to the airport but not to City Hall.

On the face of it, Relo families seem no more or less striving or stressed or self- satis?ed or absorbed in their kids, kitchens, and lawns than many middle- class Americans. They patronize the same ubiquitous chain stores, restaurants, and ?tness centers. But 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 families tend to keep up their rituals and sentimental connections 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— that is, Relos.

Yet in another way, Relos are cultural echoes of the 1950s’ Andersons of Father Knows Best and the Ozzie & Harriet...