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News & Blogs Home is where the parking lot is

landpirate

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I watched this nice short earlier about a group of aviation employees who live in vans and trailers in an airport car park. Although, its a closed shop in terms of any of us parking up there, I identify with some of their feelings towards van life.

i've tried repeatedly to get the video to embed in the thread but without success so the link and story that accompany it are below. If anyone can work out how to embed the video let me know, or post it below. Thank you :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/o...ck&ad-keywords=AUDDEVREMARK&kwp_0=222722&_r=0

Home Is Where the Parking Lot Is
Op-Docs

By LANCE OPPENHEIM SEPT. 6, 2016

Taking a back-road shortcut to catch a flight from Los Angeles two years ago, I passed an obscure airline employee parking lot — and was surprised to see over 70 motor homes. It looked like there was an entire community planted right there in the parking lot of the airport. I wondered, who lived there — and why?

I learned that this community was an employee parking lot turned motor-home park made up of pilots, flight attendants and mechanics. And I became fascinated by why and how the residents — people who may have flown us across the country, or walked us through emergency landing procedures — came to inhabit such an unusual place.

When I returned there last December, it quickly became apparent that the lot rarely attracted visitors, especially those carrying cameras. Residents did not immediately embrace me — a student filmmaker. So I was grateful when a few of them decided to share their takes on their unique living situation with me — and was struck by the contradictions in how they view their homes. While many communities seem to confer on their residents a sense of stability, those at the employee parking lot today generally view their homes as temporary. But if a home is traditionally considered a place where one yearns to return to — a place where the heart is, so to speak — can a temporary dwelling be a home?

Their perspectives are rooted in their community’s complicated history. The lot was created at least a decade ago as an airport-sponsored program offering airline employees a place to rest before heading to their next destination. Today, however, the next destination for many of the lot’s residents is unknown. As a result of pursuing their dream of working in the aviation industry, with its attendant transient lifestyle, many of the parking lot’s residents are estranged from their families. They are largely a community of people living alone, together — and most now consider the lot “home.” But airport officials do not necessarily share their enthusiasm. Instead, they are actively seeking ways to re-appropriate the space where the community is situated and have slowly, and steadily, reduced the number of its residents.

I hope this film will help expand and challenge traditional views of what constitutes a home in 21st-century America. Because as unconventional as their living situation may be, the residents of this airport parking lot told me their homes afford them something we all seek: freedom.
 

Jimmy Beans

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It's exactly the same for today's younger railroaders, chasing their seniority anywhere they're able to bid in to work a position. I started out working in Bakersfield as a conductor working trains over Tehachapi into West Colton or Long Beach, depending on which train I was called for. Bakersfield was 115 miles south of the city I was hired to work in, but it's the closest I could get. Broke in those first days, I drove an old VW bug. I removed the passenger seat, the kickboard under the rear seat and the rear seat itself as well. Slid my battery over behind the driver seat, doubled over a futon mattress and laid it out alongside the driver seat, the only seat left in the bug. That was my home, parked in the Bakersfield employee parking lot. I'm 6'3" 260 lbs and it was surprisingly comfortable and roomy enough to stretch out.

I did that for a few months then transferred to Roseville, working the conductors extra board going all directions and back. While parked in the Roseville lot I met a conductor girl who was chasing her seniority all the way from Sparks, NV. She had a run down 70's RV that she was renovating while living in it in the employee parking lot. I moved in with her, and we later found the carmen parking lot on the other side of the yard was a better place to park the house. Eventually there was a village of RV's, van dwellers and the likes. I wouldn't be surprised if Jeff Combs is still living somewhere in that small white mustang. The guy slept in the front seat and had a grip of solar panels laying over his car in the day powering fans to keep him cool in the summer.

I became an engineer, bought an old shoebox nova, broke up with conductor girl and placed a bid in Watsonville. Slept in my nova in that parking lot, among a few other employees. Every railyard has it's community of nomads, they're fully employed and realistically they can all afford to rent places where they work but it's hard to settle in anywhere, put down a deposit and buy furniture etc. because you never know when some guy who's got whiskers on you from another terminal might bid onto your job and force you out to Elko, NV because it's the only place your seniority will allow you to hold.
 
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