Workers Squeezed Out of Housing, Into Parks : Tent Cities in Suburbs: Sign of Times

David Burgess usually leaves his construction job in Manassas, Va., about 5:30 p.m., eats dinner alone at Bob’s Big Boy, then drives straight to his home: a pup tent in Fairfax County.

“It’s a little cramped,” said Burgess, 32, peering down at his green plastic roof. “I really don’t like staying in the tent, but housing around here is so expensive.”

Across Ox Road, residents of The Ridings at Canterberry pay as much as $474,500 for their elegant single-family houses. Burgess has found more affordable accommodations in the neighborhood: $8.50 a night for a campsite, a hot shower and use of the laundry facilities at Burke Lake Park.

The severe labor shortage in the Washington, D.C., area, which recorded a 2.7% jobless rate in April, has spawned a kind of “gold rush” for jobs from states with high unemployment rates. But the cost of living in the D.C. suburbs has forced hundreds of workers like Burgess to seek shelter in campgrounds, places next to highways and at construction sites.

Like ‘Hoovervilles’

“You used to have ‘Hoovervilles’ because they didn’t have jobs,” said Fairfax County Supervisor Thomas M. Davis III, referring to the shantytowns during the Depression. “Now they’re camping out because they have them.”

Some have come here year after year--usually in the summer--to live in invisible communities, hidden by the tents, cars and unfinished town houses where they sleep. They generally are single, white men in their 20s and 30s who are lured by construction jobs, said park officials and advocates for the homeless. Because the workers move so frequently, nobody has an accurate accounting of their numbers.

Unlike the usual homeless people, most have strong ties to land or people somewhere--in West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and, increasingly, Texas.

“These are our migrant workers,” said Eric Goplerud, an assistant professor at George Mason University who has studied the homeless in Fairfax. He described the urban migrant workers as the “virtual homeless” because they could not find work where they lived and now cannot find affordable housing where they work.

The jobs they seek involve building houses or constructing highways in Washington’s booming economy--the suburban equivalent of their agricultural counterparts toiling in the vineyards or picking vegetables in California.

Like their agricultural cousins, they are in perpetual motion. At Fairfax County parks, for example, entire neighborhoods pack up and move every seven days. After a required four-day absence, designed to discourage permanent camping, entire neighborhoods return.

Visit Families

Some migrants visit their families on their days off; others increasingly are bringing them along. Although most obey park rules, some stretch their welcomes by reregistering under names of others in their groups, posing as recreational campers or, like most, park-hopping.

“The fact of the matter is, park-hopping is going on,” said J. Hamilton Lambert, Fairfax County executive. “We’re caught in a dilemma--they’re not mobile home parks.”

Lambert said no one could have predicted that there would be so many job opportunities in Fairfax, which registered a 1.5% unemployment rate in April, the lowest in Virginia. He said the county is trying to accommodate the surge of workers and ensure that they are treated fairly.

“What’re you going to do?” said George Lorenze, 41, who saved enough money to buy a pop-up camper, but who until recently lived in a $66 dome tent with his wife, Joyce, 50, and their 4-year-old granddaughter, Yolanda Gibson. “There’s no work out West. You come up here with nothing. Rent is $800 a month.”

After arriving from Bryan, Tex., in their white Volkswagen Rabbit, the Lorenzes pitched their tent at Prince William Forest Park, which has a 14-day limit on camping. In their short time in this area, the family already has moved several times, mostly between the only two Fairfax County-operated parks with campgrounds, Burke Lake and Lake Fairfax.

Small Community

The family prefers the shady campgrounds at Burke Lake Park, where a small community of workers, segregated by design from recreational campers, lives peacefully in the woods, not far from an 18-hole golf course. “It’s a little tent city,” Goplerud said.

At first glance, the tent city looks like a campground, but the life styles there paint a different picture. The workers lead lives filled almost entirely by showering, eating, working, sleeping--and some discreet beer drinking, because alcohol is banned in most parks. Most live frugally, taking their pay back to their home states on weekends or saving enough during the heavy construction season to tide them through a winter of unemployment back at their permanent homes.

For the last three years, it has been the way of life for Brian Sloneker, a construction worker from Newtown, Pa. “If you have an apartment, you have something to do,” said Sloneker, 24, sitting on the floor of the tent he shares with two others. “This is all we do. We come back here (after work), take a shower.”

Although friendships form in the woods, there are few opportunities to develop personal relationships. “Who are you going to socialize with out here in the campground?” said Sloneker’s cousin, Russell Knecht, 32, a construction worker from Wellington, Ohio.

Most park managers report few problems with the migrant workers who inhabit their campgrounds. Although there were some drinking and vandalism problems at Burke Lake Park in Fairfax County several years ago, park manager Bob Grove said they have been solved.

“We understand each other now. Most of them behave themselves,” Grove said. “We don’t discriminate against them. We treat them like we do anyone else.”

Some say better. Ruffled curtains soften the windows at the camp store, where a makeshift mailbox has been erected. Assistant park supervisor Rebecca Williamson, who sells Hungry Jack pancake mix and rents campsites, drops the mail off at a post office on her way home. When wives and girlfriends call long-distance on the pay phones outside, she takes messages and attaches them to picnic tables.

Williamson said she has welcomed workers from such places as Beverly, W.Va.; Racine, Ohio, and Patton, Pa. She has heard about their jobs building townhouses, removing asbestos, delivering lost luggage. She has watched them adjust and progress during their lives in the woods--from a tent, to a pop-up camper (a cross between a tent and a small trailer), to a trailer.

Rainy-Day Chores

Occasionally, she chats with Burgess when he stays at the campground in his pup tent instead of sleeping in some of the houses he builds for $10 an hour. Burgess spends rainy days doing his laundry and evenings reading--while there is still enough light. He has a 17-year-old wife, a trailer and 45 acres in Madison, W.Va., and he visits there every other weekend, driving his Chevrolet Chevette seven hours each way.

Living in a pup tent or an unfinished house is the price he must pay for the luxury of having a job, said Burgess, who said he was forced out of his home state by high unemployment, which reached 13.2% in February. And with average monthly rents of $615 in Fairfax last year, it is not likely that his job and family will become any closer, he said.

As the number of migrant workers rises with the temperature, park manager Grove said he is noticing more families. Many are arriving from oil-depressed areas in Texas, where Virginia officials have been actively recruiting to fill suburban jobs. Desperate local employers are giving away sets of pots and pans and offering increased salaries to lure workers to this area.

George Lorenze is working as a mechanic in Manassas for $7.50 an hour, several dollars an hour more than he was paid in Texas. His wife and granddaughter wait for him in the woods. During the day, Yolanda plays with her doll or with her grandmother, who strings the family’s quilts between trees to air them out. They keep one another company, walking in the woods and looking at ducks.

The Lorenzes cook chili, beef stew and oatmeal on their Coleman propane stove, sleep on an air mattress in their pop-up camper and store their clothes in plastic garbage bags.

Some children of migrant workers go to school in the suburbs. This year in Fairfax County, for example, school officials said they had 46 children enrolled who lived in tents and motels.

Next fall, the Lorenzes plan to send Yolanda to Canada to live with her mother and attend school. They say their granddaughter, whom they have reared, will miss living in the woods, except when the weather is bad.

One rainy spring night at Burke Lake Park, four of the Lorenzes’ neighbors from New Martinsville, W. Va., crowded around a television set in an automobile, watching “Wheel of Fortune” and the rain splash on the windshield.

“It’s lonely,” said Jeff Kelbaugh, 20, from the inside of his 1977 AMC Pacer, where the television was plugged into the cigarette lighter. “I just got married.”

New Wife, 4 Children

Having a new wife and four children from his wife’s previous marriage in West Virginia makes it harder to live in a tent at Burke Lake Park, Kelbaugh said. However, his family is going to join him in his two-person dome tent for the summer, he said.

Some have suggested that park rules be relaxed so families are not constantly on the move, but others believe that the parks should not be a solution to what Virginia officials call a crisis in affordable housing. Several regional parks already prohibit residential campers, but workers say residential users still inhabit those parks’ campgrounds from time to time.

For now, the migrant workers say they have no choice but to live in their tents in the parks.

Said a resigned Kelbaugh: “We’ll be here forever.”