Today The New Yorker became the latest casualty in the media’s endless desire to publicly shame all owners of mobile home parks. Rather than to celebrate those who bring old mobile home parks back to life to the betterment of the residents and the surrounding community, The New Yorker took the easy path forged by such comics as Jeff Foxworthy and John Oliver and abandoned fair and balanced journalism to elicit a cheap laugh from the intellectual elite. Sad. How very different The New Yorker was before 1980 or so, when it earned its previous reputation as a byword for literary excellence, with editors and writers who, subject by subject, vastly outshined the current bunch of hacks employed by the magazine. The sole exception is current poetry editor Paul Muldoon, an amusing and talented Irish author and musician who has produced The Lyrics, a 960-page memoir with the Beatles’ Paul McCartney due for publication by Liveright in November. But for the most part, The New Yorker today is the kind of place where writers churn out garbage and honorable people that actually provide nice goods and services receive routine potshots.

First of all, there’s a huge problem with The New Yorker taking issue with anyone for raising rents – including mobile home parks owners. The magazine is well known to have been raising subscription prices at the rate of as much as 20% per year for some time now, with the highest annual subscription price in America. It’s focus on gouging is described here https://digiday.com/media/new-yorker-plans-double-paid-circulation-2-million/ and the article offers up this quote “while subscribers haven’t resisted price increases so far, it’s hard to know if and when that’ll happen. Ray thinks there’s still room to increase the price further without sacrificing conversion rate”. Even more odd is that they have been sticking it to the subscribers in complete disregard to the traditional method of paying for magazines with mostly advertising revenue. The New Yorker has the same paid advertising as other publication, but the owners have elected to stick readers with an incredibly high tariff for the simple reason that they can.

As for the article itself, it seems odd that in 2014 The New York Times (another publication not known for its love of American business) wrote that mobile home park owners “are the best thing going in affordable housing when the nation’s need for low-cost places to live has never been greater”. That writer, Gary Rivlin, put in the effort to go live in a mobile home park in Pontoon Beach, Illinois for a week, and found that everyone in the property loved it https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/magazine/the-cold-hard-lessons-of-mobile-home-u.html . He stated “the most striking aspect of their business is how happy their tenants seem to be.”.

The New York Times is as anti-business as The New Yorker but the writer at least had the journalistic decency to actually experience mobile home park living first hand, and to tell the truth about it. The New Yorker writer, on the other hand, put in no significant fact-finding effort other than a quick chat with an unhappy tenant and then off to the steak house. This makes sense as The New Yorker has always served as more of a satirical publication than journalistic endeavor, stemming from its founding in 1925. I was assigned a few years ago by a newswire service to report on the weekly editorial meeting at The New Yorker where cartoons (referred to loftily by the magazine’s staff as “drawings”) are accepted or rejected and they take this matter more seriously than anything else contained in the magazine. It has literally become s kind of a MAD Magazine for intellectuals. “According to Pew Research, 77 percent of The New Yorker's audience hold left-of-center political values, while 52 percent of those readers hold "consistently liberal" political values” (Wikipedia). Not exactly a crowd that gives capitalists a fair shake.

The New Yorker story is centered on a mobile home park in Iowa that had rents well below market levels but was also lacking many of the capital expenditures needed to provide a quality lifestyle. Under new owners it was brought back to life with a large investment in improving infrastructure and to regain resident pride of ownership. New homes were added on vacant lots to provide additional affordable housing in a market that desperately needed it. Professional management was installed to better guide the community and provide fair treatment for all residents with a focus on improving their quality of life. And the majority of residents appreciated this improved value immensely so when rents increased they elected to stay. Meanwhile, new residents moved in who found the rent a bargain at nearly $500 per month less than an apartment. There is nothing unusual about this. Gary Rivlin from The New York Times discovered that higher rents yet happier customers is completely logical. He stated . “to a person, the residents I met declared themselves satisfied with their landlords. A few, like Linda Wright, a former Walmart employee who has lived in the Jeffco Estates trailer park in Arnold, Mo., for the past 47 years, gushed about their ownership. Wright, who was the park manager when Rolfe and Reynolds took over early last spring, said the rutted roads in the park flooded every time it rained. Drug use was rampant, as were fights; the flashing lights from police cars routinely lit up the nights. When Rolfe and Reynolds bought the park, they repaved the streets and fixed the drainage system. They removed the most dilapidated trailers.”

The New Yorker apparently finds unforgivable that a manager at the property filed evictions without authorization, even though these accidental filings were immediately dismissed by upper management when the issue was uncovered. Not a single resident was ever asked to leave, nor did any. It was essentially a clerical error and not an attempt to disrupt lives. Kind of like the scandal The New Yorker faced in the 1990s. “As far back as the 1940s, the magazine's commitment to fact-checking was already well-known. However, the magazine played a role in a literary scandal and defamation lawsuit over two articles written by Janet Malcolm in the 1990s, who wrote about Sigmund Freud's legacy. Questions were raised about the magazine's fact-checking process” (Wikipedia). I guess everyone can make mistakes, but only a mobile home park owner must be chastised for them. Seems fair enough.

Mobile home parks are not non-profits. They are investments where the focus is to maximize returns to investors. This includes raising rents. Without higher rents all mobile home parks will be bulldozed and replaced with a higher use for the land (this is already happening with around 100 per year becoming everything from apartments to Home Depot stores). Without higher rents all mobile home parks will stop injecting capital back in for infrastructure repair and replacement (just drive in any old mom & pop property for proof). These are simple realities that anyone should understand. Sure, mobile home park owners are smart business people with a great business model. So why does The New Yorker care so much? It somehow threatens them. To their segment of society nothing is more evil than commercial success -- unless they get the money, of course. Gary Rivlin from The New York Times came to a different conclusion finding “some nobility in the … business model. The parks they take over tend to be in lousy shape, and they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing them up. In that way, they’re the trailer-park equivalent of the developer who buys abandoned properties in the Bronx and converts them into livable places that are, at least, clean and safe”.

The writers at The New Yorker have never risked their capital in a business. They have never worried about making a mortgage payment or had the unpleasantness of appearing in evictions court and the empathy to the human condition that results from it. They have never provided a roof over the head of a single family in need. Perhaps Teddy Roosevelt best summed it up when he said “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Shame on The New Yorker and their writers and editors. Their efforts have no place in American journalism and certainly serve the interests of no mobile home park resident. Profiting from a general automatic rage to side against real estate investors and landlords, some media may have made it easier for some gullible readers to favor “cold and timid souls” in today’s America. And that’s a pity.