So it seems Hobo'ing has finally made a comeback in the US. If this isn't a sign of the times, I'm not sure what is.

It's been the case for a little while. /r/vandwellers has been getting busier and busier, with a lot of new builds. Once you've seen a couple of dozen different builds there, you start recognizing the vehicles on the road everywhere else.

It seems to be an aggregation of a few different communities. There are some people doing it because they can't afford anything else, but also a lot of people who just want a cheap way to travel for a while, people who are dumping tons of money into their builds so that they can join the Instagram community of outdoor photos from the back of your van, and folks who make okay money but want to spend as much time climbing as possible.

So it's probably a little bit related to rising housing costs, but that's not all of it.

I see them all around now, too.

So true. I clicked on the link thinking that it had something to do with Amazon deliveries at campgrounds/RV parks for people on vacation, only to find out that my default level of cynicism is woefully inadequate.

The US is hitting new record highs in median income: https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2018/08/july-2018...

Medians are a meaningless statistic in a country with such a massive gap between top and bottom earners.

The ratio of income bracket to income growth is literally a hockey stick graph: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/8/16112368/pi...

Median is better than mean though. Preferably, the people with the data would release median, mean, and quintiles or deciles, and the actual data itself for better analysis.

It's meaningful if you don't care about the top and bottom earners.

Not if there's no actual data points left in the middle.

Per person real income is even better:

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/where...

The Silicon Valley version: https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/12/working-poor-finding-...