Nomadland In NYC: Graffiti Attack Drives Out Family Living In RV

NEW YORK CITY — Ronnie's two young children found the walls of their family home covered in spray-painted messages telling them to "Get Out."

The demand was daubed in large orange letters three times across the front. "A------" was scrawled on the back.

Why? Their family lives in a trailer parked on a Manhattan street, and the neighbors wanted the spot for themselves.

"I got to bring it on myself,” the children's father told Patch, asking his last name not be published. “I haven't been having any consideration for the neighborhood. I know parking is very vital in this area.”

Ronnie then hesitated and said of his kids, ages 8 and 9, "They were very sad for the graffiti."

Ronnie and his family are among an inestimable number of Americans who live transiently in RVs, trailers, school buses and vans, as detailed in the critically acclaimed book "Nomadland" that inspired the Oscar-winning film.

Author Jessica Bruder, who lives in Brooklyn, told Patch she wasn’t surprised to hear of a family living in a New York City trailer, and in “Nomadland” she reports spotting nomadic homes parked across her home borough.

“NYC is experiencing levels of homelessness we haven’t seen since the Great Depression — mostly fueled by a lack of affordable housing — and a large proportion of that is families with kids,” Bruder said in her interview with Patch.

“People don’t typically live that way if they have options that are more safe, comfortable and secure. So the hostility in that graffiti is deeply troubling.”

Bruder adds in her book — which details the economic pressures that have sent a roughly estimated tens of thousands of Americans into nomadic life over the past decade — that “the last free space in America is a parking spot.”

Ronnie, his wife and two children have lived in the RV trailer parked in the heart of Washington Heights for roughly five years, but recently moved out in favor of temporary housing, he said.

Graffiti appeared on the trailer in February, about six weeks after the move. Much of his family's belongings were still inside.

A picture of the graffitied RV trailer made its way onto multiple Upper Manhattan Facebook pages, prompting a discussion on the cruelness of spray-painting somebody's home, but also the difficulty of parking in the neighborhood and how much space the RV took up.

"Cruel," one person commented in reference to the graffiti. "Really nice woman and the sweetest kids...Whoever vandalized their property is a d---," another uptown Facebook user wrote in reference to Ronnie's family.

A different resident commented about his struggles with his own commercial truck in the neighborhood.

"Shoot, I got a commercial truck on my residential block for the past six months and I get tickets, but somehow that truck (the RV) doesn't get any tickets?" he asked.

Ronnie was clear while speaking that nothing had ever happened like this in his years of living on the Washington Heights street.

"I guess people are upset because I've been there for so long," Ronnie said. "Nothing has ever happened like this, though. People must be fed up."

Ronnie doesn't want to leave Washington Heights, a neighborhood he likes and where his two kids attend school, but he says now he must.

"I was just thinking about my family — but I'm realizing it is time for me to move on," Ronnie said.

"I have to be aware that people do live here and I am taking up a lot of space," he added. “It's a luxury to have parking in Washington Heights, there are people that pay a lot of money just to park their car in a garage.”

The trailer was still on West 178th Street as of last Monday, and the spray paint remained.

City law forbids recreational vehicles to park on residential streets for more than 24 hours at a stretch, which Ronnie admitted he knew.

On the other hand, spray-painting a vehicle is also illegal.

"They made me aware they were upset," Ronnie said. "I don't want anything else to happen to my trailer.”

Patch visited the trailer twice to request an interview from Ronnie, who responded to a note left on his doors, and to ask neighbors what they thought of the RV.

If the Facebook group members and vandals were passionate, local residents didn’t much seem to care.

“It doesn't bother me, but I don't own a car," one uptowner said.

Added another, "It is none of my business."

This opinion is one Bruder shares.

In "Nomadland," the author recalls returning to Brooklyn after living in a van, which she dubbed “Van Halen,” and suddenly seeing transient homes wherever she turned — in her neighborhood, Boerum Hill, as well as Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, near Prospect Park and in Red Hook.

“These mobile shelters are everywhere,” Bruder wrote, “an invisible city, hidden in plain sight.”

Bruder wrote in “Nomadland” that she struggled with the reporter’s impulse to knock on the door of a refurbished school bus — fitted with sheet metal over the windows and a drape behind the windshield — parked looking out on the East River toward the Statue of Liberty.

“The journalist in me wants to knock on the door,” Bruder said. “But then memories of stealth parking return — how it feels to hide behind covered windows, your heartbeat quickening at a stranger’s approaching footsteps.”

Bruder turned away.

In the author’s interview with Patch, Bruder asked New Yorkers outraged over the lost parking to entertain the thought exercise that stopped her from knocking on the school bus door.

"I would ask the vandal: ‘Can you imagine if a street-parked trailer was the best survival option you could find for your children during a city winter? And how those children might feel coming home to see ‘GET OUT' spray painted all over it?'”

"I understand that lack of parking is a problem in New York," Bruder added. "But it’s not the only problem we’re dealing with."