Month: June 2023

Do soft sales mean quicker repairs?

As shipments of new RVs stagnate at a hair above 30,000 a month, posting a near 50% decline year-to-date over 2022, the dealers who sell those RVs likewise are getting a severe haircut. May sales revenue dove 26% from May of last year and was down 28% compared with May of 2021, according to a recent report from the RV Dealer Association (RVDA). But here’s a bright note amid the gloom: all that loss of sales business may mean it’s taking less time to get your RV repaired.

That suggestion—and thus far, that’s all it is—can be teased out of the report’s RV Repair Event Cycle Time (RECT), which the association defines as the time between the start date of a work order and its completion. After reviewing 41,538 work orders around the country, the RVDA concluded that the average RECT in May was 34 days. The good news: that’s down significantly from a 53-day peak in December, and an improvement over the 40 days recorded last May, attributable perhaps to dealers having more incentive to focus on repairs as more profitable RV sales withered.

The bad news? An average score can hide a whole mess of ups and downs.

Just how much variation can be concealed within an average is suggested by another statistical measure in the RVDA report, the median. While the average RECT was computed by adding up all the days it took to complete 41,538 repairs and dividing that total by 41,538, the median establishes the midpoint at which half of all repairs lasted longer and half less. And as the RVDA reported, the median RECT in May was just 11 days.

How can the median be so much less—just one-third—than the average? Because the repairs that took longer than 11 days took a lot longer, as many RV owners already know. Indeed, 25% of all repair customers in May had waited more than 33 days for the job to be done. And while RVDA’s report did not add any additional data points on the long end of the scale, it did note that it had excluded any RECTs exceeding two years. (!) Meanwhile, it’s also worth noting that the median got shifted toward the short end of the time scale because 25% of all customers waited less than three days for the job to be done, presumably because those repairs were relatively minor.

That’s the big picture. The reality, however, becomes more stark when a couple of variables get pulled out of the data: whether repair work is done under warranty, and whether the job requires parts that are not in stock. If the repair was under warranty (42% of the total), the average RECT jumped from 34 days to 50 (RVDA did not break out medians), and if one or more parts are not in stock (24% of the time), the RECT soared to 73 days. Have a warranty repair that also required ordering parts? You looked at an average of 89 days in the shop. Conversely, a non-warranty repair with in-stock parts got you out in 15 days.

Those are national averages, but RVDA also broke out regional numbers, dividing the country into West (11 states), South(16 states), Midwest (12 states) and Northeast (nine states) regions. While the overall RECT averages hardly varied from one to another, the southern states had a clear advantage on both warranty work (a RECT of 46) and when needing to order parts (a RECT of 66). The Midwest fared worst on warranty work (a RECT of 56) and almost worst on the out-of-stock measure (a RECT of 79, just slightly behind the Northeast’s leading 81), which is ironic, considering that Indiana is ground-zero for RV production.

There’s even more variation within those numbers, as warranty RECTs can vary considerably not only within a region but by brand. So, for example, Jayco Eagles had a 108-day RECT in the Northeast states, significantly longer than the next lengthiest RECT by brand, Grand Design’s Solitude in the Midwest, at 99 days. One shouldn’t read too much into those findings, because all that slicing and dicing results in increasingly shaky statistical certainty. The Jayco Eagle, for example, was the tenth most frequently repaired RV under warranty in the Northeast in May, out of a total of 2,612 warranty jobs altogether and an unspecified total number of brands. On the other hand, those statistics indicate just how bad things can get. . . .

In addition to its eye-opening repair statistics, the RVDA report also included purchase figures that underscore the magnitude of the investment RV buyers are making—and therefore why they may get furious when that investment ends up sitting in a repair bay for two, three or more months. The average selling price of an RV in May was $51,896, the association reported, with an average down payment of $8,957 and an average of $50,844 financed over 16 years at an APR of 9.61%. The resulting average monthly payment of $517 means that RV will end up costing $99,264 in monthly installments, or more than $108,000 when adding in the down payment—and more than double the alleged “selling” price.

No one can claim a rapidly depreciating RV makes sense as an investment—but if it’s not that, it should at least be usable.

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CalOHA has lost sight of its roots

Here’s a rule of thumb for understanding how well an organization can identify its core mission: the more abstract and non-specific its name, the more muddled its messaging and the more unmoored its members become.

Take, for example, the California Travel Park Association (CTPA), birthed in 1975 with a name that identified its geographic focus (California) and the nature of its membership (an association), but most critically its constituents: travel parks—what we think of today as campgrounds and RV parks, and most definitely not trailer parks.

Thirty-three years later, however, CTPA had become a member of the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds (ARVC), and in a fit of solidarity, renamed itself the California Association of RV Parks & Campgrounds, or CalARVC. Fair enough. But when it decided in 2019 that it no longer wanted to have anything to do with ARVC, CalARVC had to change its name again—and thus was born the word salad known as CampCalNOW RV Park and Campground Alliance. No explanation for the bold “NOW.” No explanation for the conversion from association to alliance, either, or what that meant, but at least the RV parks and campgrounds were still getting acknowledged.

But fast-forward another three years, and it’s obvious someone got tired of lugging around that ponderous name plate. Or as explained on its website, “In 2022 CampCalNOW reexamined its branding and how that measured up with the associations [sic] goals for the future, taking into account the complexity of today’s advocacy efforts and the importance of unity within our industry, and settled on today’s name, the California Outdoor Hospitality Association.”

Back to being an association? Check. A continued focus on California? Check. But “RV parks and campgrounds”? Gone. Tossed into the same semantic trash heap that had already claimed “travel parks,” replaced by the mealy-mouthed “outdoor hospitality” umbrella.

So who cares? What difference does it make?

To answer that, mull over the muddled and even incoherent call to arms issued by CalOHA president Dyana Kelley this past week. In a message distributed to her members and published in RVBusiness and Woodall’s Campground Magazine, Kelley obscurely laments what she describes as “RV parks . . . being bookended into a death spiral,” with the following introductory paragraph, copied here in its entirety (including missing punctuation):

“Historically, RV parks and campgrounds tend to fly under the radar avoiding some of those bills that wreak havoc on our counterparts, in the mobile home space however as more RV parks are moving to an extended stay model our industry is now suddenly being included in everything from Narcan dispensing, fee transparency, rent control, affordable housing bills and even updating the Special Occupancy Parks Act (SOPA).”

Which, if I understand her correctly, means that Kelley acknowledges that her state’s RV parks increasingly are less about “outdoor hospitality” and more about being residential facilities—trailer courts more than travel parks. But that’s a problem, because state legislators therefore increasingly expect RV parks to conform to the same regulations as are applied to mobile home parks. All that those myopic legislators see, Kelley wrote, “is parks filled with long-term residents. Without context, independent RV parks have taken on the look of affordable housing but what isn’t seen is that parks provide a service to the community,” she continued. “They house teachers for a season, line workers bringing new power, traveling nurses and even state legislators.”

In other words, what’s important is not how long someone lives in an RV in a particular facility, but why. Rules about fee transparency or Narcan dispensing or what-have-you should be applied only to those parks or campgrounds where people are living because that’s what they can afford, not so they can “provide a service to the community.” Or as Kelley explicitly notes, “Little understanding is given to the ‘intent’ by which a traveler chooses to stay at a park, and they [state legislators] are blissfully ignorant of the role RV parks play in supporting travel and tourism during the winter months when our parks fill with snowbirds.”

There are so many things wrong with this convoluted logic that it’s hard to figure out where to start unpacking it. There is, for starters, the astonishingly frank admission that California’s RV parks are in fact, and by choice, becoming less recreational and more residential in nature—yet in CalOHA’s view, at least, those parks should not have to comply with residential regulations despite that evolution. That’s like saying that the rules allowing a small home business to operate in a residential area should still apply when it becomes a large workshop, and then a small factory. At what point do we acknowledge that a shade-tree mechanic has become a full-service garage, or that a seamstress is now operating a dress shop and fabric store?

Then there’s Kelley’s fallback position, which in essence amounts to a thorny “intent” litmus test. We have to ask “why” all these people are staying nine months or a year or two years in the same RV park, and depending on the answer, may conclude that normal residential rules should not apply to a particular RV park despite the appearance of permanence. Just how that determination would be made, Kelley hasn’t said. Nor has she indicated what minimum number of “community service” residents would be sufficient to give an RV park a pass: 20% of the residents? 50%? 70%?

There’s lots more than can be said, but I don’t want to get snarky. Suffice to say that what it all boils down to is that CalOHA and its members apparently want to have their cake and eat it, too: to “fly under the radar” as campgrounds without having to conform to the same rules as their “counterparts in the mobile home space,” even as they increasingly—even blatantly—get “filled with long-term residents.” But while there are numerous reasons for this shifting business model, it’s all made easier by the fact that CalOHA has taken its eye off the ball. Instead of pushing back against the adulteration of its original brand—of promoting RV parks and campgrounds qua RV parks and campgrounds, not as alternative housing—CalOHA has embraced the vacuous notion of “outdoor hospitality.”

Which, apparently, means whatever CalOHA says it means.

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Rule 1: own the land under your home

If you’re in the economic bracket that forces you to live in a trailer park, recent news has been alarming, with more than half-a-dozen such parks announcing their imminent closure just within the past week. Yet a growing number of RV parks also are encouraging campers to stay year-round, offering what may seem like a much needed housing alternative—until you realize it’s just another version of the same trap.

Mobile home park closures have been epidemic across the country, driven by aging infrastructure, rising land prices and various one-off circumstances. Officials in Grayling Township, Michigan, for example, have turned off the water to the aging Timberly Village Campground and Mobile Home Park because of its ongoing non-compliance with waterworks regulations: residents are on notice that the entire park will be shut down within a couple of weeks. The city of Flatwoods, Kentucky, meanwhile, has started eminent domain proceedings against a dilapidated trailer court on land it wants to use for a new fire house and city park.

Elsewhere, residents of the Dallas Pike Campground and Mobile Home Park in Triadelphia, West Virginia, received notice that they have 60 days to move out, reportedly because new owners will be using the land for oil and gas industry purposes. In Big Sky, Montana, the George Norman Trailer Court is up for sale after decades of providing affordable housing for local workers, with every expectation that the buyer will find a more profitable use for property located in prime skiing country. And in southwest Nebraska, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is demanding that 110 mobile homes be moved off leased federal land that they’ve occupied for decades to make way for a new campground, glamping tents and cabins, a splash pad and a dog wash.

That’s a whole lot of people learning, all within the space of a week, that they’re about to become homeless. But the reality also can be more complicated. In Louisville, Tennessee, only some of the residents of Country Acre Estates are getting the boot—the ones living in RVs. After more than 30 years, city officials abruptly realized that town ordinances regulating trailer parks restrict tenants to manufactured homes only. The occupants of 11 RVs at Country Acre Estates now have until the end of June to move out, but are complaining there’s nowhere for them to go.

Decades-old “mobile” homes are essentially immoveable, too old to withstand relocation, which means their owners typically are out on the street when the trailer court closes. But while even old RVs may be more mobile than mobile homes, the ones used as permanent shelters have two strikes against them, the first exemplified by the Country Acre Estates situation: barred from mobile home parks, such RVs also run up against park rules or municipal regulations that prohibit stays of more than two weeks at many campgrounds, which are viewed primarily as short-term recreational facilities. Moreover, many private campgrounds ban RVs that are more than ten years old, which would affect virtually all RVs that have been fixed residences. The combination can result in a severe lack of options—or none at all.

The other strike against using RVs for full-time housing is their substandard construction when compared with mobile homes. Although the RV manufacturing industry vigorously asserts that its products are intended purely for recreational purposes and are not suitable as permanent housing, the claim has a wink-wink and nudge-in-the-ribs quality, given the way these things are marketed—but by maintaining the fiction, RV manufacturers don’t have to comply with more stringent federal housing standards, such as using licensed electricians to wire their extraordinarily flammable creations. (For more on this scam, see here, here and here.)

The lower standards applicable to RVs are why Louisville and other municipalities prohibit them—at least on paper—from trailer courts. Yet as the Dallas Pike Campground and Mobile Home Park, and the Timberly Village Campground and Mobile Home Park also underscore, not everyone makes that distinction. Many mobile home parks adopt an ecumenical approach that regulatory agencies typically ignore.

Now, increasingly, RV parks are following the trailer court playbook—and as the pace of trailer park closures picks up, the pressure on RV parks to further accommodate long-timers will increase. The basic economic argument supporting that trend was laid out this week by Frank Rolfe (among others), in his observation that “one of the worst attributes of RV parks is that the customers leave . . . and every time they leave, you have no revenue on that space.” Which is true as far as it goes, although the same can be said of any segment of the hospitality and entertainment industries: whether it’s hotels or amusement parks, restaurants or ball parks, customers come and go. But Rolfe, whose commercial real estate portfolio is dominated by mobile home parks, has yet to see an RV park he wouldn’t prefer to convert into a residential property.

Rolfe’s comments came in yet another of his “RV Park Mastery Podcasts,” a series of more than 80 (and counting) sermons to actual and would-be RV campground owners that relentlessly promote RV parks as just another species of trailer courts. This week’s episode was devoted specifically to the wisdom of RV parks having park models, although in a broader sense it was arguing on behalf of permanent occupancy. For Rolfe, it all comes down to attaining “a more dependable revenue stream,” but also of getting on the right side of changing economic trends, most notably “as housing prices have become impossibly high.”

Deconstruct Rolfe’s approach and you’ll soon figure out that what he’s actually advocating is the transformation of RV campgrounds into cheaper mobile home parks. As he relates, “We have brought in literally over 100 park models into one of these RV parks, and they’ve all been sold and people live in there happily, and we as park owners . . . attain extremely stable income.” But as in mobile home parks, the owners of those park models don’t own the land on which they sit. And while park models theoretically are “mobile,” they are as unwieldy to move as house trailers, as well as being built to RV standards rather than more stringent HUD regulations.

All of which means that when things go south, as they so often do, the park model owner may be just as trapped as his or her mobile home counterpart. But that really isn’t Rolfe’s concern, and as increasing numbers of RV parks get snatched up by institutional investors whose primary interest is return on investment, it won’t be of concern to a growing number of RV park operators, either.

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Shady side of Caesars-linked RV park

That’s not just a tent, it’s a 40,000-square-foot temporary casino in Danville, VA. But the opportunists are already circling, including, of course, a would-be “luxury RV park” developer.

The storied city of Danville, Virginia—among its historical mileposts, it was briefly the last capital of the Confederacy—has had a bumpy ride the last couple of decades. Once a railroad hub fed by robust textile and tobacco industries, it started veering toward decay when all three of those economic pillars crumbled. A brief renaissance based on revitalizing the tourist trade foundered on the shoals of the 2008 recession, but then regained its momentum, and especially when Caesars Entertainment announced last year that it would be coming to town!

Yup. Casino gambling—coming to a town known also as “the city of churches” because of its numerous monuments to piety.

Nor will this be some minor-league operation. Caesars said it would be sinking more than half-a-billion dollars into building a resort with a 500-room hotel, a 2,500 person “entertainment venue” and 40,000 square feet of meeting and convention space, not to mention at least 1,300 slots, 85 live game tables, 24 electronic game tables, a poker room and sportsbook. Can’t wait until the grand opening late next year? No worries: Caesars last month pitched a 40,000-square-foot white tent right next to the construction site as a temporary casino, including 740 slots, 25 live table games, yada yada—not exactly to your Las Vegas standards, but just about the biggest thing to happen locally since the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee set up shop in town in 1963.

The city’s leaders are understandably giddy at the thought that their town has a shot at reclaiming some of its former vitality—but as with people, towns should be careful what they wish for. A development as big as this is the social equivalent of a black hole, warping the space around it and sucking in other objects that might otherwise have passed by harmlessly. Danville may get the economic boost it’s seeking (although there’s no guarantee of that: see Atlantic City), but the casino already has attracted less savory camp followers who may provide more tarnish than glitter.

Case in point: J. Cubas Holdings of Coral Gables, Florida, which is seeking city approval for a 333-site luxury RV park on 46 acres zoned for residential use. As detailed by developer Joe Cubas, the so-called “Palace Resort” will be Roman-themed to complement the casino and will include pools, spas, a restaurant and bar, a gym and tennis and pickleball courts. The clientele will be high-end, Cubas has said, people “who know they’re going to spend $500, $1,000, even $5,000 gambling in a weekend,” and to help them spend that money the resort also will provide a shuttle service.

But the neighbors, perhaps predictably, are not happy. Cubas’ 46-acre parcel can be accessed only by a narrow two-lane road, Jenny Lane, which they contend is ill-suited to handle an additional 650 vehicles or more—the Palace Resort sites include both an RV pad and an additional parking pad—coming and going, shuttle be damned. The increased traffic, noise, litter and impact on local wildlife associated with such a development will destroy the residential nature of the neighborhood, they told planning commissioners in a May public hearing. “We’re not opposed to a campground, we’re just opposed to one in our neighborhood,” a Jenny Lane resident told the commission. “This needs to be relocated outside of a neighborhood.”

That doesn’t sound unreasonable—except that Danville’s zoning code, presumably dating back to a time when “campground” meant a few dozen water-and-electric sites for tents and travel trailers, actually requires campgrounds and RV parks to be located in residentially-zoned areas. Indeed, Cubas has said that’s exactly why he purchased this particular site—and the planning commission, whose approval of his application appears to be mostly a formality, is on board, voting 5-1 on May 8 to submit it to the city council for final ratification. The commission’s only stipulation is that a traffic impact analysis be conducted to address local residents’ concerns.

All of that, and the city council’s anticipated approval June 20, might be chalked up to just another example of the interests of an unfortunate few being sacrificed for the greater economic good—if not for all the red flags the city is ignoring.

There is, for example, Joe Cubas’ almost complete lack of relevant experience; although he claims to have built four RV parks, none were operating last fall when he sought approval for a 454-site RV park in adjacent Pittsylvania County, his first choice before coming to Danville. As reported by the Star-Tribune, when questioned by a county supervisor about his thin résumé, an offended Cubas replied that he’d been a developer his whole life and “running an RV park is much easier than building a residential development.”

That’s a clueless and unresponsive answer, but Cubas in any case has no desire to actually run an RV park. He just wants to sell them, even before they’re built, as evidenced by his “for sale” listing Feb. 22 of a 470-site RV resort on Albemarle Sound in North Carolina that “will [emphasis added] consist of 470 sites with first class amenities.” No such RV park yet exists, however, and the listing was withdrawn May 20, presumably so Cubas could turn all his attention to Danville. Even there, however, he’s been hop-scotching: last summer he was hawking a “potential development opportunity” on the west side of Danville, a 106-acre site just inside city limits that he touted as, yes, the Palace Luxury RV Resort; that listing was up less than a month, coming down Aug. 20 as Cubas turned his attention to the ultimately denied Pittsylvania County application.

Then there’s his unbridled enthusiasm for using his luxury RV park as a springboard for much bigger promotional schemes. Making the hugely questionable assertion that “most RVers also own motorcycles,” Cubas disclosed in his permit application that he’s been in discussions with Thunder Road Harley Davidson and unnamed city officials to have Danville host a bike week in 2025. That could mean really big bucks for Danville, according to the application, which cited the Sturgis, S.D. and Orlando, Fla. annual biker rallies as examples of what is possible; no estimate provided of what proportion of those half-million visitors could be described as “high-end,” or whether Danville—population 42,000—has either the room or the resources to cope with such a tidal wave.

But the biggest red flag, the one that attests to Joe Cubas’ questionable scruples, is his threat to stick it to the city if it denies his permit by . . . building between 92 and 230 single-family homes on his 46 acres. Those new homes obviously will impact city services, his application pointed out, and just one of those impacts would be as much as a $1.5 million annual hit to school budgets to accommodate all those new students. The RV resort, by contrast, “will have no impact on the city’s or county’s social services”—an assertion that ignores police, fire and other tax-funded services—but “will potentially generate in excess of $1.3 million dollars [sic] a year in transient lodging, occupancy and meal tax revenue for the City of Danville.”

That’s a pretty blatant economic threat, especially coming from a Floridian whose avowed interest in southern Virginia is to capitalize on a casino, not to provide housing in an area to which he has no ties. But it’s exactly the sort of thing that gambling fever encourages: a get-rich-quick attitude that isn’t limited to slot machines or card tables. Even a Roman-themed RV luxury park will suffice, especially if it’s easy-in and easy-out. The locals, as usual, can pick up the pieces.

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WWJD? Why, go RVing, of course

When it comes to attending an evangelical Christian camp in Monterey, Massachusetts, the question naturally arises: what would Jesus do? And the answer, as affirmed this week by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, is that he’d camp in an RV, even if the town’s zoning bylaws prohibit everyone else from doing so.

This spiritual one-upmanship caps a four-year legal battle that began in 2019 after Hume New England, the East Coast home of Hume Lake Christian Camps, sought planning board approval for 12 RV full hook-up sites despite a town-wide ban on trailer and mobile home parks. The “camping ministry” was seeking to expand its capacity from more than 300 beds to 500, and wanted to supplement its lodging with RV sites; a draft master plan showed that the RV park could eventually grow to 44 sites. When the planning board denied the application, citing the clear language of its zoning regulations, Hume cried foul and filed a lawsuit.

The RV park, Hume argued, is part of its “religious purpose” and would assist the ministry “in furthering our mission of experiencing Jesus in the camp environment,” which apparently is something Jesus would have encouraged.

Monterey, a small town of about a thousand residents in the southwest corner of the state, argued in response that there is nothing inherently religious about an RV park, but that Hume was simply looking for a cheaper alternative for housing volunteers, staff and campers. There was nothing preventing Hume from building additional dormitories, planning board members pointed out—and indeed, one such project had been approved after the RV disagreement flared up. Although religious organizations should be free to practice how they wish, one board member averred, that freedom should not “negate all the zoning laws” that the town’s residents had established to preserve the character of their community.

But that argument did not prevail with the state’s highest court, which concluded that the RV park would be exempt from zoning restrictions under a Massachusetts law known as the Dover Amendment. Designed to prevent religious discrimination, the law limits a municipality’s ability to “regulate or restrict the use of land or structures for religious purposes . . . on land owned or leased by . . . a religious sect or denomination.” The religious purpose exception, the court observed, covers anything designed to “aid a system of faith,” and while the proposed RV park is not intrinsically religious, the court concluded that it would facilitate the camp’s religious purpose.

The irony, of course, is that a law to prevent religious discrimination is being applied in this case to create religious exceptionalism. Thanks to the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling, the only people in Monterey allowed to operate an RV park will be Christian fundamentalists—unless Monterey says to hell with it and voids that particular zoning regulation altogether, which would amount to giving Hume an outsized policy-making role in the town.

Rubbing salt into the wound, Hume’s religious status already provides it with other benefits not available to local residents. As select board member Susan Cooper pointed out in a newspaper interview in March, Hume neither pays local taxes nor makes payments in lieu of taxes, which some tax-exempt entities make to their host communities. And because the campground will be accessed by a public dirt and gravel road that was not designed for RV traffic, “I think this small town might end up having to pay to do a lot of work on that road,” she said. “They’re basically using our resources and not giving anything back, from my perspective.”

The court decision, meanwhile, seems to open the door for an anything-goes approach to additional developments at Hume New England and any similar, ostensibly religious facility in Massachusetts. As summarized by a National Law Review article Monday, “The court took the broad view that if the land or structure is used for the purpose of carrying out its religious goals and to serve a religious purpose, the use itself can be secular in nature and can be deemed an exemption under the Dover Amendment.” Which, in effect, means it’s open season in Massachusetts for the Jesus crowd, even if that doesn’t sound very Christian.

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RV camping in flood zones? Why not?

Oh, those wacky developers! They’ll put up anything, anywhere, if given half a chance—and what could be more enticing than a nice, flat, easily sculpted flood plain?

Take the town of Leland, North Carolina, on the west side of the forebodingly named Cape Fear River and across the river from Wilmington. Like a lot of rural areas and small towns, Leland’s ordinances hadn’t kept up with the times. So when a company named Evolve Acquisitions disclosed that it wanted to build an RV park on a 96-acre property zoned for residential use, town council members belatedly learned that their land-use rules didn’t cover such a possibility. In the absence of specific campground standards, council members would have to be guided by the standards of the most similar activity—which, town planners told them, would be a hotel or motel.

Which, as any campground owner can tell you, are as similar to an RV park as a golf car is to a honey wagon, despite both having wheels.

That was in late 2021, and by early 2022 the council had adopted a comprehensive set of campground regs that included minimum acreage, site size and spacing, open-space minimums and setbacks, etc. etc. But the regs also specified that campground sites could not be located in a flood hazard area—and you can probably guess where this is going.

Almost a year-and-a-half later, Evolve has submitted a request that the town council delete that bothersome prohibition about flood hazard areas. Sound reckless? Nah—Evolve also suggested that the ordinance include a requirement for such sites to be posted with signs warning campers that they’re in a flood zone, and that they would have to evacuate the park within 24 hours of a declared state of emergency. As Evolve’s lawyer, Samuel Franck, explained to the county planning board a few weeks ago, his clients had sought the RV ordinance language but did not intend it to restrict the use of flood hazard areas, and so were simply seeking to “correct a mistake.”

Wow. When it comes to this whole scenario, there is no shortage of mistakes. Start with the premise that someone in the “hospitality industry” thinks it’s reasonable to shuck the responsibility of providing safe accommodations by posting a sign that may or may not be read, but which in any case attempts to absolve the campground of any liability if things (predictably) go south. Add to that the distinct possibility that advance notice of impending floods could be laughably short and in any case meaningless: it’s been less than five years since the Cape Fear River swelled to its highest level in 73 years, thanks to Hurricane Florence, and just two years before that, Hurricane Matthew and Tropical Storm Hermine pounded the area with more than two feet of rain. Flooded roads and washed-out bridges made evacuation impossible. People died.

Then there’s the sheer idiocy of continuing to develop flood plains, which increases the amount of impermeable soil and results in even greater flooding. The Cape Fear River drains an area the size of New Jersey, but increased urbanization and suburbanization of the watershed have left thousands of acres unable to absorb rainfall, with catastrophic results. It’s ironic, therefore, that Evolve’s internet home page proudly proclaims, “Location. Location. Location! Evolve knows all about the importance of developing in the right place and at the right time.” That may be true for the apartment buildings that comprise 98% of its portfolio, but none of those could have been built in a flood zone and still qualify for financing.

This penchant for plopping RV parks onto flood plains with the blithe assurance that campers can just roll out of the way when trouble comes is disconcertingly common. It also tends to result in lawsuits. A proposal to build a glampground on a sandbar of an island in the Gallatin River, in southwest Montana, has been a political football the past couple of years and was the subject of a court hearing last week; further developments are expected any day. Meanwhile, a controversy over a proposed 240-site RV park in the Platte River flood plain west of Omaha, which also ended up with a lawsuit being filed last summer, was resolved only when a third party stepped in and bought the entire 101 acres for $2.5 million. The new owners say they will leave the property in its undeveloped state. In both cases, the would-be developers dismissed flooding concerns by claiming people could just drive out of harm’s way—which doesn’t really get at the question of why people should be placed in harm’s way in the first place.

But RV parks and campgrounds are the hottest corner of the commercial real estate market right now, so developers with little to no relevant experience have been piling on. And Evolve does have at least one—just one—RV campground to its credit, the Oceans RV Resort in Holly Ridge, N.C. which opened earlier this year. Reviews thus far are glowing, but it’s all very new and hurricane season is just starting. Meanwhile, Evolve’s Leland venture will be going before the town council June 15, with a planning commission recommendation that its application be denied. Ultimately, the commission said, prohibiting RV parks in flood hazard area is safer for the public.

Some things apparently aren’t self-evident.

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A dreadful orange sky for RV lobby

Washington D.C. today; the Capitol building is faintly discernible to the right of the Washington Monument.

It is beyond irony that more than 120 RV industry leaders—representing manufacturers, suppliers and campgrounds—have converged on Capitol Hill just as the Washington, D.C. skies have turned orange. But that’s not why the RV reps are in town. They’re here to lobby for their preferred legislation, including America’s Outdoors Recreation Act, the Farm Bill, reauthorization of the Generalized System of Preferences and reform of Competitive Need Limitations, and the Travel Trailer and Camper Tax Parity Act.

Have your eyes glazed over? Have you noticed that nowhere on this list of legislative priorities, compiled by the RV Industry Association, is there any attention to environmental issues. Are you unsurprised?

It’s been only a couple of weeks since I wrote about western Canada’s wildfires darkening the skies over Montana, even as that state’s legislators were busy ensuring that greenhouse gas emissions and climate effects would not be part of the mix when assessing the environmental impact of large projects. I suggested that perhaps it would behoove KOA, which is headquartered in Billings, Montana, to take a more active role in preserving the natural environment that it’s been busy marketing to the American consumer. I’m not holding my breath.

Or maybe I should, now that the pyrocene—an apt phrase coined by fire historian Stephen Pyne—has expanded to the Eastern Seaboard. Five hundred miles south of the fires consuming swaths of Quebec and Ontario, my hometown of Staunton, Virginia is on the pollution cusp, defined not just by distance and prevailing winds, but also by our modestly mountainous topography: earlier today, the Air Quality Index (AQI) just to the north, in Harrisonburg, was a healthy 5, but it popped up to 80 in Charlottesville, on the other side of the Blue Ridge—and up to a decidedly unhealthy 180 in Shenandoah National Park, which runs along the top of the mountains.

But that’s also not quite right. One noteworthy observation about these numbers is that the AQI is actually a composite, combining ozone levels and two different sizes of particulates into one reading. So, for example, the AQI in Shenandoah National Park obscures the fact that the reading for PM2.5—particulates measuring no more than 2.5 microns across—is 193 micrograms per cubic meter, or significantly above the 150 level at which even healthy people should avoid going outdoors. Particulates at that microscopic level (human hair, for comparison, is between 50 and 70 microns wide) are particularly worrisome because they’re small enough to be absorbed into the bloodstream, which means they can cause heart disease in addition to the lung disease caused by larger particles.

The other notable observation about the AQI numbers listed above is that none of them are for Staunton itself. There are no air quality monitors in my small city, and indeed, the farther you go from large urban centers, the fewer monitors there are. Moreover, fewer of those monitors measure particulates in addition to measuring ozone. So, for example, the Harrisonburg AQI reading cited above is really misleading because it’s for ozone only—there’s no accurate way of getting a particulate reading.

And where are most campgrounds located? Precisely in those areas that have the lowest concentration of particulate monitors. What you don’t know can hurt you.

All those kinds of concerns are flying right over the heads of those who claim to be industry devotees of the great outdoors—they’re more concerned with getting tax dollars for infrastructure development, loosening regulatory restrictions and selling their products and services to the great American public. Indeed, the current industry orgasm is over National Go RVing Day, which is just two days away and has the RVIA calling “on the RV industry and consumers alike to celebrate the joys of RVing by heading out to their favorite outdoor destination for a weekend of RVing.” As if! Maybe in Florida or the Rockies (at the moment). Not so much in Pennsylvania or New York.

But this is only the beginning of fire season. And unlike hurricanes or wildfires themselves, which affect a more or less well-defined area, wildfire smoke affects hundreds of square miles far from its point of origin. According to one study (paywall protected) cited by the New York Times, between 2016 and 2020, smoke from distant fires was contributing as much as half of local air pollution in great swaths of the West. “Across the country, the number of people exposed to what are sometimes called extreme smoke days has grown 27-fold in just a decade,” the Times observed.

Here’s a suggestion: all those RV suits up in Washington D.C. should step outside of the Capitol for an hour or two. Take a brisk walk around the Mall. Sit on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to wonder why they can’t catch their breath. Admire the orange sky. And think about what they should be advocating to ensure that this doesn’t become the norm, because sooner or later the great American public will conclude that RVing is no healthier than cigarette smoking.

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A microcosm of glamping blunders

A glampground proposal heard this past week by the Rome-Floyd County Planning Commission, Georgia, inadvertently displayed a microcosm of the problems surrounding such projects, highlighting at least three common issues. What’s surprising is that this was as innocuous a proposal as can be imagined, looking for an official thumbs-up for just seven to nine yurts—nowhere near the kind of overblown schemes that have angered local residents elsewhere (as, for example, see here, here or here.) Yet apparently no one in the county, including planners and local residents, supported a “plan” that seems less plan and more whim.

The first issue was that the glampground applicant, Andrew Devon, was long on vision and short on real-world grounding. It didn’t help that Devon kicked things off by stressing his several years of traveling around the world, “expanding himself spiritually, and learning different cultures and practices that have connected him more deeply to nature,” as reported by the Rome News-Tribune. But as became evident during Thursday’s hearing, connecting more closely to nature isn’t the same as connecting with people’s natural needs: as pointed out by Brice Wood, a county planner, the site doesn’t have access to public water or public sewer—and, apparently, no plans for a septic system or a well, either.

The omission, Wood said, had prompted “quite a few comments” from the environmental health department. One would hope so. Yet as laughable as such an omission might seem, it’s only a bit more egregiously dumb than siting campgrounds and glampgrounds in floodplains or fire-prone areas, both of which are being pursued by much bigger—and presumably more deep-pocketed—investors than the hapless Andrew Devon. But bigger doesn’t mean smarter; it just means more political clout to overcome the common-sense skeptics. And bigger, too frequently, also means dumb ideas on a grander scale because a lot of money can be fertilizer for stupidity.

The second issue highlighted by Devon’s proposal is the lack of meaningful zoning and land use regulations throughout the country that can cope with the recent explosion of camping’s many permutations. No longer confined to travel trailers and tent pads, campgrounds have morphed into a constellation of accommodations and amenities that range from backwoods sites to Disney-esque theme parks, yet in too many cases the rules governing their infrastructure, density and land-use impact are a decade or more out of date and rely on a one-size-fits-all approach—or none at all.

In Floyd County, commission members were told by Wood, the campground ordinance does not distinguish between tents, campers, RVs or cabins. Moreover, added the county planner, there are “no density restrictions” in the ordinance, so that approval of an initial nine sites “wouldn’t prevent potentially a hundred campsites” from popping up—campsites that could be filled with any combination of park models, cabins, safari tents, domes or other dwellings. And whether nine or 99 sites, Wood pointed out, Devon’s property is accessed by only a narrow gravel road that runs through several other properties, raising concerns about accessibility for emergency first responders. Nor were the owners of those properties thrilled with the idea of a sudden increase of traffic. .

That, in turn, raises the third issue common to most recent applications for new campgrounds: the predictable reaction of local property owners to the traffic, noise, safety issues and influx of strangers such developments bring to a community—and the surprising lack of local outreach by developers to address such concerns before they become problematic. Time and again, developers either show a blatant disregard for local sensitivities or seem to think they’ve done their public relations homework if they’ve schmoozed the right number of local power-brokers. Sometimes they succeed, but only if grass-roots opposition is too weak or too late in mobilizing to derail their big plans. Other times, they get handed very expensive setbacks.

In Devon’s case, despite his self-professed years of learning different cultures and practices, the one culture he apparently neglected was his own. As he told the planning commission, in a curiously passive voice as he responded to the complaints of several local residents: “If we would have had this discussion, and if you would have voiced these concerns about the safety of your children and the serious issues with the driveway, I most likely wouldn’t have even filed the permit.”

No worries there. The planning commission voted unanimously to postpone the application, giving Devon a chance to submit an actual site plan—or to just scrap the idea altogether.

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