Month: February 2024

Using ‘nature’ as a propaganda tool

The glampground Michael Patterson wants to build would straddle 10 private lots bordering Sand Pond and sit directly across from another glampground just 1,100 feet over the water.

Michael Patterson is, if nothing else, adept at promoting himself and his plans for developing 113 acres of wooded land he owns in southern Maine. He has a blog and a robust YouTube presence, much of it devoted to selling real estate. He graced the cover of the November issue of Woodall’s Campground Magazine, a puppy licking his face, in a photo taken at a camping industry convention. He has been widely quoted in local news stories, explaining his love of nature and his desire to be a good neighbor.

“I don’t want to damage the environment,” he’s quoted in a Portsmouth Herald story a couple of days ago. “If I damage it, then it destroys what I’m trying to create because I’m trying to keep it wilderness.”

If that sounds a bit defensive, it’s because Patterson’s plans are rubbing some of his neighbors the wrong way. And if it sounds a bit hyperbolic, that’s because only a real estate developer would describe this chunk of Maine as “wilderness.” But it’s all of a piece with his desire to build a 44-site “very woodsy” and “high-end” glampground directly across a 30-acre pond from another even larger glampground, because nothing says “minimal environmental impact” quite like 22 or more RV pads, as many as 22 guest cottages, new roads, a couple of turnaround-loops for firetrucks and RVs, three laundry/bathhouse facilities and, eventually, a swimming pool. Because who wants to go swimming in a spring-fed pond?

This being winter in Maine, a lot of local residents have decamped for warmer climes, but enough have stuck around—or are keeping up with local events from afar—for a petition opposing Patterson’s plans to gather more than a thousand signatures. Started by local resident Brian Dumont and addressed to a Sanford building and permit safety specialist, the petition stresses the adverse environmental impact a new glampground would have on the area and cites a need to “protect our natural spaces . . . not just for their inherent beauty but also for their ecological importance.”

Unfortunately, the petition inadvertently also makes the case that this is one barn from which the horse has already bolted. “The vibrant wildlife ecosystem that once thrived here has been dramatically reduced due to over-camping along its shores,” the petition observes. “A few years ago, there were an abundance of native turtles, birds of many types and native fish species including horn pout, pickerel, perch and sunfish. Today almost none of these remain.”

Looking at the map above, it’s hard to see how it could be otherwise. The red borders of individual building lots indicate that virtually all of the land around the pond has been developed; Patterson’s glampground would be limited to just three fingers extending to the shore. The large blank area on the left side of Sand Pond and above Mud Pond, meanwhile, is occupied by Huttopia Southern Maine, one of a handful of U.S. glampgrounds owned by a French-based company that has approximately 60 more such resorts in Europe. This particular establishment has more than 80 luxury tents on platforms, most with en suite bathrooms, as well as half-a-dozen “tiny house” cabins, a pool, playground, restaurant, bar and lounge, store—everything one might need to survive in the wilderness.

There are times when it seems even Patterson must know the absurdity of his pretensions. One of his blog/YouTube segments, for example, describes his use of a Bobcat T770 to clear approximately 60 acres of forest floor, ostensibly as a fire prevention measure. But it also “enhanced the land’s aesthetics” by promoting “the growth of new branches on existing trees, offering more privacy for future campsites,” so it’s your guess what’s really the primary motivation here or how much bigger this project will become . Meanwhile, even as he acknowledged to the Portsmouth Herald that “not everyone enjoys the summertime sounds and autumn activities that can be heard across the water at Huttopia,” Patterson rather likes the festive feel of it all.

“I saw their tiki lights hanging from their campers across the pond, ” he said, referring to the campground that predated Huttopia’s arrival in 2019. “They’d have karaoke, and I could hear the awful singing. I thought it was awesome.”

How all this will play out should be determined in March, when two city-appointed commissions are expected to act on Patterson’s plans, but their authority apparently is limited to tweaking details such as setbacks or traffic patterns—a campground already is a permitted use in the rural residential district surrounding the pond. Meanwhile, the opposition is gearing up even more, despite the lack of a clear line of attack, with Dumont spearheading the creation of the Sand Pond Association “to protect, preserve and responsibly enjoy this little piece of heaven.”

Both sides, in other words, are pursuing their goals by appealing to a natural aesthetic that both also know no longer exists. “The wilderness” in this instance is little more than a muttered prayer, “Mother Nature” a saint whose help is invoked in battling a heathen foe—which is to say, the opposition.

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New homes are now smaller than RVs

Built by Lennar Homes in San Antonio, TX, each of these houses at Elm Trails is just 8.5 feet wide—exactly the same width as the Prevost RV owned by Clarence Thomas, although not as long.

Sometimes the unexpected intersection of unrelated trends and events can be . . . illuminating. Whether we’ll be comfortable with the resulting insights is another story.

Sunday was a such a day. That’s when the New York Times business section ran a lengthy lead story headlined “The Great Compression,” an obvious play on “the great recession” and “the great resignation,” both recent developments that are still working their way through the economy. “Thanks to soaring housing prices, the era of the 400-square-foot subdivision house is upon us,” the subhead explained, with the story then relating how even so limited a home size can be preferable for some people when compared to the financial uncertainty of ever-increasing rents.

Sunday evening, TV host John Oliver made headlines of his own. Oliver offered Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—who has complained that he doesn’t get paid enough, apparently as a justification for accepting lavish gifts from the billionaire class—an annual stipend of $1 million if he would step down from the bench. As a deal sweetener, Oliver said he would throw in a brand-new Prevost Marathon motorcoach to replace Thomas’ current model, which he purchased for $267,230 in 1999 with the help of a “loan” from one of his benefactors.

Forget the annual stipend: that Prevost all by itself might be enough to sway Thomas, who makes little effort at hiding his upper-crust pretensions even as he dons the mantle of common-man humility. Driving a motorcoach that cost more than most people’s homes was important to him, he has said, because it enabled him to escape the “meanness” of Washington, D.C. and to connect with regular people and the American heartland. He has a preference for seeing the regular parts of the United States and spending time with the people he meets along the way in RV parks and Walmart parking lots, Thomas has said, as it feels normal to him and he comes from regular stock. Thomas likes the word “regular” quite a bit.

Then again, Thomas also corrected an interviewer who referred to his Prevost as an RV by maintaining that it is, in fact, not an RV but “a motorcoach”—a “condo on wheels.” Which, of course, is exactly what “regular” folks expect to see in a Walmart parking lot. (And not to nit-pick, but despite Thomas’ claim to the contrary, motorcoaches are indeed RVs, which simply means “recreational vehicles.” But “RV” sounds so, um, déclassé, don’t you think?)

Still, it must chafe Thomas that his condo on wheels is now well into its third decade. As wheeled conveyances go, that’s so old—just one more year, and in Virginia that Prevost will qualify for a special antique license plate. Which is why Oliver’s offer must be tempting: the 2024 Prevost MarathonH3-45 model retails for upwards of $2.4 million, depending on the upgrade package. And at 45 feet in length with two slide-outs, it offers 430 square feet of floor space—enough for a king-size bed, 1.5 bathrooms, a home-size refrigerator and four large TV sets on which to watch John Oliver on Last Week Tonight.

It’s also a stunning contrast with the teensy tract houses that are now popping up around the country, apparently targeting the very kind of “regular” people that patronize Walmart stores, where they can ogle Clarence Thomas’ wheeled condos. This new iteration of the American dream, typically ranging between 350 and 800 square feet, is not to be confused with the trendy embrace of “tiny homes,” which typically—but not always—are mounted on a chassis and can claim at least some amount of mobility. The compressed homes are stick-built on permanent foundations, just like their more conventional brethren, and conform to federal housing construction regulations. They exist simply because too many people can no longer afford a “regular” home.

Let me not overstate the size of this phenomenon. As the Times article notes, homes under 500 square feet still comprise less than 1% of the new homes being built in the U.S.—but they’re the start of something that might have been unimaginable a decade ago. And at the same time, it’s hard not to see this development as a diminishment of what it means to be middle-class—a diminishment thrown into sharp relief by the contrast with Thomas’ aspirations. While some folks can drive condos on wheels, others will just have to settle for a similarly sized—and much less luxuriously appointed—house that isn’t going anywhere. As, all too often, may be true of them as well.

One other intersection bears noting. The New York Times article opened with a vignette featuring Robert Lanter, a 63-year-old retired nurse who searched in vain for a “regular” home he could afford in Deschutes County, Oregon, after moving back to the area from a condo in Portland. He ended up in 600 square feet, in a house “that can be traversed in five seconds and vacuumed from a single outlet,” in a neighborhood of homes as small as 20-by-20 feet.

Coincidentally, the previous day I had posted about Deschutes County toying with the idea of permitting RVs to be used as year-round homes because of the lack of affordable housing. I called out the idea—slated for a possible public hearing, following a Feb. 28 meeting of county commissioners and planning staff—as a sure-fire recipe for creating dispersed slums. The Times article demonstrates that even in Deschutes there are sounder—if no larger—alternatives becoming available, and so prudence might suggest holding off on the RV idea for a while.

But if, for some reason, the county commissioners want to stick with the RV concept anyway, maybe they should contact Clarence Thomas. He just might be looking to unload a 24-year-old condo on wheels.

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RVs as ‘housing’ a recipe for slums

Squeezed by a housing crisis that is approaching Great Depression dimensions, state and local governments have started turning their backs on “decent, safe and sanitary” standards that long guided the home-building and mortgage-lending industries. The scale of the problem they face is daunting: half of all renters nationwide were “rent burdened” in 2022, spending more than 30% of their income for housing; a record 635,000 Americans were homeless last year. But faced with such overwhelming need, elected officials are grasping at a most primitive “solution”—RVs as permanent housing—and in doing so are laying the groundwork for even bigger problems a few years hence.

A case history of such declining standards is on display in Oregon, generally, and in Deschutes County specifically. Having already amended state law a few years ago to give its counties the option of allowing accessory dwelling units (AUDs), Oregon’s legislative assembly last summer took the additional step of allowing RVs to be used as rental dwellings in rural areas. Opponents argued that the state had yet to see whether allowing AUDs would make a significant difference in the housing supply, but supporters noted that Oregon needs more than half-a-million new housing units across all income levels within the next 20 years. All possibilities should be considered. Recreational vehicles, it was argued, could take up the slack, presumably because they’re cheaper and mobile, and therefore relatively quick and easy to set up.

The “ayes” had it, producing a law that is remarkably free of restraints on allowing “vehicles . . . designed for use as temporary living quarters” to be used as permanent housing. The law does require that such RVs not be “rendered structurally immobile,” presumably so they can be removed more readily when “dilapidated or abandoned”—one of the drawbacks of “a limited useful life” cited in a legislative analysis. But the law does not require “fire hardening requirements,” as was included in the law authorizing ADUs. And it explicitly declares that RVs used as housing are “not subject to the state building code.” Indeed, virtually the only state restrictions are on which properties can be used for this new housing option, with any additional regulations left up to each county.

While Oregon’s new RV law did not go into effect until Jan. 1 of this year, Deschutes County was all over it months ago. Located in the rural middle of the state and coping with a homeless population of approximately 1,300, the county had its planning staff draft new rules last October to put some flesh on the legislative bones. The result couldn’t get more basic. For example, Oregon defines “vehicles used as temporary living quarters” as having, “at minimum, cooking and sleeping facilities that may be permanently set up or connected to the vehicle, or may be stored within or upon the vehicle with the intent to use within or upon the vehicle”—a definition, alert readers will note, that makes no reference to toilet facilities. Planning staff therefore included, as “additional standards under consideration,” a requirement that “the RV must have an operable toilet and sink.”

That’s what you call a low bar. Meanwhile, the “additional standards under consideration” make no mention of the clear allowance for outdoor kitchens, don’t set a minimum square-foot-per-occupant standard, don’t address what kind of utility hookups will be required, don’t even call for fire extinguishers or smoke alarms—and certainly don’t set up an inspection protocol to ensure the standards are being met.

Planning commissioners met Jan. 11, and again Jan. 25, to review the staff’s proposals as well as three dozen or so written public comments, almost all opposed to the whole idea. Many commenters took issue with the basic rationale for the RV initiative, pointing out that increased housing density on rural land won’t help people who need jobs and social services that tend to be located in urban areas. Many also noted that new RV dwellers would place additional demands on infrastructure and municipal services, such as fire protection, police, and ambulance services, without any offsetting increase in tax revenues. And others expressed concerns about increased demand on ground water supplies, the greater fire hazard associated with growth in the urban-wildland interface, and the loss of a rural lifestyle caused by a potential doubling of the population.

But perhaps the most telling criticism, echoing a concern raised by the legislative analysis last summer, is that counties like Deschutes simply don’t have the resources to enforce whatever rules they adopt. RVs on private property are already becoming prevalent, many complained, in defiance of existing zoning restrictions and without any enforcement by an overburdened county government. “We have lots here that look like homeless encampments, with not enough code enforcement now,” wrote Mark and Jane Odegard, reflecting a common observation. “We are a residential community, not a campground.”

Craig Heaton echoed the sentiment, complaining of “several RVs, campers, fifth wheels and small sheds ” on nearby properties. “It is quite common to smell the sewage. Extension cords from the house to these makeshift quarters are present. Year after year I’ve filed complaints with Deschutes County” to no avail, he added.

Apparently taking these and other concerns to heart, the planning commission rejected its staff’s proposals—but only by the narrowest of margins, voting 4-3 against permitting use of RVs as supplemental housing. But it also left the door open for further consideration, via a work session with the county’s commissioners on Feb. 28 to determine whether to hold a public hearing on the matter. Should that happen, it will be interesting to see who in the RV industry will step up and point out all the truly horrific reasons why this is a bad idea—ha-ha-ha! Just kidding!

The problems of exorbitant housing prices and exploding homelessness are real and tragic, and cry out for effective intervention—but putting people into firetraps with scarcely more floor space than a prison cell is not it. All that will accomplish is a dispersed slum of rapidly deteriorating eyesores, transforming Deschutes County into an Oregon version of the worst of West Virginia, also a once truly magnificent landscape.

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Let’s face it: we’re all tourons

There’s an undeniably smug pleasure many of us take in observing others’ failings or stupid behavior, and indeed, it’s hard not to feel superior when reading about the latest winners of the Darwin Awards. Or when gaping at the pictures posted on the People of Walmart site. Who goes out in public like that? How do some people come up with such incredibly dumb ideas?

And aren’t we special/smart/superior not to be like that?

And yet . . . and yet, perhaps the line between smart and stupid is a lot fuzzier than we think. Consider, for example, the gleeful fascination that self-styled outdoorsy types have with “tourons,” that mashup of tourist and moron used to describe people who think it’s a good idea to take selfies with a bison or elk, or who try to pet bear cubs. These encounters, which frequently end badly for the touron, are grounded in a Disney-fied view of nature and its creatures as essentially benign and placed on this world for our enjoyment. For a touron, the thought that we might be perceived as a threat—or even as a food source— is inconceivable. And it’s that lack of awareness that causes so much self-satisfaction for observers who pat themselves on the back for knowing so much better.

But what if we’re all tourons, to one degree or another, distinguished only by the clarity of our perceptions and the sophistication of our understanding? How much difference is there between the tourist who ambles up to a wild animal and the tourist who thrashes heedlessly through a tick-infested meadow, or who kicks up leaf mold and breathes in fungal spores, or who ignores a mosquito bite even after the headaches it caused progress to vomiting, high fever and aching joint pain?

That last set of symptoms describes the progression of dengue fever, which can leave a lucky person debilitated for weeks on end. The unlucky ones develop severe dengue, which causes plasma to leak out of blood vessels and results in organ failure. If untreated, with blood transfusions and intravenous fluids, the mortality rate is 15%. That’s probably higher than the mortality rate inflicted by bison goring stupid tourists, but thus far, at least, no one is calling dengue victims “tourons.” Not yet.

Although many Americans have never heard of dengue fever, or if they have, think of it as something exotic, it is in fact establishing a foothold in the United States, as are a growing number of other tropical diseases. Not seen in the U.S. until a few years ago, dengue is already found in the warmer, wetter parts of the country—Florida in particular, but also Texas, Arizona and southern California—and is expected to get a boost this year as a current explosion of the virus in Brazil moves north with the seasons. Depending on the weather, Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi could be next. The few hundred cases reported to date could quickly swell into the thousands.

This spread of mosquito-borne diseases—not just dengue, but yellow fever, West Nile and Zika viruses, malaria and others—is just one result of a warming climate that gets more attention because of the extreme weather it produces. But the “natural” world of flora and fauna is just as strongly affected by climate change as the physical world of wind and ocean currents and the increasingly violent storms they kick up. Warming waters produce algae blooms that poison once-pristine rivers and lakes. Shorter winters enable the spread of tick-borne lyme disease far beyond its New England origins. “Valley fever,” once confined to the desert southwest, is becoming endemic throughout the country.

All of which is to say that the romanticized view of Mother Nature promoted by the campground industry, and now its glampground imitators, is just as superficial and ignorant as that of the tourons who view wild animals as cuddly photo-ops. There are numerous threats to our well-being when we venture out of our domestic bubbles, some not even visible to the naked eye, and that number is growing at an alarming rate. Ignoring those less obvious perils doesn’t make us superior to tourons—indeed, failing to recognize our responsibility for creating a more dangerous environment, through our contributions to climate change, arguably makes us dumber.

Nature is not inherently hostile to humans: it just doesn’t give a damn, any more than a lightning bolt concerns itself with the tree it cleaves. In the final analysis, then, we have only ourselves to blame when we put ourselves in danger’s way, whether that danger comes in the form of a 1,200-pound bison that can run 35 miles per hour, or a 2.5-miligram mosquito.

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Need RV repairs? Be prepared to wait!

RECT is an acronym for Repair Event Cycle Time—the time from the start date of an RV repair order to its completion. Note that RECTs that took longer than two years (!) are not included.

Last summer I reported on a possible silver lining to the grey cloud of plunging RV sales: the decline in high-margin sales meant dealers had more incentive to beef up their servicing efforts. Complaints about months-long waits to get even basic repairs had been exploding, thanks in part to shoddy workmanship and substandard parts as manufacturers rushed product out the door—then dragged their heels on approving warranty repairs. Add a resulting shortage of replacement parts, and the completely predictable result was an average wait time last May of 34 days for non-warranty work—but 50 days for warranty repairs.

And if even one part was out of stock? That national average jumped to 73 days for non-warranty work, 89 days for warranty repairs.

Crazy, right? But that was actually an improvement over December 2022, when the national repair time had averaged 53 days, and the wait time for both warranty and out-of-stock repairs had nudged down a bit. Not a huge change overall, true, but moving in the right direction and with every reasonable expectation that the improvement would continue.

But that was then, and this is now. The average national repair time this past December shot back up, to 51 days—and if you’re unlucky enough to be in the northeast, that average was 65 days. In May, 25% of all customers had to wait longer than 33 days for their repairs to be completed; in December, that wait time for the unlucky 25% had more than doubled, to 74 days. The national average wait of 50 days for warranty repairs in May had jumped to 67 days in December, and to a whopping 90 days in the northeast. Meanwhile, the percentage of repairs that languished because parts were out of stock jumped to 33% in December from 21% in May, extending those repairs by another week.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The number of RVs cranked out by manufacturers last year was roughly half that of 2022, which one might think would mean more time for quality control on production lines. Lower production and the repair of pandemic-disrupted supply lines should have replenished parts stocks, not squeezed them further. And after several years of pumping money into its technical institute, the RV Industry Association was boasting in December of having the largest number of certified techs in the RV industry’s history.

So where’s the bottleneck?

A good question, and one the industry hasn’t yet acknowledged, much less answered. To be sure, some of the numbers above may be attributable to seasonal variations, if inexplicably so: repair times seem to peak in December and January, then gradually decline through the spring and summer before bottoming out around October. Still, the latest peaks are significantly higher than those of a year ago, so progress this ain’t. The only thing certain is that RV owners who need repairs are still twisting in the wind, their expensive and frequently highly leveraged adult toys sitting on a dealer’s lot somewhere for months on end.

The data above, utilized by the RV Dealers Association for the benefit of its members, is extracted from much more extensive research conducted by a systems software company called Integrated Dealer Systems. Number nerds who would like to explore that information more thoroughly can go deeper here. 

ARVC/OHI: adrift without a rudder

The organization formerly known as the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds, or ARVC, is having one heck of an identity crisis.

Last November, supposedly after a year of vaguely referenced “surveys and interviews,” the association’s leadership announced that it was “rebranding” itself and henceforth would be known as Outdoor Hospitality Industry, or OHI. That awkward word jumble without a subject noun was explained away by ARVC/OHI’s executive director, Paul Bambei, as marking the association’s transition toward becoming “the trusted voice of all outdoor hospitality.”

Delusions of grandeur, anyone?

While Bambei and his enablers thus laid claim to global aspirations for their modest little industry association, ARVC’s dues-paying members couldn’t help but notice that they had been disappeared. An organization originally founded “for the purpose of promoting camping through the private sector and protecting the camping industry from unfair legislation and unfair competition” apparently had decided that “camping” was—what? Too old-school? Too limiting? Just not as focus-group attractive as “outdoor hospitality”? Whatever the case, “campgrounds” and “RV parks” seemed to have ceased as an integral part of the organization’s identity.

Predictably, the grumbling soon started. Critics pointed out that the outdoor hospitality industry’s “trusted voice” presumably would be speaking on behalf of not just campgrounds, RV parks and glampgrounds but also bed-and-breakfasts, inns, ski lodges, marinas, resorts and even hotels and motels if they were in any way connected to the “outdoors.” Worse yet, the new “outdoor hospitality” umbrella would cover Harvest Hosts, Boondockers Welcome and Hipcamp, long seen by many campground owners as unfair competitors who don’t have to comply with RV park licensing requirements. How would all these disparate businesses have their conflicting interests represented by a single voice except in the most abstract sense?

Less than a month later, the grumbling became more serious when the Pennsylvania Campground Owners Association voted to quit its partnership with OHI. The national organization’s “mission and vision” no longer aligned with its own, PCOA leadership explained, adding that its members had grown increasingly concerned about OHI’s lack of communications and transparency about various changes it was implementing.

Decisive though it was, however, PCOA actually was slow on the uptake: ARVC/OHI had been signaling its intentions at least a year earlier, with little apparent pushback—and, indeed, may have been emboldened by the muted response. Early last year, for example, I wrote a three-part post making the case that ARVC had lost its way. (Indeed, in an ironic foreshadowing, I suggested at the end of the second installment that “perhaps it should rebrand as the National Association of the Outdoor Hospitality Industry.”) I observed at the time that ARVC had adopted a “mission statement” that was couched “in soulless corporate-speak,” to wit: “We empower outdoor hospitality businesses by providing industry-tailored resources, organic connections, consumer exposure, professional development, and proactive legislative action.” 

This past week, apparently in belated response to PCOA’s secession, ARVC/OHI backpedaled furiously. According to its press release, because the new mission statement neglected to explicitly identify its “core membership,” the wording would be changed to the following: “To empower RV parks, campgrounds and glamping businesses with the community, resources, professional development, and legislative advocacy needed to ensure successful futures for all Outdoor Hospitality Industry businesses.” (The new wording, it added, is to be approved at ARVC/OHI’s board meeting this spring—raising the question of just who decided this is a good idea that should be announced before board approval.)

No mention of the name change to OHI and its silence on the subject of camping. No mention of OHI’s “vision” statement—“an empowered outdoor hospitality industry”—also cited by PCOA as a point of contention.

The proposed new mission statement is known as trying to have your cake and eat it, too. As with most such efforts, however, it fails as a semantic construct, since there is no logical connection between empowering RV parks, campgrounds and glamping businesses on the one hand, and ensuring the successful futures of all outdoor hospitality businesses on the other. The “empowering” of a part does not ensure the success of the whole. On the other hand, the way this sentence is constructed, its unmistakable meaning is that RV parks and campgrounds need to up their game so that the outdoor hospitality industry as a whole can thrive.

Bambei, meanwhile, proved himself just as fuzzy-minded as the organization he leads by insisting in the press release that the core constituency he serves really hasn’t changed, “it’s simply expanded.” Which is not unlike saying our little town of New Amsterdam really hasn’t changed, it’s simply expanded—into New York City. 

But logical thinking and precise language aren’t the point: muddying the waters is. Whatever he may say after the fact about his primary concern for ARVC/OHI’s “core,” Bambei just can’t keep his grandiose ambitions from spilling into the open—and so, in that same press release, he goes on to to declare that “we know it is important that the hospitality industry has a national organization positioned to represent it well into the future.” And so, by golly, the RV park and campground industry might as well shoulder that burden on behalf of all those other unrepresented businesses. With Bambei at its helm, of course.

PCOA’s secession apparently had another, more salutary effect: almost simultaneously with its announced mission restatement, OHI’s board voted to allow direct RV park and campground membership across the United States. In doing so, it ended a much-criticized requirement that campgrounds in partnering states—like Pennsylvania—could belong to ARVC only if they first joined the state organization. (On the flip side, campgrounds that belonged to a partnering state association were in most cases required to pay national dues even if they didn’t want to be ARVC members.) That compulsory package deal was so unpopular that the country’s biggest state associations had been seceding from ARVC, one by one, with Pennsylvania’s departure the final straw.

But while long overdue, this change means that OHI will relinquish having captive dues-payers delivered by compliant state associations and will have to actually earn those members by convincing them it has their best interests at heart—a daunting prospect for an organization increasingly criticized for being out of touch with its grassroots and given to top-down decision-making. That, as much as any dreams of representing a vaguely defined but overarching “hospitality industry,” explains why ARVC/OHI seems so unmoored these days.

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