Next Stop, Reloville
Life Inside America's New Rootless Professional Class
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An eye-opening investigation of the growing phenomenon of "Relos," the professionals for whom relocation is a way of life
Drive through the newest subdivisions of Atlanta, Dallas, or Denver, and you'll notice an unusual similarity in the layout of the houses, the models of the cars, the pastimes of the stay-at-home moms. But this is not your grandparents' suburbia, "the little houses made of ticky-tacky"—these houses go for half a million dollars and up, and no one stays longer than three or four years. You have entered the land of Relos, the mid-level executives for a growing number of American companies, whose livelihoods depend on their willingness to uproot their families in pursuit of professional success. Together they constitute a new social class, well-off but insecure, well traveled but insular.
Peter T. Kilborn, a longtime reporter for The New York Times, takes us inside the lives of American Relos, showing how their distinctive pressures and values affect not only their own families and communities but also the country as a whole. As Relo culture becomes the norm for these workers, more and more Americans—no matter their jobs or the economy's booms and busts—will call Relovilles "home."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Kilborn expands on his 2005 New York Times profile of the "relos," rootless, upper-middle-class, mid-level executives, "an affluent, hard-striving class" who follow the money "as they migrate through the suburbs of Atlanta and Dallas and the expatriate villages of Beijing and Bombay." Kilborn explores "relovilles" like West Plano and Flower Mound, Tex., examining their curious, portable and insular culture, surveying the ad hoc "relo economy" that aids the perpetually transient relos. A skillful storyteller, Kilborn captures the costs and loneliness of the relo lifestyle without judging his subjects' choices. Kilborn began research for this book in 2005, when many large corporations responsible for relocating the relos were in such different economic circumstances; as a result, his story feels unfinished. He notes that the national free fall in housing prices has made relos less mobile and that some upper management positions have been eliminated, but fails to mention what kind of effect the economic downturn has had on his subjects' tendency toward conspicuous consumption and what will happen to the ghost towns and ghost strip malls they leave behind as they begin to curb their spending. Photos.
