My Life in Tents

It turns out you can get a one-bedroom for under $500 in New York City—if you’re willing to sleep on the ground.

Our friends over at Brokelyn broke (ha ha) the story of three college grads who are camping out in a backyard in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Each dude is paying $100 a month to pitch his one-man tent on plywood slabs laid over the mud.

Their site is less Depression-era shantytown than nouveau poor adventure—it’s a “badass thing to do,” said Louis Frank, a 22-year-old NYU grad who works for a Manhattan bus tour company. Note to the inspired: his friend Simon Levy says the Tempurpedic mattress is key. Read more about their escapades with leaky tents, smelly feet and Craigslist here, or pop over just to check out their logo. The NY Post picked up the story this morning.

Tent cities have been springing up in other, warmer places, but this is a new one for New York. A few months ago, CNN.com reported that sales of camping gear were up. Maybe it’s not because everyone’s using their furlough for a vacation.

Recession Lexicon: Nouveau Poor

/n. Your class distinction if you used to have two private jets and now just have one. Or had to give up your Pilates class or nanny. You’re feeling poor, but really, you’re not actually poor-poor.

The term has been around for months now, and Barbara Ehrenreich, a chronicler of social change, discussed this demographic in the New York Times on July 14. The recession, she says, has been portrayed as “smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.”

Just as “nouveau riche” was a pretension, “nouveau poor” occupies the same distinction.