After growing up wealthy, Chuck Collins's thinking is transformed by his work with mobile home park tenants.
Chuck Collins is an organizer, agitator, researcher and storyteller based at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits Inequality.org, a global web site focused on the income and wealth divide. He is author of Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good. In his late twenties he worked with residents of mobile home parks around New England to buy their parks as cooperatives.
This story originally aired on Dec. 29, 2017 in an episode titled “Home.”
Story Transcript
When I was in my mid-twenties, I had a job working with mobile home park tenants who were trying to buy their mobile home parks and own them as resident-owned cooperatives. I worked all over New England as land values were rising and these mobile home parks were at risk. I worked with those tenants.
I got a call from a group in Bernardston, Massachusetts, thirty mobile home park residents whose park was up for sale and they needed help. One thing you should know is in my mid-twenties I looked incredibly young. I looked like I was about seventeen. I had painful skin acne. I was fairly skinny and awkward.
So I remember the first time I met with the leaders of this resident group. They sort of looked at me like, “This high school student with shaggy hair and bad skin is gonna help us save our homes?” But they came to trust me.
I think part of what happened is I interviewed each of them about their financial situations, so I sort of knew all their personal financial secrets. And in those conversations I really got to know people. I knew what their savings were, I knew what their incomes were. Because I was trying to figure out, did they have enough money? Were there enough people there who were going to contribute to a down payment towards the purchase of the park?
So after I had done my analysis, we had a meeting with the nine leaders of this mobile home park. We were meeting in Harlan and Mary Parro’s double-wide mobile home with this group of leaders. I was actually personally in agony at that moment for two reasons.
The first reason is I had interviewed this group and determined that they really didn’t have enough money, that there were a third of them that were sort of retirees with nest eggs but there was another third that had like zero or negative net worth to fall back on. It was not a wealthy group and they were about $35,000 short of the funds they needed to be able to buy that park. Only a third of them maybe could buy their own shares.
So I was in agony because I was going to have to break this news to them.
The other reason I was in agony, however, was that I had a secret. I knew all their financial secrets but they had no idea that I was a wealthy young man, that when I was twenty-one I had inherited a substantial amount of money, my family is from a meat-packing family from the Midwest and I had this wealth. I actually was thinking, “Well, $35,000. I could personally write a check to cover that gap.” I could even pretend that, “Oh, look, I got a grant from somewhere else.”
And I was actually thinking that I might do it, that I might actually because I'd come to really appreciate just how vulnerable they felt, what a community they had built together, and that all of that was at risk.
So I broke the news to Harlan and the whole group of nine leaders. I said, “Here’s the situation. $35,000 gap.” There was this little pall in the room.
Then this guy Reggie said, “Well, I have enough to buy my share and I have another $6,000 that I could put into the purchase.” And I’m like, That’s all his money.
And then the Dundorfs, this couple said, “Well, we have enough to buy our share and we have another $7,000 that we can put in towards the purchase.”
And around the room this group went. And because I’m the only person who knows their own individual private financial information, I happen to know that they are putting everything they have on the table. I had not factored that into my assessment.
And it came to Harlan and Mary, and Harlan, and Mary said, “We've talked about this, Mary and I,” Harlan says. “And we can buy our share and we’re gonna buy Mrs. Rivas’s share confidentially and privately. I don't want anyone to share that in order to protect her privacy and her dignity.”
I happen to know that that was all Harlan and Mary’s nest egg, and that Mrs. Rivas is one of the people who’s probably going to have to move if the cost of the park went up at all.
Then they were just a couple of thousand dollars short and Harlan and Mary’s daughter came in. She worked at a bank and she said, “I can put in the rest,” and they cheered. They had done it.
And they literally pulled out their checkbooks. And because we hadn’t opened up a bank account yet, they just wrote the checks out to me. They emptied their bank accounts entirely, handing me the checks, trusting me to put them and take them to the bank. And as I drove away, my hands were trembling and my brain was seizing up because I actually had never seen anything like it.
The day came. The good news is they closed. They bought the park. The Bernardston mobile home resident-owned park was formed. And at the day of the closing at the law office, all forty-five residents wedged into the office. The men had cigars like they were proud parents. They were like, “What are we gonna buy next? The Pine Cone Diner’s up for sale.”
Harlan says to the Greenfield Recorder newspaper, the headline is, “We are hostage no more. We are the Israelites who have been wandering in the desert but we just bought the land from pharaoh.”
Mary came up to me and she said, “You're a smart young man. You should go to college.” I’m like I’m in my mid-twenties, you know.
She said, “You could probably get a job on Wall Street where you could make a lot of money. I don't see why you're hanging around with a bunch of old fogies like us.”
I said, “Actually, I can’t think of anywhere I'd rather be today.”
Then she kind of leaned over in a very maternal way and she said, “Have you ever tried Noxzema for your skin?”
I was like, “Yeah.”
Something happened in that day for me. Something shifted. I would sometimes think I had a change of heart. My brain scientist friend would say that actually my brain was rewired in that moment. There was something about the firing of my mirror neurons, the way in which I was being exposed and identifying with a whole different group of people.
You see, I grew up in a wealthy community. People were generous, people were charitable, but I had never actually had this experience of solidarity, of people being like all-in for each other. My brain scientist friend says there's a part of our brain called the right supramarginal gyrus, which is the part of our brain where we begin to differentiate ourselves from others. We begin to understand what it means to walk in other people’s shoes.
What they said is if you grow up in an affluent community where you don’t experience a lot of reciprocity and helping each other with needs, that part of your brain is actually underdeveloped. It’s under-stimulated. And what I was experiencing was an explosion. I didn’t understand any of that brain science. What I knew was I wanted what those people had. I wanted to have that kind of community.
I began to understand that actually having this wealth was a barrier to being in a reciprocal community, in a community of solidarity. So I thought, as any 26-year-old might in that situation, maybe I should give this wealth away.
So I wrote my parents a letter with my intention. I said, “Thank you for these opportunities. I was able to go to college without any debt, but I see these other needs out there and I actually think this money is a barrier to my own development.”
Well, a couple of days later when time went by, this was back when you send letters with stamps and went to Michigan, so my father called up and he said, “You haven't given away the money yet, have you?”
I said, “No.”
He says, “Well, I'd like to come and talk to you about this.”
I said, “Sure.”
So he actually came to visit me here in Massachusetts. We took some long walks but at one point he said, “You know, you grew up in a sheltered environment. Do you understand? Bad things can happen. You might wish you kept that money. For instance, you're single. But what if someday you have a partner and that partner has an illness. Wouldn’t you wish you had that money?
Or what if you have a child someday and that child has a special need. You're gonna wish you had that money as a cushion to help that situation. Have you thought about that?”
And I said, “Well, Dad, I have. If that were to happen, then I would be in the same boat as 99 percent of the people I know. I would have to get help. That’s what people do.”
He said, “Yeah, but in the end, you would probably have to fall back on government and that’s a lousy and tattered safety net.”
To which I said, “Well, maybe I would have a very personal stake in fighting to make that a better safety net.”
To which he wisely replied, “Oi, so idealistic.”
Now, I have children in my 20s now and I always say to them, “Your brain is still developing.” And that it’s true. My brain was developing and my heart was developing. In that moment, though, my dad said, “You know what? I understand. No strings attached. I love you. You'll always be my son.”
So with that I went home to the National Bank of Detroit, I went to the trust office, I saw my trust advisor, this woman Glenda Hallon, African-American woman from Detroit who is a civic leader to this day, and I’m signing the papers to transfer this wealth that’s in my name to a couple of foundations.
She sort of looks at me. She says, “Are you doing this out of altruism?”
I said, “No, actually I think this is in my selfish interest.”
She's like, “Hmmm. Are you gonna be okay?”
I sighed, “I think so. I mean, everybody’s acting like I’m jumping off a cliff here, but I think I’m gonna be okay”.
To be honest, I had no clue as to how much other advantage I had wired into my life. I gave this wealth away but there's this flow, four generations of economic stability, I’m white, I’m male, debt-free college education, huge advantage, access to healthcare, social network, social capital, all of that just flowing and hardwired into my life the way privilege works. But in that moment, it felt like I was taking a leap.
So I went back to my job working with mobile home park residents all over New England and several months went by and then something bad happened, which is the house I was living in burned down. No one was hurt but I was completely disoriented. In fact, I lost every piece of paper that said who I was. I had to reconstruct it all.
And the night of the fire, the fire department dumped millions of gallons of water into this house. The next morning, my housemate Greg and I are kind of standing in this charred shell of a house and four cars pull up. Out of those cars come ten of these Bernardston mobile home park residents. And they have casseroles and trash bags and shovels and they've come to help us put our lives back together. In that moment I thought, “I think I’m gonna be okay, and I think I’m getting what I want.”
Thank you.