Lot rents are often raised beyond owners’ means, and trailer park land is frequently sold to developers.
Salamon and MacTavish also found that park residents can lose their homes without the due process given other types of renters.
Beyond the trailer free#
Salamon says that, since these trailer parks are regulated in only a few states, the parks’ owners are generally free to abruptly and exorbitantly raise fees and rents as well as make their own rules-for example, limiting whether residents can have pets or repair a car in their driveway. The manufactured housing industry estimates that about half the nation’s 8.8 million mobile homes are located in more than 50,000 landlord-owned parks.
“They don’t have the same control, status, or security as owning a stand-alone house.” “The owners do have a house and it is often better than an apartment, but it is really seen as second best because they don’t own the land,” explains MacTavish. Owning a manufactured home on land leased in a trailer park amounts to “half the American dream,” says MacTavish, a human development professor at Oregon State University. The researchers found hard-working rural families who took pride in their homes, but who also resented the popular stereotypes of trailer residents and often felt sucked into a financial arrangement filled with hidden costs and limitations. Census Bureau estimates, nearly one in six homes in nonmetro areas of the United States are mobile homes, compared with 8 percent nationwide and 6 percent in metro areas.)įor their research, which will be published in a forthcoming book, International Perspectives on Rural Homelessness, Salamon and co-author Katherine MacTavish interviewed 250 residents in rural rental and land-lease trailer parks in North Carolina, Illinois, New Mexico, and Oregon. Manufactured homes are the fastest-growing form of housing in the United States and a common sight in rural communities, where zoning and housing codes tend to be less restrictive than in urban areas. “Because the park is private property, the owners have little recourse if they’re evicted.” ‘Half the American Dream’, and Sometimes a Nightmare “Being landless leaves trailer owners at the park landlord’s mercy,” explains Salamon. Owning a mobile home but renting the land it stands on in a trailer park amounts to “a kind of serfdom,” says Sonya Salamon, a community studies professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and co-author of the study. Owning a manufactured home (often also known as a “mobile home”) in a rural trailer park is often touted to these families as an affordable “next best thing”-and a step toward conventional homeownership.īut a new study of trailer park residents in four states finds that, rather than being a step in the right direction, manufactured-home ownership in a privately owned park can be a trap-a declining and often dangerous structure that lacks many of the social benefits of small town life and leaves its owners in a state of “quasi-homelessness,” ever vulnerable to losing their home. (October 2004) Rising housing costs in rural America have put homeownership beyond the reach of many working-poor families.
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