Francisco Guzman isn’t allowed to leave anything in the tiny garden around his house. He can’t put rubbish out before collection day, or listen to music outside. “Pets should not be over 13 inches [33cm] high. And if you want to host a friend, or even your brother or your mother, you have to ask the manager. They have to be registered, and he can say no. I mean… what the fuck, you know? It’s my home!” Guzman and his wife own their home, a prefabricated house with three rooms (two of them bedrooms), but it stands on ground they rent at Friendly Village, a mobile home park in Aurora, Colorado.
The young couple pay $500 a month for one of the park’s 440 lots. They also pay $250 a month on the eight-year loan they took out to buy their house. It’s a typical 1970s mobile home with a floor area of 75 square metres, a flat roof, aluminium external walls and a once-white façade, yellowed by time. The rent “includes water, sewage and waste [collection], and there is also a small swimming pool in the park,” said Guzman.“I’d like to have a real home, with a real garden. Here the neighbours are 15 feet from my home. There’s no privacy. But for 500 bucks you can’t have anything in Aurora or Denver.” Guzman works at a service station, his wife occasionally fills in for a domestic cleaning company, and together they earn $2,000 a month.
That’s very little for where they live, close to the dynamic state capital, Denver, where property prices have risen 50% since 2012. In October 2015 there was no rented accommodation in Aurora for less than $1,000 a month, and the cheapest house for sale (needing complete refurbishment) was $130,000. The same month, a similar-sized mobile home (built in 1973) was on offer at $14,500, and park rents were $400-600 a month. “There are no vacancies right now — you should register on the waiting list. Well yes, there is a turnover, not a huge one, but it can go really fast,” said Friendly Village’s manager.
Aurora has nine big mobile home parks with more than 2,500 lots in total. Most are on or close to Colfax Avenue, in an unattractive suburb. They include Hillcrest Village, owned by Equity LifeStyle Properties, the market leader with 140,000 mobile home lots across the US, Green Acres (which has only elderly residents), Foxridge Farm, Cedar Village and Meadows. Neither the pastoral names nor the efforts residents make to decorate their homes with US flags, statues of the Virgin Mary or flowers can disguise the monotony of the layout.
Like social housing neighbourhoods, Aurora’s mobile home parks are designed differently from classic urban developments, and are separate from the rest of the city, with their own road network, road signage and layout. Rectangular lots are set at right angles to the narrow, poorly paved roads, and are separated by low hedges, a chain or just a line drawn on the ground. Each lot has a number, which appears in the resident’s address, alongside the name of the park. “We never tell anyone where we live [but] it’s hard. As soon as people see my address, they know it,”said Guzman. “Sure, it’s a problem — people can think ‘he lives in a trailer park, I won’t hire him because he’ll make problems’.”
Social housing at zero cost
Mobile homes are cheap in the US. Unlike conventional houses, built on site by bricklayers, electricians, carpenters and plumbers, they are made entirely in factories, by low-skilled workers, and come off the production line ready to use. New homes start at $25,000 for 70 square metres, including delivery, and like cars they depreciate over time, so homes built in the 1960s or 70s can cost less than $10,000. Twenty million Americans (including 23% of retired people) live in one, compared with nine million in 1975. There are seven times more of them in the US (8.6m units) than low-rent homes (1.2m) (1). The occupants are mainly disadvantaged households whose median annual income is half the national median ($26,000 compared with $52,000 in 2011) (2). They also serve as social housing, at zero cost to the public authorities, who don’t need to build anything, and make big profits for the companies that sell them.
“The main problem is not purchasing a home, but finding a place to put it,” said a “home consultant” at a branch of Clayton Homes, the US’s biggest retailer (see Not real property). Most US cities have strict zoning regulations that restrict the siting of mobile homes on private land to well defined areas, which are already saturated, and because mobile homes are reputed to devalue adjacent land, municipalities are careful to avoid new developments. So unless they are prepared to go far out into the countryside, many owners are forced to turn to private parks, which house 12 million Americans (3).
The number of mobile homes increases closer to New Mexico, where they account for more than 15% of all housing. They stand alongside major roads and small country roads, where housing density is lower and zoning regulations laxer. At Trinidad, Colorado, they are concentrated in a dozen small parks on cheap land on the outskirts of town. These don’t look like army camps, and are not characterless like the parks in Aurora.
Trinidad, population 8,000, lies in the foothills of the Rockies, on the border with New Mexico. The town had its heyday in the early 20th century, thanks to coal mining and the railways, but since the second world war its population has fallen by 40%, and only a few relics of its wealthy past remain: a former grand hotel on the main street, a majestic library built in 1904 with a donation from Carnegie Foundation, and a steam locomotive on display in the supermarket car park. “There’s no work. In five years I’ve been here, I never had a job for longer than two months,” said Jacqueline Johnson. She used to work at a hospital in Las Vegas, but fled Nevada after leaving her husband in 2010, and moved in with her half-sister, then living in a motel. “At first we shared one room. The kitchen was right next to my bed. Then we rented this trailer for $550 a month. That’s a lot, but we have three rooms, and a real kitchen, and you can eat outside when the weather is fine.”
Including welfare and odd jobs, they earn around $2,000 a month. “After we pay for food and bills, we have almost nothing left. And we only have one car between the two of us.”That’s a serious handicap: you can’t get anywhere on foot, except for the Chinese restaurant with its all-day, all-you-can-eat buffet. “When I need the car, and my sister is late, I get really mad. But everyone here knows each other, and I can usually get a neighbour to drop me somewhere. A trailer park is a real community.”
According to Harry Vallejos, a retired resident of the Cedar Ridge park, it’s like “a small family”. Vallejos pays $250 rent a month. He’s ill and can’t get about easily, so spends most of his time in the park. He knows all the residents, their family situation, their political views and how they spend their day — Annie McDaniel, 91, who can’t drive any more, so her daughter visits twice a week; Harold and Hannelore Thomason, in their eighties, who have lived here for 40 years, and so on.
‘A lot of coming and going’
Life in a trailer park doesn’t offer the privacy of a traditional house, where you can take refuge in the back yard, or the anonymity of an apartment block. Just by looking out of the window, you can tell if your neighbours are at home or have gone to work, if they have visitors or if their gutters are blocked. It’s common to hear shouting and doors slamming. The communal lifestyle makes it easy to get friendly with your neighbours, but it also means rumours and gossip. Cedar Ridge has around 20 houses, most occupied by elderly people who own them. They’re suspicious of the younger residents, especially a family recently arrived from Texas and a man who only occupies his mobile home a few months a year. “There’s a lot of coming and going, and I have to keep an eye on my property,”said Vallejos, though he insisted this was “the best community in Trinidad”.
Vallejos wouldn’t live at the Almar park for the world: it has a bad reputation. In 2015 the police shot dead a young black man who was hiding in an abandoned shack. The incident got a lot of coverage from local television stations and has stuck in people’s minds. The manageress at Almar told some potential tenants: “We patrol all the time, either myself or my husband. My son is the maintenance man here. He or his girlfriend patrols all the time. And Nicky [a resident] there, her dad is a detective for the police department. And my brother lives here, and you know, everybody checks on everybody. I throw a lot of people out.”
The park they should really avoid, she said, was Lakeside, which opened 15 years ago. It’s a huge square of earth and gravel that turns to mud when it rains. The rent on a bare lot is $150 a month; for $300 more, you get an old mobile home with three bedrooms. Unusually for Trinidad, Lakeside has several vacancies, though the rates are the lowest in town. “Nobody wants to stay there. There are drugs problems, fights, shootings. It’s is a disaster for the community,” said a woman who owns a small house 200 metres away. When I pressed her for more details, she claimed she often heard sirens. Eventually she admitted she had never set foot in the park and didn’t know any of the residents.
Mobile homes have always had a negative image in the US. Though they are home to 8.7% of African Americans, most people in the US associate them with a white underclass (“white trash”), and refer to their occupants as “trailer trash”, just as they associate low-rent neighbourhoods with black people. This goes back to the period between the two world wars, when salesmen and agricultural and construction workers, who travelled the country in caravans (trailers), were often accused of immorality and of not paying taxes in the towns where they settled. In 1937 Fortune magazine described them as “crowded rookeries of itinerant flophouses” (4).
The mobile home population changed in the 1950s, when models 10 feet (3 metres) wide, compared with 8 feet (2.4 metres), came on to the market, making it possible to reach the second bedroom without passing through the first. There was a housing crisis at the time, and the enhanced privacy encouraged many Americans of modest means, especially older people and young working-class couples, to make them a permanent home. New models can be up to 5 metres wide, and some, in the retirement mobile home parks of Florida and California, close to marinas and golf courses, are luxurious. Makers no longer call them mobile but “manufactured” homes.
Drugs, shootings, police
But a new name is rarely enough to change a reputation. Local television news is filled with coverage of shootings, police raids and drug-related incidents at mobile home parks. On YouTube, you can watch Trailer Park Boys, a mockumentary television series that has run for 15 years in Canada and the US, about the misadventures of a group of simple-minded park residents, some occasionally jailed for minor crimes. Cinema box office successes such as Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and 8 Mile (2002), an account of the early life of rapper Eminem, also depict the parks as places where violence is rife. Even the subtler portrayal of a New Hampshire community in Russell Banks’s novel Trailerpark (1981) takes up the themes of drugs and alcohol.
It’s not surprising that many people in Trinidad have strong opinions about the residents. “They just say bullshit about us,” said a young Lakeside resident who asked to remain anonymous. “Most people here are honest, they work hard. It’s a nice place to stay. But you also have trailers for rent, and tenants… and they change all the time. So, sometimes are there are bad tenants. Right now, in the trailer just across the way, there are two guys who smoke pot all the time. They have a dog, a vicious dog, very aggressive.” She said the owners aren’t particular enough in their choice of tenants, and don’t ask them for any guarantees. “They just want to fill vacant lots, so they don’t give a shit about who stays in the park. When there are problems, we have difficulties with getting the owners to respond. They aren’t reinvesting anything in general maintenance.”
Dave Anderson, executive director of the All Parks Alliance for Change, which defends the interests of mobile home owners, says this is a typical problem with rural parks: “In metropolitan areas, there’s a lot of pressure in terms of property values. Where the property values are higher and the development is denser, the community owner is able to charge higher rents. And higher property values and denser development also support redevelopment for some other purpose. In smaller rural communities, the property values are lower, the rents are lower and the pressure to redevelop isn’t really an issue. But small owners run a very limited operating budget, and they may not have enough capital to make repairs if there is a significant maintenance issue with the water or sewers.”Living in a family-owned park in a small town is no protection against rent rises. Rents at Almar in Trinidad went up 11% in November, from $220 to $245; they had already been raised two years before.
In most states, there is no law to prevent park owners from putting up rents, provided they give a few weeks’ notice. That’s one of the first things that Frank Rolfe teaches students at his “mobile home university”. Rolfe, who has a degree in economics from Stanford, got rich by investing in mobile home parks with his associate Dave Reynolds. They started from scratch in 1996 and now have the sixth biggest operation, with 170 parks around the US, excluding the “tenant-friendly” states of California, Florida and New York.
Rolfe and Reynolds run a three-day intensive course costing $2,000 that covers the rudiments of park management: be strict in case of late payment of rent, impose fines for non-compliance with the rules, avoid installing self-service laundries or other shared facilities that could generate unnecessary costs, evict undesirable tenants. “The average students are professionals in their 50s. They are very disappointed in the rate of return of the US stock market. It’s a great time to be in the mobile home park business, because there’s a huge demand for affordable housing, because the US economy is going down the drain,” said Rolfe. Their approach follows that of developers involved in urban regeneration: they buy small mobile home parks (especially “mom and pop” operations) from owners who don’t work at improving their profitability, refurbish them, install a few additional services and raise rents.
Tenants are powerless to resist such increases. Since models 3 metres or more wide were introduced, mobile homes have become difficult to move. A car is no longer enough: you need a special truck, wider than an ordinary road. A move can cost several thousand dollars, and many residents find it makes more sense to buy a new home. The immobility of these supposedly mobile houses makes their occupants vulnerable, as they can’t threaten to move out if the owner doesn’t maintain the park properly, or raises the rent.
Emily Montoya (not her real name) doesn’t know where she and her partner would find the money if they had to leave Raton, a town in northern New Mexico with a population of 6,500, where they rent a mobile home lot for $150 a month. The couple have children, she isn’t working and they have no savings. They may have to move soon, as their park, Enchanted Hills (next to the town’s cemetery) is up for sale at $320,000 for 8 hectares and 46 lots. “I discovered that when I came home one afternoon, when I saw the for sale sign. We fucking don’t know who is going to buy it, and what he gonna do… We can’t move out, we can’t afford it. That’s the only thing we know.”
Montoya’s neighbours share her fears, since the law in New Mexico does little to protect park residents. They can be evicted at 72 hours’ notice if they fail to pay the rent, one month’s notice if they break the rules or “disturb other tenants”. And if their park closes, all they get is two months’ notice. “In some states, like Minnesota, you are guaranteed relocation financial benefits. If you have to move your home, or if your home isn’t in a condition to be moved, you get money to replace it. In some states, you also have the ability to band together with the other homeowners in order to purchase the land yourself and prevent the community from being redeveloped. But mostly, there are no guarantees for the residents,” says Anderson. Enchanted Hills will probably stay open: the area doesn’t attract many developers and the best thing you can do with land where the zoning regulations allow mobile homes is to let it out in individual lots.
In California, it’s the opposite: the law protects tenants, but there are many developers. In 20 years, more than 400 mobile home parks in the state have closed as real estate prices have risen (5). Since 2012, 400 residents of Palo Alto’s Buena Vista mobile home park, the oldest in Silicon Valley, have been fighting to stop its closure, though they pay $1,000 a month in rent (the smallest accommodation in town costs three times as much). Having initially agreed to the closure, the city changed its mind after the protests grew to huge proportions. It now supports the residents, and has even offered to buy the land (1.8 hectares with 117 mobile home lots) for $39m. The owner has turned this down, as the realtors say the property is worth more than $50m (6).
The case has gone to court, and until a ruling is issued, the residents of Buena Vista are no more certain of their future than those of the Raton park. As Anderson explains, mobile home owners “have kind of a dual identity: they are homeowners but they are also renters of lots. And yet, in most American states, they are not protected by tenant-landlord laws, and they are not protected by homeowner protections either.” They can count on no one but themselves.
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