ABSTRACT
In the last three decades of the twentieth century mobile or manufactured home parks, typically known as trailer parks, became common across the rural United States. Trailer parks, particularly those parks catering to families with children (rather than those populated by the retired) house those of modest means and provide them access to their dream – an affordable separate, stand-alone home in a rural setting. In most US trailer parks homeowners rent rather than own the land beneath their homes. Owning a mobile home but being landless, or renting both home and land, is not a state of homelessness. But landlessness is central to why trailer-park homeowners or renters share quasi-homelessness. They have a home, whether shabby or plush, but due to specific financial, structural, and social insecurities connected with living in a privately owned trailer park and being landless, they are at risk of homelessness. We show that a rural trailer-park family can rapidly lose everything, particularly where there is scarce affordable housing. Such a threat makes people fear homelessness, despite owning a home – or at least owning a mortgage on a mobile home. Each of the three insecurities – financial, structural, and social – will be considered in turn as a potential risk of homelessness, for trailer-park homeowners as well as renters. Examples are drawn from field studies of trailer-park communities in Illinois, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Oregon. Finally, we conclude by considering the link between the potential quasi-homelessness status of mobile-home park dwellers in the context of evolving rural land tenure patterns. First, some basic information about US mobile-home or trailer-park communities.
