Roots

Mobile home parks have their roots at the turn of the 20th century with the advent of automobiles. Early auto travelers began outfitting their cars with camping equipment, fostering the development of the “auto camp.” The first official auto camp opened in Douglas, Arizona, in 1913.

By the 1920s, auto camps(also called “auto courts” or “motor courts”) began to add amenities like communal bathrooms, showers, laundries, and kitchens. Initially, the camps were designed for motorists to pull in and erect tents next to their autos.

By the 1930s, rustic cabins began to be constructed by owners of auto camp sites, and some auto owners began to bring their own “house trailers.”

The concept of house trailers as a permanent form of housing coincided with the Great Depression and World War II. Trailers housed nomadic workers employed by the Works Progress Administration, founded in 1935.

When jobs ended, workers often stayed in their trailers in place, in part due to the inability to find work elsewhere. Likewise, during World War II, trailers offered housing for defense industry workers.

By 1945, the federal government had ordered more than 150,000 trailers to house wartime workers. The postwar population boom and resulting lack of housing caused its own boom in the manufacture of trailers.

By the mid-1950s, trailers began to look and function like conventional permanent housing, and by 1955 “trailers” had come to be called “mobile homes.”

By the late 1960s, six million Americans lived in mobile homes, representing one-third of U.S. single-family dwellings. By 1978, the Housing and Urban Development agency had created a national building code for what was by then called “manufactured housing.”

All those mobile homes needed places to park, and individuals with land or who could purchase land began setting up mobile home parks (MHPs) across the country. These largely “mom-and-pop” operations typically were not run by professional landlords and did not necessarily generate adequate funds to maintain infrastructure.

Today

Fast-forward to 2024: Today, some 22 million Americans live in manufactured housing, which represents more than six percent of the nation’s housing.

Approximately 100,000 Coloradans live in mobile homes; their median household income is $39,000. The state has 760 registered mobile home parks with 57,475 lots.

Many owners of mobile home parks have recently reached retirement age. Major events, such as death or retirement of the park owner, can trigger park sales.

Issues

The potential value of mobile home parks has attracted corporate investors, venture capitalists, and hedge fund operators to purchase them. Institutional owners accounted for 23 percent of park purchases in June 2021, an increase of 13 percent from the previous two years.

Often those buyers learn (sometimes after purchase) that infrastructure has not been maintained and must be repaired and/or replaced at great expense.

To finance improvements and increase profits, new owners often raise lot rents in parks by enormous amounts, causing “constructive eviction.” Those who cannot afford the new rents must leave, including those who own their mobile homes and must abandon them because of the high cost of moving them.

In the worst cases, new owners do not make repairs or improve the parks, leaving residents to tolerate sewage leaks, water service disruption, and other unhealthy and dangerous circumstances.

Many residents of mobile home parks are people of low income, the elderly and disabled, and immigrant workers. The loss of their homes may leave them unhoused, in the short or long term.

Large numbers of mobile home parks in the U.S. are owned by corporations who have no presence in the communities where their parks are located.

In recent years, due to inflation and housing shortages throughout the country, the value of mobile home parks as affordable housing, especially for workers, has become more apparent than ever.

Governments and nonprofit organizations trying to solve housing shortages are now working to preserve existing mobile home parks and, in some cases, help residents purchase their parks.

Doing so has proven difficult, in part because mobile homes are not technically classed as “affordable housing” in many jurisdictions, and are operated differently from traditional housing.

Traditional mortgages are typically not available on the purchase of a mobile home placed on a rented lot, and tenants’ rights don’t necessarily apply to mobile home park residents.

Government mortgagors Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae offer low-interest government-backed loans to investment companies, but not to resident groups who want to buy their parks.

Mobile home owners are both owners and renters, exposing them to the risks and responsibilities of both types of tenure.

Mobile home parks typically operate on private infrastructure, unlike other neighborhoods where streets, sewers, and water systems are owned and operated by a municipality.

This is the environment in which participants in this convening find themselves: promoting the preservation of mobile home parks as a practical means of maintaining and improving affordable housing; protecting vulnerable, contributing members of our communities who deserve and need our help to sustain themselves and their families; and providing residents with the ability to control their own housing and thus secure their futures.

History adapted from a report by the City of Los Angeles, January 2016