Mobil home parks and poverty
Homelessness in Colorado, U.S.
In the Aurora mobile home park where she lived for 16 years, eviction notices kept coming to Petra Bennett’s door — for unauthorized guests, lack of insurance, late rent. They were bogus threats to make the single mother leave. And eventually, she did.
Homelessness in Colorado, U.S.
In Federal Heights, Karla Lyons’ waitressing wages are eaten up by a constant stream of home and yard repairs ordered by her park manager, including removal of a giant maple tree that fell on her patio roof and crushed it. She would move if she could afford it.
And in Boulder, Greg Gustin carries a knife in the pocket of his jeans while on duty as manager of a 1950s-era mobile home park that is one of the sketchiest spots in town. When a resident was accused of strangling his wife last year and leaving her to die in the manager’s officer, Gustin pulled surveillance video to defend himself to police.
Across Colorado, where the housing crisis impacts both rural and urban towns, the strife between mobile home park residents and park owners is approaching a boiling point. The business model — in which homeowners pay lot rent to park their houses on someone else’s land — exposes the immobility and economic vulnerability of tenants who can’t afford to move or live anywhere else.
Mobile homes provide the largest inventory of unsubsidized, affordable housing in the nation, but many began as RV parks in the 1960s and 1970s and are now old, with rundown water and electric systems and trailers that have been long past “mobile” for decades.
The Colorado Sun, along with more than a dozen partner news organizations across the state, spent the summer visiting mobile home parks to hear from residents, managers and owners. The project found that the number of parks is declining and ownership is consolidating as mom-and-pop parks sell out to large investors, which sometimes leads to displacement and redevelopment — and, in the eyes of many residents, an imbalance of power that threatens their low-cost lifestyle.
More than 100,000 people live in more than 900 parks across Colorado. Those residents include many of Colorado’s working poor and immigrants who are undocumented. They have been mostly ignored for decades.
“We’ve relegated mobile home parks to a corner of the American imaginary,” said Esther Sullivan, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado Denver and author of a book on mobile homes called “Manufactured Insecurity.”
“We have media representation of who is living there and stereotypes of who is living there that are absolutely false. In reality, this is a major swath of our workforce. This is the primary way that our working households attain the American dream of home ownership.”
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