What once were mutually supportive, family-owned mobile home lot rentals have been replaced by an industry increasingly controlled by multi-state corporations and private equity firms driven by profit—often at the expense of residents and their homes.
As these homes have been less mobile, the land under them has become more attractive to predatory investors. Frank Rolfe, the founder of Mobile Home University, who teaches classes “in the art of buying and operating mobile-home parks,” compared owning a mobile home park where residents own the homes but rent the land to “a Waffle House where the customers are chained to the booths.” Investors can raise rents without limit and people must stay and pay or lose their home and largest investment.
Deferred maintenance has become part of the investment strategy that neglects infrastructure and repairs and prioritizes investor returns over resident well-being. It results in rising rents, declining infrastructure, and growing social and economic vulnerability for residents—many of whom have few, if any, other housing options.
THIS PRACTICE HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR DECADES. People are suffering and are being displaced. Homes and communities are being destroyed. Governments are looking the other way. Or worse. They are awarding taxpayers dollars to developers who are destroying these affordable housing communities (homes owned by individuals) to build fewer affordable homes. One example:
CREI Holdings in Florida received government funding for the Li’l Abner affordable housing project in Sweetwater. CREI Holdings secured $67 million in construction financing for Li’l Abner III, which will add 316 affordable housing apartments, with the project also receiving a $2 million grant from Miami-Dade County to cover construction costs. Nine hundred manufactured homes were destroyed to make way for 316 new units.
A Decent Home
A DECENT HOME is a feature length documentary film by Sara Terry that addresses urgent issues of class and economic inequity through the lives of mobile home park residents who can’t afford housing anywhere else. The film asks, Who are we becoming as Americans? — as private equity firms and wealthy investors buy up parks, making sky-high returns on their investments while squeezing every last penny out of the mobile home owners who lack rights and protections under local and state laws, and must pay rent for the land they live on.
John Oliver on Last Week Tonight
On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examined the disturbing realities of the mobile home industry — notably, a system of land ownership that allows some of America’s richest people to prey upon some of the country’s poorest.
PESP Private Equity Manufactured Housing Tracker
Over the past 20 years, manufactured home communities increasingly have gone from “mom and pop” enterprises to ownership by private equity firms, hedge funds, and large, multi-state corporations that seek to capitalize on manufactured home owners’ unique situation.