Mobile Home Parks and Disasters: Understanding Risk to the Third Housing Type in the United States

Abstract

Research on affordable housing and disasters in the United States largely focuses on owned and rented housing, the nation’s two most common housing tenures. Researchers have largely overlooked mobile home parks (MHPs), a third housing type that is home to 2.7 million households. Mobile home parks are characterized by their private ownership, stigmatization in popular culture and by local governance institutions, and unique tenure arrangement, in which residents own their individual homes but rent the land underneath. Existing studies have narrowly focused on the physical vulnerability of mobile home units and, to a lesser extent, the sociodemographic characteristics of residents. The interactions between MHPs and the environmental, social, and regulatory contexts of disasters remain largely unexplored. To holistically examine the factors that interact to produce disaster risk (exposure and vulnerability) for residents living in MHPs and assess whether parks are uniquely at risk compared to other housing types, an exploratory case study of the 2013 Colorado flood is presented. The central research question here is as follows: What characteristics structured disaster risk for MHP residents before and after the 2013 flood? Six MHPs located in 3 flood-affected communities, drawing on (1) surveys of 101 households whose homes were significantly damaged or destroyed by the 2013 floods, including 44 households living in MHPs; (2) semistructured interviews with 21 key informants who were active in the recovery; (3) observations at dozens of housing recovery–related meetings and events; and (4) analysis of recovery plans and government documents. Five mechanisms of exposure and vulnerability are revealed that together describe how MHPs and their residents were uniquely at risk to the disaster. The findings of this study may be summarized as follows: (1) MHPs were exposed to flooding at a higher rate than housing generally, (2) MHPs spatially concentrated socially vulnerable households, (3) MHPs and their residents were stigmatized by local governance before and after the disaster, (4) was a barrier to recovery, and (5) postdisaster recovery policies and plans disadvantaged MHPs and their residents. The article concludes by describing the importance of MHPs to community resilience and suggesting several avenues for future research.