It’s easy to miss the entrance to manufactured home communities if you don’t live there. Tucked away from view, these enclaves, sometimes called trailer parks, offer housing for very low-income folks, with monthly costs averaging $564, half the $1,046 for apartments, according to City Lab.

There are more than 13,000 of these homes in Thurston County, about 11% of our housing stock, according to Thurston Regional Planning Council data. Nationwide, an estimated 17.7 million people live in manufactured homes. That’s a lot of folks, of whom 70% are very low-income senior citizens. And many of these homes are at risk.

The vulnerability of...

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — The Farmworkers of America said it received several complaints about Chalet North evicting for minor infractions.

The mobile home park is along Alpine Drive, not far from Orange Blossom Trail.

Some residents feel the owners of Chalet North are taking advantage of them because they don’t understand the law.

A spokesperson for Chalet North said it only uses the eviction process, which is lengthy and costly, as a last resort.

Outside of Chalet North’s gates today, current and former residents protested the mobile home park’s management and what they said are unfair eviction practices.

Former resident Leticia Ramiraz...

Walla Walla seniors facing rising rents in manufactured housing communities and apartments have an opportunity to share their plight with state lawmakers this week.

Rental costs — including lot rent and utility fees for water, sewer and stormwater passed through by management — increased by $193 over 22 months at Rancho Villa, a manufactured home community for those 55 and older in Walla Walla.

Mobile and manufactured home residents from Rancho Villa and retirees living in other rental properties around Walla Walla shared their financial challenges at a community town hall in March, asking state lawmakers to help by implementing rent...

Across the US, homeownership is becoming increasingly inaccessible for low- and moderate-income households. While land costs are a driving force in this trend, construction costs carry some of the blame as well. However, “Comparison of the Costs of Manufactured and Site-Built Housing,” a new paper I co-authored with Chris Herbert and James Shen finds that manufactured housing offers a potential solution to rising construction costs, with a significant cost advantage over site-built homes. Given this cost advantage, we suggest that housing advocates and policymakers take steps to promote more widespread adoption of manufactured housing as...

A TINY home dweller has narrowly avoided homelessness after she was evicted from the property where she had lived for nine years.

Back in 2017, Yvonne Perrigo and her retired mother were living at the Skyview Trailer Park in Missoula, Montana, when the landlord left a note saying they needed to leave within six months.

There were plans to raze the park and build a new affordable apartment complex.

That's when Perrigo had to begin the painstaking and financially taxing process of moving her mobile home to another trailer park, the Missoulian reported.

"It was one of the roughest times I’ve ever had," she told the outlet.

"We were seriously...

LONGMONT — The popular tiny home movement is growing bigger in Colorado thanks to a new law aimed at allowing factory-built homes of about 400 square feet or less to become permanent fixtures in neighborhoods and in one case, to be used as an emerging therapy to get homeless military veterans back on their feet.

Advocates say House Bill 1242 , which went into effect July 1, will spur more purchases since it sets building standards for the scaled-down structures. The new rules also allow cities and counties to create legal pathways to let people live in tiny homes for a lifetime as opposed to just 180 days, advocates say. 

“Before this...

The Albemarle County Planning Commission recommended approval of a Special Use Permit request for the new owner of the renamed Crozet Mobile Home Community (MHC) at the commission’s June 27 meeting. The mobile home park on Park Road just east of Crozet Park has existed in that location continuously for over 40 years, predating most of the development around it. The 15-acre community currently hosts 73 manufactured homes, and the parcel’s new owners—who acquired the MHC in 2022 for $4 million—would like to add 14 more units to the site.

County senior planner Kevin McCollum explained that because the mobile home park was established before...

Christy Nair waves to neighbors as she strolls to her house perched on the edge of Silver City West, a 55-and-up mobile home and recreational vehicle park in Morro Bay. As she opens the front door, her 13-year-old pug, Duke, skips from a sunny spot on the sofa to the door — wagging his tail in anticipation of treats or head scratches. Nair, a retiree, has called Silver City West home for the past 11 years — but she worries about difficulties others may face when they choose to rent there or at other mobile home parks in the city.

About three years ago, Nair discovered black mold in the home she originally purchased at Silver City West,...

ROWAN COUNTY, N.C. (WBTV) - A group of families in a mobile home park in Rowan County reached out to WBTV after their running water was restricted by the landlord to only three hours a day.

The landlord says there’s a leak and that until it can be located and fixed, they have to limit the water to more than a dozen homes. It’s been going on for a month now, and they want answers and water.

The taps and the spigots are dry at the Mobile Manor off Hartley Road, except for certain times of day.

“7 in the morning to 8:30, then it’s cut off the rest of the day until 7 to 8:30 at night,” resident Brandy Brewer said.

It’s been that way for a...

A Colorado state agency confirms to CBS News Colorado it is investigating complaints of unfair and exploitative practices at a mobile home park in Arapahoe County. 

Activists claim the alleged issues there are an example of a problematic trend happening to mobile home parks across the country. They say large private equity companies are buying up mobile home parks, raising rent prices, and implementing costly policies, which they say take advantage of the people who live there, and critics say the same is happening at Foxridge Farm in northeastern Aurora. 

Residents say some people at Foxridge Farm are having to pay up to $3,800 a month...

Relatively few affordable housing-oriented bills cleared the General Assembly this year, albeit with a high-profile exception.

In early June, housing justice organizations celebrated passage of a bill guaranteeing most tenants a right to legal representation during eviction proceedings — a version of a bill that failed in a dramatic midnight vote at the end of the 2022 legislative session.

And last week, Gov. Carney quietly signed legislation enabling counties to use realty transfer tax revenue to fund affordable housing projects, opening the possibility that Sussex County could use a portion of its substantial revenues from pandemic-era...

In 2021, a California-based investor group purchased Golden Hill Mobile Home Park in Golden, Colorado, a small city just outside Denver in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Less than two years later, rents doubled for the nearly 40 households that called the community home, pushing residents—some that had lived there for decades—to seek cheaper alternatives in an area already feeling the pressure of an affordable housing crisis. 

But this week, residents of the Golden Hills community got some good news: They are now the owners of the land their homes sit on, thanks in part to a 2020 state law that gave them the opportunity to purchase...

By the end of Shekinah Samaya-Thomas’s first date with her now-husband Chris, she had made two things very clear: She was going to get married — not necessarily to him — and she was going to own a house.

For two people looking to establish a life together in the San Francisco Bay Area, getting married was the easy part. Buying a house was another story — both had experienced homelessness and Mr. Samaya-Thomas had no credit when the two first met. Housing prices in the East Bay continued to rise.

Claire Fahy is an editorial assistant based in New York who covers breaking news and general assignment stories.

Through her search for a new apartment, one question on rental applications seemed to jump off the page at Debbi Halsted: Have you been evicted?

The answer was no — at least not yet.

But over the past few weeks, she had been worried her answer would change if she couldn’t pay her rent. Her Clinton landlord wanted to raise the payment from $650 a month to $1,250, more than a 90% increase. Halsted is on a fixed income and knew she couldn’t afford that rent. Even if she opted not to pay any other bill, her monthly income is just $1,119, which would leave her $131 short.

“There’s nothing right now that I see that I can afford. So what do you...

Mobile homes and similar single-family dwellings that are built elsewhere and placed on rented land have long been a low-cost option for aspiring homeowners across Pennsylvania.

Manufactured-housing communities are disproportionately in rural areas, but they’re not exclusive to small rural pockets. In Pennsylvania, a slight majority are in urban areas, particularly in suburbs outside midsize and large cities, according to the first statewide analysis of these communities, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Trends in lot vacancy suggest that demand for these homes is strongest “on the outskirts of larger urban areas,...

House Republicans objected to , arguing that the state shouldn't be setting mandates on manufactured home community owners that could push them out of business, further reducing Delaware’s affordable housing stock.

The First State Manufactured Housing Association, representing mobile home park operators, also expressed concerns about the changes one year after setting the other requirements for the industry. 

But Democrats argued that the changes were needed to offset the "unintended consequences" of the 2022 law indexing rent increases to inflation. 

"The residents of manufactured home communities are some of the most...

A new federal law proposed by three U.S. senators, including Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal, aims to protect mobile home owners. The law would curtail extreme rent increases and other predatory operator tactics.

In recent years, mobile home communities across the country continue the shift from locally owned and operated to hedge fund management.

Dave Delohery, president of the CT Mobile Homeowners Alliance, has lived in mobile homes for about a decade.

Delohery is a resident of the former Jensen mobile home community in Southington. It was purchased in 2019 by Sun Communities, the nation’s second largest manufactured home...

SUPERIOR — Douglas County was willing to give land away and found no takers.

Now officials are going to try it again.

The county's Land and Development Committee on Tuesday, June 27, directed the County Clerk’s Office to advertise parcels that once housed the north and south Country Acres trailer parks for sale again.

No bids were received after the property was advertised in June.

County Board Chairman Mark Liebaert said he anticipated receiving three bids on the property, which was valued at $33,600 during the last assessment in Parkland in 2013. Tuesday, he was worried the lack of bids would leave Douglas County to bear the cleanup...

It looks like the mobile home park at Dotsero will have broadband internet service in the near future.

During a Monday presentation to the Eagle County Board of Commissioners, Scott Lingle, the county’s director of innovation and technology, briefed the board about efforts to bring better service to the county’s rural areas.

A recent request for proposals was sent to internet service providers. Three bids came back. The least expensive bid came from Vero Broadband. The total project is expected to cost about $380,000, which includes both the mobile home park and the Two Rivers neighborhood. Eagle County will pay 75% of that amount, but...

Two years ago, residents of a north Fresno trailer park placed their hopes in local leaders to help them out of a bad situation.

Local leaders, namely the Fresno City Council and a Fresno Superior Court judge, only made things worse.

Today, roughly half as many people live in the former Trails End Mobile Home Park compared to before government “help” arrived. More than a dozen were evicted by new predatory landlords scheming to turn a quick profit off their plight. Those who remain also face eviction in less than a year, but not before being threatened with rent hikes and all sorts of unpleasantries in the meantime.

How did this happen?...

Novato is home to 415 senior citizens who have just learned they’re in danger of losing their homes.

All are residents of Marin Valley Mobile Country Club immediately adjacent to Hamilton. This is affordable housing. Rent for each pad is about $650 per month including utilities. The 315 units are not-very-mobile house trailers, single- or double-wide manufactured homes owned by individual residents.

About 41% of the residents of the well-maintained facility qualify for affordable housing. The reality is that the majority of the remainder chose MVMCC because their retirement savings coupled with Social Security places them in the bottom...