Episode 46: Manufactured Housing (aka Mobile Homes) with Esther Sullivan

Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This week's episode is with Professor Esther Sullivan. And our subject is manufactured housing. More specifically, we're talking about the communities in which these homes are often located, known variously as Manufactured Housing Communities, Mobile Home Parks, or Trailer Parks. Manufactured homes are a very important source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the US. And one of the few ways that low-income households are able to enjoy many, though not all, of the benefits of homeownership. They're also deeply stigmatized, they're disfavored by federal policy and local zoning regulations, and the communities in which they're located are increasingly under threat. This is our first conversation about manufactured housing on the show. So we spend a good chunk of time discussing its history and context. But the real focus of Esther's research here is the way that policy shapes how mobile home residents experience eviction when their communities are closed, whether for redevelopment or for other reasons. A few themes have developed over the past two years of producing this podcast, and one is the importance of policy design and close attention to implementation. This episode is definitely another example of that. Esther compares Florida which offers protections and financial support to manufactured home residents facing eviction with Texas where residents are pretty much on their own. Despite its protections, Florida residents are arguably worse off because of how poorly executed its programs are. This outcome is by no means inevitable. And the lesson certainly is not to follow Texas's lead on this, but this research does highlight once again how important it is to get the details right. The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Louis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante and Jason Sutedja with Divine Mutoni helping us out with transcripts. If you want to reach the show, you can email me at shanephillips@ucla.edu. And you can give us a five star rating at Apple or Spotify. Now let's get to our conversation with Professor Esther Sullivan.

Esther Sullivan is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Colorado Denver, and she's with us to talk about housing insecurity in Manufactured Housing Communities more commonly and somewhat mistakenly known as mobile home parks or trailer parks. Since this is our first time talking about manufactured housing on the show, we'll also be discussing some of the history and policy around this important but overlooked source of low cost housing. Esther, thanks for being here and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Esther Sullivan 2:50
Hi, yeah, thanks for having me.

Shane Phillips 2:52
Mike Lens is my co host. Hey, Mike.

Michael Lens 2:55
Thanks, Shane. Good to see you. Good to see you, Esther. I'm looking forward to this conversation. It was really fun to read about manufactured housing and mobile homes that are not so mobile, it turns out.

Shane Phillips 3:06
So we always kick off these interviews with a tour by our guests of a place they've lived somewhere they know. Well, Esther, before this meeting, you said you wanted to talk about Miami, which I believe is your hometown. Say Mike and I are visiting, where do we go?

Esther Sullivan 3:20
Yeah, I'm from Miami so where else would I take you but Miami. And if y'all came to Miami, we'd be in North Miami which is a place that a lot of people don't go when they come to Miami or they go to the beach, they go to South Miami where there's Coral Gables. But North Miami is certainly where it's at. It's super diverse place of an already extremely diverse city. And my town, where my parents still live, Miami Shores is directly adjacent to Little Haiti, a huge population center for Haitian immigrants and then their families, and there is just tons of good food all around. So we would probably take a tour starting from my house going down the boulevard, Biscayne Boulevard, a historic kinda boulevard that is still filled with all of the old school kind of motels and things that have been there, you know, since the hayday of Miami in the 50s. And we'd stop at all kinds of little places, including you know, going into grocery stores, to eat at their cafeterias where you can get some of the best Cuban food not necessarily from a Cuban restaurant, but inside the grocery store of the cafeteria is certainly the place to go.

Shane Phillips 4:42
That sounds like a pro tip to go to the grocery store for the Cuban food and not the Cuban restaurant.

Esther Sullivan 4:47
Oh yeah! You know that you're right because when you go in everybody on their lunch break from office workers to construction workers getting their food by the pound you get it by the pound so yeah,

Michael Lens 5:02
Well, that sounds delicious. That sounds fun. One of the conferences that I go to in the fall - well the ACSB conference, though, is the Planning Academics conference that we subjected Shane to in Toronto. He had some good times and some boring times.

Shane Phillips 5:20
It was Toronto though, it was great.

Michael Lens 5:22
Toronto was cool, and we had some good food in Toronto, Shane, but it's in Miami this fall, and people are unhappy because, you know, they want to boycott Florida, and a certain governor and all that sort of stuff. I'm not really into state boycotts, and I'm not really into skipping a trip to Miami. I've gone to a couple of conferences in Miami before, and I'm totally cool with it. So I'm gonna return this fall and I'm gonna go to the cafeteria.

Esther Sullivan 5:53
Good. And you know, if you're gonna boycott Florida, then boycott Florida but don't boycott Miami.

Michael Lens 5:58
I'm feeling that totally.

Shane Phillips 6:00
I actually thought where you were going with that boycott was the planners feeling like, you know, we shouldn't be building all this housing in Miami, which is going to be underwater in like 20 years.

Michael Lens 6:12
No, no, they're just trying to flex their muscle against Republican governors that...

Shane Phillips 6:18
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so the focus of our conversation today is an article Esther published in American Sociological Review in 2017, titled, 'Displaced in Place: Manufactured Housing, Mass Eviction, and the Paradox of State Intervention'. She's also the author of a 2018 book titled 'Manufactured Insecurity, Mobile, Home Parks and Americans Tenuous Right to Place', which we'll also likely touch on in this conversation, and is a great resource for anyone looking to learn more about the subject. The article is an ethnographic study of how mass evictions were carried out in two states, Texas and Florida, and it serves as something of a cautionary tale for how poorly designed government assistance programs can leave residents worse off, than if they'd never received any support at all. And to be clear, that's not an argument against government assistance or other public programs. But it is, I think, a call to make sure they're designed and implemented carefully, because good intentions alone aren't always enough. So we'll be talking a lot about eviction today. But as I said, we also want this to be our sort of primer on manufactured housing. So let's set the stage here. Esther, at a very high level, why should we care about manufactured housing here in the US? How common is this type of housing and what kinds of people and communities does it serve?

Esther Sullivan 7:44
Yeah, we should absolutely care about manufactured housing, because in the United States, manufactured housing is a major part of our affordable housing infrastructure even though we don't often hear about that. And that's in part because a lot of the affordability of manufactured housing comes just by nature of the affordability of its production. So producing housing in a factory setting means that these manufactured homes cost less than half the cost to build as a site-built home. So they're just more affordable to produce, and that results in a more affordable product. And so today, you know, 18 million Americans are living in a manufactured home. And these homes not only provide, you know, a deeply affordable source of housing, but they're also really our nation's lowest cost form of homeownership. In 2021, 1 of every 10 new single family homes was a manufactured home, and nearly 1 in 4 of the homes that are purchased by a first time low income household is a manufactured home. That means that manufactured housing is a primary vehicle for low income home ownership in the US. So in 2011, 70%, of all homes sold under $125,000 - 70%, were manufactured homes. Why is that? Because you can't buy a home for under $125,000 If its prebuilt

Shane Phillips 9:23
Yeah, and I think, I don't know, coming from Washington state and living in California, at least in Los Angeles, I feel like a lot of times these homes can be hidden depending on the community you live in, or the city or the metro area. And I know both of those states actually have quite a bit of manufactured housing, but it does feel like a very hidden housing type.

Esther Sullivan 9:45
Well, certainly I will probably talk about that more, because that's not by accident but by design.

Michael Lens 9:52
Right. Yeah.

Shane Phillips 9:53
That's a great point.

Esther Sullivan 9:54
And a lot of that design comes from a century of planning policies that have effectively kept this housing hidden from view, and kept it clustered into manufactured home communities. So you know, like when we kind of get to talk about what is manufactured housing, it's important to note that not all manufactured housing is located in a mobile home park. In fact, it's only about 40%, it's less than half that of manufactured housing that's located in a manufactured home community, or what people will call a mobile home park or trailer park. Now, in many cities, planning ordinances will require that manufactured housing can only be sited in a manufactured home community, or mobile home park. But you know, in more outlying areas, and sometimes within metro areas, these homes can be sited on a piece of property that you also own, you know, that the homeowner owns. And in that case, they're not really too different from just the structure is different, you know, from a site-built housing, but the basic housing, the land tenure, and all those things are the same. Yeah, we're gonna talk a lot about mobile home communities, and there, the housing tenure is quite different because you don't own the land, you're renting it.

Shane Phillips 11:06
Yeah, yeah. So let's get into that a little bit further, kind of taking this one step further back, like, what is manufactured housing? What do we get wrong when we refer to it as mobile homes or trailer homes, and what sets it apart from the single family and multifamily housing that we're probably all more familiar with? Whether we're talking about design or location or ownership, really any other characteristics you think we should be aware of? Like, what is the distinction here?

Esther Sullivan 11:34
Sure, you know, want to see there's less and less of a distinction because innovations in manufacturing have led these these homes to be more like "traditional site built homes," they look more like traditional site built homes, and that's in part because the market kind of demands that. But certainly, you know, manufactured housing did originate from travel trailers, true auto campers, from the 1920s, that could be pulled behind a vehicle. But since years after World War II, this housing has been designed as permanent housing. So manufactured homes are designed and produced in a factory. And that's really the only thing that distinguishes them from site build housing, their dimensions are different, because they need to be pulled down a highway, right to be transported from the factory and installed on site. And the production of them is different, because it is factory, you know, prefabrication. But these homes are designed to be permanent housing, and indeed, they are permanent housing. So like a 2011 American Community Survey estimated that 79% of manufactured homes never move from the first site where they're installed. And that's because they're not intended to move again, and moving them again, can result in serious structural damage. And so in answer to your question, what do we get wrong when we call them mobile homes, well we get everything wrong. These are immobile mobile homes. Yeah, they're not, you know, they're designed to be mobile once from the factory, where they're installed on site. That's what makes their production affordable, you know that you can do that but after that, just like any home, they slack in, they settle, and they're not intended to be mobile again. And then also, just technically, in 1976, HUD instituted what we call the HUD code, it's the HUD code for manufactured housing. And in a regulatory sense, all homes built after 1976 are called manufactured homes so they should be called manufactured homes.

Shane Phillips 13:43
Got it? And I think we'll come to the the ownership structure and how that at least sometimes differs often differs, particularly in Manufactured Housing Communities. Maybe we can save that because we're gonna be talking about eviction, and it plays a big role in why the evictions that take place in Manufactured Housing Communities are very different in many in some respects than other kinds of evictions. But in recent years, I've gotten more interested in the history of manufactured housing in the US and the policy and regulation that's shaped its impact and growth, or contraction, as it may be here. And a while back, I came across this presentation from 2018 by Schmitz,Teixeira and Wright which we'll put in the show notes. It argues that the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, and the National Association of Homebuilders played a major role in the genesis of our housing supply and affordability crisis, really, by undermining manufactured housing in pretty much every possible way starting in the 1960s. And I think, you know, attributing our housing crisis to this is maybe going a bit too far, but it does seem like it played a role. This statistic from that presentation blew my mind that in the 1960s is anywhere between 10% and 60% of detached single unit houses were factory built depending on the year. So up to 60% of single-family homes built in a year were manufactured homes. And as the manufactured share of the housing market kept growing, HUD influenced by the NIH B and probably many others stepped in to create these barriers to production. Everything from creating a national building code that was more strict than local code requirements applied to traditional stick-built or site-built housing, I think that's what you were referring to a moment ago, to requiring a permanent chassis on some manufactured homes, even if they were never intended to be moved after their first installation. And that regulation was important, not only because, as I understand it, it increased costs, but also because homes with chassis on them were prohibited in many cities by their zoning ordinances. So it was a way kind of a backdoor way of just banning these homes in many locations. To the extent that you're familiar with the rise and the fall of manufactured housing in America, and the reasons behind it, could you share some of that with our audience? I think this history is really interesting.

Esther Sullivan 16:10
Yeah, certainly. And, you know, these figures that you cited that in between 10 and 60%, of single unit homes were manufactured a factory built in the 1960s, this is right. I mean, the 1960s and into the 70s was really a boom time for manufactured housing, and also for manufactured home communities for the first mobile home parks. And that's why a lot of these parks date to that period. And certainly there was a kind of concerted effort on the part of home builders and all of the adjacent fields - trades people, etc, to kind of limit the production of manufactured housing as a source of competition. But you know, my work has focused actually more on the limitations that came from local jurisdictions, from planners, and how that has really limited the supply and the ability to place a manufactured home within an existing community. So you know, going all the way back to the pre-World War II years, as manufactured, well, at these times, these were true auto campers; as campers began to consolidate into what were called then municipal parks, jurisdictions responded to these parks, and to the people living in them because to be clear in the post-depression years, these were often low-income families traveling in search of work using an auto camper for that reason. Municipalities responded to this population by enacting restrictive ordinances and using zoning to outright prohibit manufactured housing or require that it be located only within a manufactured home community and that those communities be zoned out of any zone that was zoned for residential or single family. That's why today we see across the nation that manufactured home communities are more often located in commercial and industrial zones. And so this is a really long, you know, long history of using planning in this way, and it continues today. So, like in Roth Pandal's survey of land use regulations across the 50 largest metro, they calculate that half of local governments within the 50 largest metros have a zoning ordinance that outright prohibits the placement of manufactured homes. And that's really common, and that's why we don't see the production of new Manufactured Housing Communities because local regulations make it so difficult for a new community to be developed. And these local zoning codes make it really difficult for even the placement of a single manufactured home on a lot. Most often manufactured housing cannot be located next to single-family housing.

Michael Lens 19:08
Sounds like we have a new like Fair Housing fight, or I mean, maybe not new. I mean it maybe I'm just new to this. This is relatively new to this idea. I mean, I've been exposed to your work Esther on this for three or four years, but like, I don't hear a lot of conversations about this in fair housing. And we'll probably we'll talk about policy towards the end today but this is a very obvious form of exclusionary zoning that we have and have had for a long time.

Esther Sullivan 19:36
Yeah, I completely agree. And, you know, I do think it's beginning to be more of a conversation. So like the Biden's Housing Supply Action Plan, they specifically call out how zoning and local land use regulations have limited the supply of affordable housing and they they're calling for zoning to be revised to facilitate the development of more affordable housing and they include manufactured housing

Michael Lens 19:59
Ah, cool.

Esther Sullivan 20:01
So we're just including is like a huge win inside housing...

Michael Lens 20:06
Yeah, yeah, I assumed it is

Shane Phillips 20:08
I do feel like that focus on the local role is a really useful corrective too because I think there's, kind of reminds me of a recent conversation we had with Todd Michney, about the origins of redlining, and how, you know, there can be a simple story about pointing the finger at the Homeowners' Loan Corporation or the Federal Housing Administration, or what have you. But in reality, there was just, there were people in the public sector, private sector, everywhere in between, there were all kinds of pushing in the same direction. And so to pin it on one group, or one institution is missing a lot of other things that were going on. And so I think it's, it's useful to point out that this was coming from the cities at the same time, or maybe, you know, one influence the other, but it was also the federal government and the cities. So you point out early in the article that manufactured housing represents the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the country, and that mobile homes provide 66% of the new affordable homes produced here. But I think that latter stat(istic) that is now a couple decades old. Since you're not able to get into this in your article, what is the state of manufactured housing today, both in terms of new production and the loss or preservation of existing homes and communities?

Esther Sullivan 21:26
Yeah, that's a good point, because that statistic is a bit old. So it's like throughout the 90s, and up until 2000, it's true 66%, of new affordable housing produced, was manufactured housing. And that's because those like yours in the late 90s, represented a real boom time for the production of manufactured housing and the lending on manufactured housing. So I don't want to get too much in the weeds with it. But actually, there was a very similar boom, and then bust that occurred in the manufactured housing industry, as what occurred later in the site built home ownership of the housing collapse of 2008. Almost the same kind of process in which lending became more available to more families who may not have previously qualified for loans. And the production of manufactured housing really skyrocketed. It's kind of interesting, just because if we were paying more attention to manufactured housing, this would have been a case where we might have seen some of the warning signs, but certainly since 2000, production of manufactured housing has kind of fallen a bit. But still, today 2020, the US Census tells us that it's about 10% of all new home construction. So one to 10 new homes constructed is a manufactured home.

Shane Phillips 22:48
Yeah, and it's probably, I don't know what the figures are today but I would guess that multifamily housing is maybe 30% or so in the US. I'm sure it varies quite a bit year to year, but we talked about multifamily constantly, and we should, but we almost never talked about manufactured housing and 10% is a very significant number of homes.

Esther Sullivan 23:10
Yeah, and I just I said this before, but I think it's important to reiterate that manufactured housing is a source of homeownership, you know, and there's a real demand for low income homeownership in the US. And that's part of what makes manufactured housing, you know, so appealing to so many people.

Shane Phillips 23:29
Yeah, I mean, when people are facing rising rents, and these other you know, this housing instability to be able to have any kind of security in your home and kind of predictability is really valuable, especially for a low income household. But we'll talk about it's not quite as stable in many cases as traditional homewnership

Michael Lens 23:47
Yeah the security part

Shane Phillips 23:49
It's an improvement. But yeah, there's a difference. So let's start to move into your research on the displacement of mobile homeowners in Texas and Florida, and how they're different policy regimes in both states affected the experiences of those mobile homeowners. And I'd like to hear a bit about why you were interested in mobile homeowners in particular. We've kind of started to get at this, and we'll get to Texas and Florida soon. but just thinking about mobile home owners in general, manufactured housing owners in general or maybe I should say, owners of manufactured housing in Manufactured Housing Communities or mobile home communities, what is it about their situation that makes them especially vulnerable to eviction, or that makes their situation unique compared to someone renting an apartment, or a house or someone who owns their home and mostly only needs to maybe worry about, like foreclosure, for example?

Esther Sullivan 24:47
Sure. So we've talked a bit about manufactured housing, you know, at a high level, but now we're going to zoom in to talking about those manufactured homes that are located within manufactured home communities and these are really like a totally distinct housing type, and they really have a distinct housing tenure that's like halfway between owner and renters - this divided housing tenure, (and) that's why I call these halfway homeowners. In mobile home communities in manufacturing communities, about 80% of residents across the nation own the home, many of them outright, you know, they paid it off, but they rent the land where that home is placed. And that's really important, because that's part of what makes housing and manufactured home communities so deeply affordable, right? As we've talked about, the manufactured housing is already less than half the cost to build than a site-built home. But when you're able to place in a manufactured home community and rent a lot for that home, you don't need to purchase land to become a homeowner. And we know that land is the biggest cost of any, any home purchase, you know, it's the land that's of value, it's the land that's gonna cost.

Shane Phillips 25:58
There's a big trade off there, though, in that the land is also what appreciates over time. Yeah, whereas even in Los Angeles, we say, you know, our home values are going up 10% or however much every year. We say it's our home values, but it's actually the land value. The value of the home goes down over time, and so this is just as true for mobile homeowners, but because they don't own that land, there's a vulnerability there right?

Esther Sullivan 26:23
Yeah, and that depreciation aspect is where you get this, like commonly held with wisdom, that manufactured homes depreciate over time, whereas other housing appreciate. Well, no, it's not the housing, it's not the structure that's appreciating. So it's something unique about the structure of a manufactured home that depreciates

Shane Phillips 26:41
Hmm I never thought about that if that contributes to this idea that like, you know, manufactured housing is lower quality, it's just not worth it, it's not worth anything or, yeah, that's super interesting.

Michael Lens 26:52
All of our homes are depreciate or declining in quality, right?

Shane Phillips 26:56
Yeah, like there's something qualitatively different about these site built structures, and like they are different, but they're not magically appreciating in a way that manufactured homes are not.

Esther Sullivan 27:08
Economists have shown that in cases where were manufactured homeowners own the land, their homes appreciate relatively similarly to nearby site build housing.

Michael Lens 27:18
There you go!

Esther Sullivan 27:19
So beyond this issue of appreciation, that's certainly an issue in manufactured home communities. But the bigger issue is just the lack of property rights, the lack of tenure security, the lack of rights to the land under these homeowners homes, makes them extremely vulnerable to multiple kinds of forms of housing insecurity. And that's everything from rent hikes to fees upon fees that landlords, owners of the manufactured home communities, charge, to failure to maintain properties, which can put these residents at risk, especially in times of disaster of flood. And ultimately, the thing that I discuss in my book, which is that landlords can decide to close these parks to sell that property for a more lucrative, you know, land use to simply retire and get out of the business all kinds of reasons. And in doing so, they produce a mass eviction, you know, sometimes hundreds of households in a single moment who need to find a way to move these immobile homes in order to hold on to their largest asset and usually all their accrued housing wealth.

Michael Lens 28:37
So Esther, the ethnographic approach to this research is fascinating and is so much deeper than than most social science research, and certainly not what I do. And I think we would love to hear from you the fuller story of how you did this, how you selected your cases, and that entails you identifying mobile home parks that were likely to be close soon, and moving in yourself as a resident months before eviction notices were served. So you could experience this alongside the other residents at every stage, from before the eviction notices were served to after everyone had left. So we'd love to have you walk us through that experience. And you know, your reasoning for taking this approach to this important topic.

Esther Sullivan 29:27
Because residents in manufactured home communities have this divided tenure, you know, where they don't own the land under their homes, they're vulnerable to these mass evictions. And I saw manufactured home communities close in Texas where I was doing my PhD at the time. And I just wondered about where these residents went and how they strategized over a move like this which is so much more complex than a standard eviction because you're moving yourself, your household and your largest asset, you know. For most American, lower income Americans who have achieved the American dream of homeownership, almost all of their household wealth is tied up in their home

Michael Lens 30:15
Right.

Shane Phillips 30:16
Moving sucks enough without moving your house.

Esther Sullivan 30:20
Yea

Shane Phillips 30:22
Taking the whole house with you

Esther Sullivan 30:23
Yeah, and so I wondered how did they accomplish this and what really is even the system. So I began the work by using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map closures. I chose one Texas County, basically, Harris County, Houston, because that's the county with the most manufactured housing in Texas, which is the state with the most manufactured housing. And I mapped closures over a decade, parcels that were coded as having a land use of manufactured home community where that land use changed to something else over time. And using this kind of spatial analysis, I got a sense of where park closures might occur. And certainly that park closures were occurring in Houston, hundreds of communities closed over that time period, which we have to think in many thousands of these manufactured home community households. But that did not give even the beginning of the picture, which is really about the process. And that's what ethnography, which is the social science method of gathering data embedded within a community alongside people who are experiencing whatever phenomenon is of interest, you know, to the researcher, experiencing that phenomenon, and documenting it over time. So ethnography is really good at capturing process, you know, any type of social phenomenon, that's, that's a process occurring over time. And that's really what an eviction is, right? It's not a moment in time certainly. It's a process of becoming evicted, of grappling with eviction, and then of picking up the pieces afterward, really. So it was clear to me early on,that I needed to be in place, hopefully before the moment of eviction, and document that over time within these closing communities, and that's how I design my study. I chose mobile homes or likely to close mobile home parks in Florida and Texas, because these are the states with the largest manufactured home community, populations or manufactured housing populations, and they are two states with very different regulatory regimes. So you know, like, an object of analysis for me in this study was how evictions unfold under different state laws - that kind of structure, the compensation that people might receive the support that they might receive, and their basic protections like length of notice period, that kind of thing. And Florida and Texas have really different kinds of state structures for this. That's in part because Florida had an existing statewide Manufactured Home Residents Association who had fought for protections in state statutes. And Texas, you know, people will be surprised, had almost nothing, they had...

Michael Lens 33:39
... wild west.

Esther Sullivan 33:41
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Shane Phillips 33:43
Did the Florida associations that push for this was this like retirement, you know, senior groups primarily, or was it more widespread

Esther Sullivan 33:52
Yeah. You know, that is an important point. Now, I don't know who was active in the Association at the time that they passed that legislation but it is true that Florida's population and Texas as population are quite different. Where Florida has many of these snowbirds, wealthier retirees who have moved into manufactured housing in Florida as part of the retirement, whereas Texas, a large part of the Texas manufactured housing, residents are low income, Latino households, and it's a very important source of housing for recent immigrants. And so just like the kind of political capital there is a very different.

Shane Phillips 34:35
Yeah, I feel like I, a lot of manufactured housing communities are these 55 and older communities, seniors only basically,

Esther Sullivan 34:42
And the community that I lived in and Florida was a 55 and older community,

Shane Phillips 34:47
which is, you know, for the listeners you are not 55 or older, but we can talk about that.

Michael Lens 34:54
No official documentation here but you know, judging by a year of PhD received, you know, and yes. Esther would have a very good skin routine if she were above 55 particularly when this was done. So more seriously, was this the first ethnography you did you know as a as a principal investigator, I guess?

Esther Sullivan 35:22
Well, I was a graduate, you know, I began this work as a PhD student, this was my dissertation, but it wasn't my first ethnography actually, because I had done an ethnographic study for my master's thesis, which was about cohousing. And so I engaged with a cohousing community that was trying to develop in Austin and eventually did develop. And so I had experience conducting participant observation, you know, being embedded in the community, being at their meetings, being at their dinner, being with them when they're home, when they were off, driving around with them, talking about housing, (and) examining the processes, the collective processes that they use to make decisions. So I have had experience doing that and had wonderful, wonderful training in ethnographic methods at the University of Texas at Austin, which has an urban ethnography lab, and is just a great place to become an ethnographer.

Michael Lens 36:17
Yeah, so I mean, that's the the training, but then I would imagine, embedding yourself for your entire, you know, lived experience really in it for a period of time is a different matter altogether, right? Actually spending the amount of time that you spent in these settings, and getting to know people was something you had to probably work pretty hard at. So I guess, a couple of questions about this experience as a researcher, you know, I'm a researcher but I sit in front of a computer and look at data, and you know, I don't go out in the real world very often. What was it like to live in these communities, particularly as they're going through a lot of trauma? And like, you know, I also have, what may be a personal question is like, I assume you've lived apart from family, you've lived in a different location than you would have lived in had you not been doing this work right. So I don't know, if you were living apart from a partner or a spouse or whatever, like, how was that experience for you?

Shane Phillips 37:33
And if I can jump in just really quick here, Mike referenced the amount of time spent living in these communities. And I don't think we've talked about that, if you could just share, I think we're talking between the two locations. Well, over a year, right?

Esther Sullivan 37:47
Oh, yeah almost two years yeah. Yeah, you bring up a great point, Mike, because with ethnography, unlike all other social science methods, you know, it's really the ethnographer, who is the instrument of data collection

Michael Lens 41:54
Right

Esther Sullivan 38:01
You know, we put our bodies into spaces and collect data, you know, we use relationships with people, our interactions over long periods of time, all day long, you know, to collect data, and to serve as kind of that instrument of record. And that's part of the craft of ethnography is like tuning that instrument to do it in the most, I think, ethical. Also, I don't want to say like, correct, because, you know, there's always positionality right there, but in a way that gets to the meat, or the truth as people see it, of people's experience, and allows you to kind of encompass that whole world. So for this ethnography, I moved into communities in Texas, and Florida. All of these were closing communities, and I chose them with really kind of specific requirements, that the community be up for some kind of sale or redevelopment or a rezoning, that the community members themselves would know that the community was likely to close but that process hadn't started yet. And that allowed me to get embedded in the community before the closures began, and at least gather some data on what community life was like before the closures and that actually became a really important piece of the entire analysis. Those weeks and Florida, months and months before the eviction took place. So this ethnography took place over two years - 11 months of that was in Florida, a long process where residents went through a rezoning hearing that decided that their park would close down and then spent many months dealing with trying to access state aid in order to move and then months afterwards where I followed them I'm into new forms of housing sometimes into homelessness, and kept in contact with them afterwards as I moved to Texas for seven months where I lived in, (and) worked in parks that were closing in Alvin, Texas outside of Houston, and then followed up for the next six months with resonance there. So over that two year period, I was deeply embedded or living full time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week in these communities and collecting data through really detailed field notes of all my conversations, and also audio recordings of anything that was directly relevant to moving to housing to the eviction. And I recorded and transcribed those, and that kind of served as the universe of data from which I analyzed later and wrote this article, and then the book. Yeah, conducting ethnography is hard for for those reasons. Oftentimes, ethnographers leave the familiar, you know, and traverse into, you know, different or new contexts. That's not all ethnography, you know, ethnography can be very close, you know, the things with which the researcher is already intimately familiar, and those produce some wonderful ethnographies as well. And I had to, you know, recognize that I was in an incredibly privileged position to be able to conduct this ethnography over two years, you know, I had funding in order to do it, I didn't have commitments that I didn't have kids or something that would, that wouldn't allow me to go into the field. I'm a white woman, and I experienced just incredible, like, generosity on the part of people, and I recognize, you know, that there are many elements of like my race, gender, class representation, that would lead people to just like, accept me, pretty much. I mean, people were still suspicious of me at first and had to take a long time to gain rapport; I definitely don't want to act like I just showed up, started conducting ethnography I mean. I moved into these communities, people were very skeptical of me at first. In Florida, they were like, "why are you living here in 55, and older, manufactured home community". And you know, even more than just being, I was 30 at the time, so even more than not being 55, and older, they were really kind of up in arms that that the landlord allowed me to rent.

Michael Lens 42:17
Right

Esther Sullivan 42:38
It's kind of a funny, like, we know that there's a real stigma, as much as there's a stigma against, you know, manufactured housing, there's a stigma against renters. And so these manufactured housing community residents who really identify as homeowners were kind of up in arms that the landlord allowed me to rent a house for a mobile home in the community for the period that I was there, but they also kind of said, like, well, everything's going to hell, because now we're getting evicted. So you know, they're just letting the community go downhill

Shane Phillips 43:10
With these doctoral student registry and...

look with the cat!

Esther Sullivan 43:21
Yeah, so it was a slow process of gaining rapport, but ultimately, I did. And then in Texas, you know, residents were skeptical of me, because these communities were I mean, 97 to 100%, Latino. Many people were recent immigrants, and the way that the parks outside of Houston offered housing was oftentimes through like social networks - people would know someone who was immigrating to the United States or needed housing, and they would let them know about an opening in the manufactured home community. And so they they were really tight knit communities where people knew each other were related to each other, and one resident, who later became a dear friend, told me the first time I showed up on her porch, she thought I was a social worker. And was quite concerned that why I was there. So, of course, part of the ethnographic method is that slow process of gaining rapport with participants in the study over time,

Michael Lens 44:21
Wild.

Shane Phillips 44:22
Yeah, I'm sure that's part of why it takes such a long time, you have to invest those months and years. So getting now into the experiences of eviction and the different ways that Florida and Texas regulate mobile, home parks, and the kinds of assistance that they offer when these evictions are occurring. Could you give us an overview of how each state deals with this and then tell us how they play out in the lives of residents. Both states are pretty Laissez Faire and market oriented so I think listeners might be surprised to hear that Florida has a lot more protections than Texas. And then I think that surprise would be compounded by how much worse the experience actually was for those Florida mobile homeowners despite the additional regulations and protections and assistance that the state law requires.

Esther Sullivan 45:11
I chose Texas and Florida as the sites for this study precisely because they had a very different kind of state systems of protections and aid. In the event of mobile home park closure, one of these mass evictions where a landlord sells the land or redevelops. The land or code enforcement requires that community to be closed down and residents are all forced to move. In Florida, there was an existing system of state aid delivered through the Mobile Home Park relocation Corporation, which is like a state statute to set up a fund which is paid into by all manufactured home community residents a small fee when they register their home. And then a small fee paid per lot for all owners of manufactured home communities in Florida. And so those funds go into this kind of general fund, where in the event of a land use change and a park closure, the residents in Florida are first entitled to longer notice period per state statute, they have to be informed that there is an application for a land use change on their property, which gives them more time to prepare. And then they're entitled to compensation for relocation. So it's about $2,000, for a single section manufactured home, more for a double wide more for a double section, and then $1,500 If you abandon your home. Now, those amounts are not commensurate to the amount that it costs to actually move one of these homes. And that's a big part of what created the complex and really disruptive eviction period for residents which we can talk about. But in Texas, there's just no system. Residents in Texas can be they're required to give 60 days notice that the park is closing, but there's no enforcement system in Texas. And so in practice residents, and I documented this, received as little as 30 days notice that their park was closing, and they're forced to move their home, contract and move or find a mobile home park move or find an available space for their home, all on their own. So the research was designed to compare the experiences of eviction under these different systems, and I imagined that the residents in Florida would have different and better outcomes than the residents in Texas. But what I found was the administration of state aid, the system for delivering state aid really mattered in Florida. And this is important beyond just like thinking about this one like small system of state aid for manufactured housing residents in Florida because this is a bigger story about how the delivery of assistance to residents in need, whether that be because they've lost a job or just experienced a disaster or are being evicted right? The delivery of assistance, public assistance to residents in need, has really shifted over the last decades, as we've moved more towards a market oriented or neoliberal approach to delivering social services.

Michael Lens 48:39
The phrase that you use frequently in the book and in the paper is poverty governance right? Well, you were just talking about specifically is the administration of state aid in this time of housing crisis, right? And, you know, again, the phrase that you use repeatedly is poverty governance, and this is, as you're noting right now is part of a larger shift in how we govern poverty or do not govern poverty, or try to, you know, help people who are in economic crisis. And so this is a good time, I think, to talk about how state and federal governments have shifted their kind of responsibility in the way that they administer state aid, and you know, specifically how this affects what you find in Florida and Texas, in poverty governance in manufactured housing.

Shane Phillips 49:37
Yeah, I think as you talk about poverty governance, if you can tie that into how the Texas and Florida residents experience their evictions.

Michael Lens 49:47
Right right

Shane Phillips 49:49
You know, we understand that Florida has this more complicated system and more aid in place and so forth. And yet you did not find that residents there at really felt that they were better off because of it. And so, you know, how does that all come about? Like, what were the experience was like?

Unknown Speaker 50:05
I use this term poverty governance to explicitly make links between this specific housing program and these larger frameworks that have really transformed as market oriented and neoliberal approaches to delivering aid have shifted. And so a big part of that, you know, in an era of neoliberal restructuring, which you know here on mute, this term is used in all kinds of different ways right? In here, I'm really talking about the program of neoliberalism, as I'm highlighting its preference for private over public control. And its prioritizing social service provision that's delivered through kind of market-oriented approaches or with public-private partnerships,

Shane Phillips 51:04
Sort of like creating a profit incentive to solve social problems.

Esther Sullivan 51:09
Well, it certainly does create a profit incentive to to solve social problems.

Shane Phillips 51:14
I didn't intend that to be too positive of framing, because I think you could definitely interpret in a very negative way. That's sort of more how I intended it at least

Michael Lens 51:14
is it a bug? Is it a feature?

Shane Phillips 51:24
Exactly.

Esther Sullivan 51:24
Exactly, because the justification would be more like, you know, the market can do things or deliver things more efficiently than the state ever could. The markets (are) going to provide people with the kind of choices that they need in this moment of crisis, that the state never could, the market is going to be more efficient. All of these kinds of justifications are behind this restructuring, the intent of this restructuring. But you know, as part of this restructuring, we see across the board that, you know, regulatory responses to crises, like eviction, but also like, you know, disasters. health crises even, occur within a framework where state action is kind of dismantled, and direct state regulations are replaced by market logics. And so those market logics creep into the management of those that need public sector services in that moment. So, you know, manufactured housing community, I use this term poverty governance to think about well, first of all, how manufactured housing communities kind of arise in a context where the state has relieved itself of the duty to directly provide affordable housing, right? That's part of why there's such demand in these manufactured home communities. But they also shape the structure of aid in moments of housing instability, like when these mass evictions occur, and they certainly did in Florida where the policy is, you know, is to involve market actors in the delivery of aid. So, Florida relies on this voucher, this aid that's given to residents, $2,000, in order to move their home during a closure of a manufactured home community, and on paper that sounds a lot better, right than in Texas where residents were given no direct assistance, no funds to pay for these really costly and complex moves of their home. But in Florida, the structure of the aid was such that it was the aid was given not as a direct payment to residents, but instead as a voucher, which could be redeemed through a licensed mobile home mover. And as I document in this paper, that created like an entire cottage industry that kind of sprung up around attracting these vouchers and moving homes into larger, mainly corporately owned, manufactured home communities who would provide additional funds to movers because it costs more than $2,000 to move a home. it costs up to $10,000, at that time in Florida, it costs about $10,000 to move one of these homes, they cost more today. So corporate parks would would pay for part of the real cost of moving those homes and in doing so they would attract these homes into their corporate owned parks. Residents rents in these circumstances doubled and sometimes tripled when they moved into corporate parks, corporate parks filled any lot vacancies that they had, and so it was a real win-win for movers and corporately owned parks. But in the process, residents were caught up in a bewildering, really, eviction process that ended up taking months and months for residents to move and then resettle in their homes. And that process really produced terrible social and health consequences in Florida that I didn't see in Texas as much.

Shane Phillips 55:18
Yeah, I do want to emphasize here, you know, a point that comes through in your article, which is that the Texas homeowners who were evicted, this was, of course, very traumatic for them as well. They had, as you said you know, 30-day notice in many cases, and no financial support for moving, and yet, they mostly figured it out. And the fact that they had to have this all taken care of within 30 days, and then it was kind of solved, and there's, you know, repercussions to this, that they'll likely be leaving with financial and otherwise for much longer. But compared to the Florida residents who had this month's long notice period of uncertainty and then working with these movers and corporate parks was another source of uncertainty where the movers would do things in bulk as a way to sort of reduce costs. Presumably they'd move a bunch of homes all at once, and then drop them off at the new location, but maybe not actually connect them and make them habitable for weeks or months down the road, and residents wouldn't really know at what time they would be able to move in, it would just be kind of checking in day by day. And I think there's this really interesting dynamic happening in which Florida system is more rule-bound and deliberative, and that can be a good thing, certainly, but the state doesn't seem to have made the resources available or have the capacity to move through the various steps and approvals in that system in a timely manner, or efficient manner. So these rules and processes that are nominally in the interest of mobile homeowners become actually their biggest source of frustration. You know, I think we've focused so much on the cost of this, we forget that there are other things that people care about. Meanwhile, in Texas, they don't require really anything of anyone in terms of regulations, and there are fewer protections and resources for homeowners but in large part, they seem to end up happier with the process overall. We have these protections in Florida without any oversight, and this process without bureaucratic support or state capacity. And when that is the case, it seems to be worse, actually, than having no protections or no process at all, at least from the perspective of many of these residents.

Esther Sullivan 57:43
Certainly, this is not an argument for no protections, right, or for...

Shane Phillips 57:50
Was gonna get there but yeah...

Esther Sullivan 57:51
I mean, that's the thing. Yeah, that that this kind of analysis does, because it gets so deep into the weeds of like really understanding the administration of aid. But the larger picture is that these residents in both states experienced a deeply disruptive relocation process, beyond just being evicted right? The process of relocation was deeply disruptive, and that dislocation was felt and continued to be felt by residents long after they were resettled in their homes. And so the comparison between Texas and Florida, it is important and that it highlights exactly, as you said, that the administration of aid matters, right, i's not just the existence of aid. But it's the capacity of whether it's states or localities to administer aid in a way that actually reaches residents and addresses their needs, rather than treats them as a source of like currency to be traded in a market and as a site where profits can be extracted from their eviction process. So, you know, that's the kind of point of the comparison between Florida and Texas. But I mean, the residents in Texas still were financially and socially just profoundly affected by their forced removal from their parks, and then the dissolution of the communities that were so important to them and the forms of social support that they had in these communities which were dismantled by the eviction process.

I think to help illustrate the shortcomings of Florida's approach. The experience of Maddie and Walter is a really heartbreaking distillation of the harm that can be done here, and what you've called 'the paradox of state intervention'. Could you tell us that story of Maddie and Walter and what that phrase the paradox of state intervention means in relation to it.

Maddie and Walter were my neighbors that lived across the street from me in Florida in the 55 and older community where I lived. Walter was a World War II vet, I think they were 94 and 93 at the time. They had been married for 70 years. They grew up together on an island off the coast of Maine, and Walter told me that in their class, in their high school class of seven, Maddie was valedictorian, and he was ranked number seven. And they were wonderful people, and they were actually part of three generations of their family that lived in this manufactured home community. So two of their sons and one of their son's wife, and their kids all lived in this manufactured home community and were evicted and flung to different manufactured home communities in different counties by this eviction process as residents just sought out any space that they could find. Now, the administration of the state aid during this process created additional insecurities. Where as these mobile home movers got contracts for as many as like moving like 80 individual homes from one park because of this network of like, I guess I should call it, yeah because of this web of contacts between mobile home parks and movers and getting the state aid, some of these movers would get contracts for moving as many as 80 homes from a single park. Whereas in Texas, residents contracted with a single mover to move their home and got it done that way. Maddie and Walter were caught up dealing with these movers who move their home and then these two 94 year old residents who had many, many existing health issues and mobility issues were out of their home for six weeks as they waited for this the home to be reinstalled. I mean, their common kind of response to when I would check in on the home, they would just answer the single word "permits, permits Esther permits" like we're not there yet. Maddie would go into the ICU following a stroke inside the abandoned trailer they were living, in their former park while their home was being installed in this new park. And Walter went and checked on her every day and I was there during their conversations. The main focus of their conversations was progress on the house, progress on installing the house, and installing the ramp to get Maddie into the house on plans to fix up their screen porch, was totally dismantled during the move. And eventually, Walter got back into his house, but Maddie had died over those six weeks where she was in the hospital. She never saw her house again. Walter entered it alone, I was with him, and it was heartbreaking. So this is an extreme case in which Maddie died during that period but across the board, residents experienced very serious impacts to their physical and mental health during this period where they were staying with family or friends or in abandoned trailers, or getting housing wherever they could as their homes were reinstalled in these new parks.

Shane Phillips 1:03:54
So we've touched on this already, and I just want to restate even if the outcomes for the Texas mobile home owners were less bad than those of the Florida residents, they certainly weren't good. And you're very explicit about that in your article. In the conclusion, you make a few recommendations for reform that I was hoping you could talk about. And I'm curious whether you've seen any positive movement on any of this as a result of your work, or other people's research and advocacy whether in Florida and Texas or anywhere else, because I'm sure these issues are not limited to those two states.

Esther Sullivan 1:04:31
The bottom line is that these moves are extremely disruptive, and they have long term costs for residents in manufacturing home communities, but also for the jurisdictions that are losing a major source of their affordable housing. Housing in these communities is so deeply affordable that it's just it cannot be met by other sources of affordable housing. So just for instance, the park where Walter, and Maddie lived, that park was closed because it became apartments. And the developers of that apartment, they went to the city council, and they showed them the percent of units that they were going to set aside at 50% of AMI, which would be their workforce housing. And Walter and Maddie who I went to those meetings with were shocked to see that these affordable housing units would cost them $1,300 a month in rent. They paid $200 in rent a month; they own their home outright, they lived in their park for decades. And so, and this is across the board, what happens in these manufactured home communities where there's just no source of housing at these deep levels of affordability because we have to remember, in these communities, most of these residents. A lot of times, they own their house outright. In some places they bought like a second hand mobile home, and although that housing is likely dilapidated, and there may be some issues with it, they're living at levels of affordability that are just unmatched anywhere else, right. So I say all that to say that the bottom line for policy prescriptions is to keep people in their homes inside these communities to stabilize this important source of affordable housing, and to enact local or state laws that are targeted towards preserving manufactured home communities making it more difficult to redevelop them, or in the case that they are redeveloped provide incentives for landlords to sell to residents themselves and not to Walmart, or the next apartment developer, as is often the case. And while I don't write about that, in this particular article, I write about it a lot in the book. And that's where we have seen movement in states across the US. Since I've been here in Colorado, we've passed two big pieces of state legislation that are both targeted towards providing protections for manufacturers and community residents, providing a complaint system for them to be able to register complaints related to their landlord, for them to have longer notice periods in the event of a landlord change. And for them to have a system of getting enough time and notice for residents to organize and put together a purchase offer and some designated funding to help them with that purchase offer so these parks can be resident owned. So those are the real policy prescriptions that we should talk about rather than talk about how to make a slightly better, slightly more humane system of actually providing aid and in the event that people are evicted and forced to move their home, you know, to different counties or wherever they can. I mean, if that needs to be done, places that are doing it better are places like Oregon who provide funds that are commensurate with the mount of money that it actually cost to move these homes, 10 to $15,000.

Michael Lens 1:08:10
Yeah, so I think certainly some of the UCLA Housing Voice Podcast listeners would be familiar with the idea that folks like Shane and I are very interested in changing land use and zoning laws or regulations that would allow for more density, more apartment buildings, more multifamily and more places, and might think that conflicts with some of what you're saying, right, because some of the precipitating events for the sale and redevelopment and eventual eviction of the residents in these mobile home parks trailer home parks, are the result or the precipitating event is often a zoning change or land use change that allows somebody to redevelop these parks but you know, I think what I would say is, you know, while I would, I might not as a kind of policy interested researcher say, "Okay, we should never ever have zone, a trailer home park", I would definitely say like up zoning the trailer home parks in your metropolitan area, or your city should not be like the first priority. And you should target single family zones, it should target other areas that that don't have existing, affordable housing sitting on that land right? And, you know, and then I think it also gets back to the kind of broader zoning conversation that this touches on for me is it gets back to one of the areas that we that you started on when you were talking about the history of manufactured housing, which is that we just don't allow manufactured housing in enough places and this would be a naturally occurring affordable housing source in more places, and at a higher volume if we allowed it in more places. So I think to me, like that's how, you know, these two things fit, or I don't know how many things I just talked about, how these various things fit together is like, yeah, like, let's not obsess on the trailer park first, you know, and let's also make trailer home parks as possible in more places,

Shane Phillips 1:10:30
It seems like they're only moving in the direction of closing these communities as opposed to also creating new ones

Michael Lens 1:10:37
Right.

Esther Sullivan 1:10:38
Yes, it's almost impossible to create a new one because the regulations on the book are so, they prohibit even the location of a single, manufactured home, and certainly, they make it extremely difficult to develop a new manufactured home community, and that goes back to the stigma surrounding these communities. And that stigma is reproduced and reified by planning policies that do just that siphoning commercial areas, site them away from residential housing. So we think that there's some other kinds of housing, cite them in places where they're going to depreciate all of these things. So in a universe where there's not new manufactured home communities coming online, what we have, and what I've really begun to look at in the year since I published this article, and even the book is that the issue is not so much the closure of these parks anymore. Instead, it's the consolidation of these parks under corporate ownership as a world and I'm talking about a global marketplace of institutional investors looks to gobble up these parks because they understand there's just so much demand for housing in them, and that the nature of that divided asset ownership makes it very difficult for residents to move once they placed their largest asset on that rented land. And so they'll tolerate rent hikes and fees upon fees that make it very profitable for the Carlyle Groups and the Blackstones of the world to operate these parks which they're doing.

Michael Lens 1:12:15
And then yes, the financialization question is a whole other rabbit hole.

Shane Phillips 1:12:20
All right, yeah, we will save the financialization conversation for next time. But Esther Sullivan, your book again, is 'Manufactured Insecurity, Mobile Home Parks, and Americans Tenuous Right to Place.' Thanks for joining us on the Housing Voice podcast.

Esther Sullivan 1:12:38
Thanks so much for having me.

Shane Phillips 1:12:43
You can read more about Esther's research on our website lewis.ucla.edu. Show Notes and a transcript of the interview are there too. The UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter at ShaneDPhillips, and Mike is there at MC_lens. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.