Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place

by Esther Sullivan

Manufactured Insecurity  is the first book of its kind to provide an in-depth investigation of the social, legal, geospatial, and market forces that intersect to create housing insecurity for an entire class of low-income residents. Drawing on rich ethnographic data collected before, during, and after mobile home park closures and community-wide evictions in Florida and Texas—the two states with the largest mobile home populations— Manufactured Insecurity forces social scientists and policymakers to respond to a fundamental question: how do the poor access and retain secure housing in the face of widespread poverty, deepening inequality, and scarce legal protection? With important contributions to urban sociology, housing studies, planning, and public policy, the book provides a broader understanding of inequality and social welfare in the United States today.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology

264 pages, Paperback

Published August 7, 2018

Reviews

[Rachel Whitfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really appreciated hearing about the policy and zoning side of MHCs

[Katina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceeded my expectations and gave me ideas for further legal research. Very similar to "Evicted," but exploring the inequities and injustices that mobile home owners face when the land they don't own is sold out from under them. Appreciated the author's methodological notes and her compassion for the people she lived with and researched. This was very engaging for an academic book, but I am not a fan of how sociology books italicize terms the author wants you to think are important. Just write in such a way that the importance is made clear. This author did so, but maybe italicizing is a convention in the field? Anyway that's a very small bone to pick.

[Evan Last name · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just so helpful. Sullivan charts how financialization, local spatial governance, and a uniquely precarious form of land tenure together produce a "specter of dislocation" in mobile home parks. This haunting manifests affectively, and the book's (quasi?) ethnographic method ensures that readers feel it too. For example:

"Walter sat out in 'Paradise,' his shady patio garden, and Mattie used the porch to practice her beloved hobby, orchid growing, since her disabilities kept her homebound. The porch was the place that several of us had gathered the previous fall to celebrate Walter and Mattie's 70th wedding anniversary, where Mattie reminisced about graduating high school with Walter from a one-room school house in Maine and Walter joked that in their class of 10, Mattie was valedictorian and he was ranked tenth.

For one month after their home was hauled to a new park in a neighboring county Walter continued to check on the naked home, stripped of its porch and all the minor additions he had made over the last 20 years. He frequently worried over the date he could begin to reconstruct Mattie's porch so that she could enter the home comfortably when they finally got their Certificate of Occupancy. However, during these weeks of waiting Mattie suffered a stroke inside the abandoned trailer the couple rented in Silver Sands. Mattie was taken to the ICU and then spent several more weeks in the hospital with Walter perpetually by her side. She maintained her dry wit in her hospital bed, insisting that no one worry about her and saying, 'I'm not sick, I'm just falling apart.'"

Rest in peace, Mattie. May all the passive income podcast listeners choke.

[Russell Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Sullivan contrasts the plight of residents facing the closing of mobile home parks in Florida and Texas. This academic treatise cloaks an ethnographic analysis of the issues behind a portrayal of the experiences of those actually living through the process. The results are heartbreaking for those displaced from their homes but "simply business" for the industry. The book also provides an interesting comparison between a state that claims to provide support under these circumstances with one that does not.

[RYAN PHAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird. I did not expect moving mobile homes tô bé so stressful. Then again, from a different book, moving is the most stressful human action possible, so there’s that. Seeing your double wide cut in half and hauled away from your community must be upsetting. Also, I did not expect to see empty mobile home parks. I would have expected thể main reason to empty it out would be for development purposes.

[Aurora Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grew up in a trailer park and needed to read this for a research project I was doing on the gentrification of mobile home parks. Covers not only the history of mobile home parks, but the history of manufactured homes and the legislation.

[Sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant hybrid of thorough geographical/economic research, anecdotal support, and sociological analysis of stigma to humanize the mobile home park and highlight the lack research about evictions underscoring the housing crisis

[Lora Elliott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't a fun-reading leisure book - it is definitely an academic book. It's actually one of the very few books studying manufactured housing as a topic (and not how to buy/sell/invest in/remodel manufactured homes.) It's thorough and gives a really good comparative analysis on the effect of mobile home park closures on tenants in different states under different regulatory landscapes.

I think the downfall is that I'm biased against sociology, and the author's continuing use of the phrase "techno-social modularity" drove me a little batty.