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The New Yorker
Dept. of Business
March 15, 2021 Issue

What Happens When Investment Firms Acquire Trailer Parks

The financial industry's pursuit of profits from mobile-home
communities is undermining one of the country's largest sources of
affordable housing.

By Sheelah Kolhatkar

March 8, 2021

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Hikes in lot rent are forcing out people whove saved for years to buy
their homes.
Hikes in lot rent are forcing out people who've saved for years to
buy their homes.Illustration by Keith Negley

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One day in October, 2016, Carrie Presley was visiting her boyfriend,
Ken Mills, when she received a phone call from a neighbor informing
her that someone had just been shot outside her home. Presley lived
with her seventeen-year-old daughter, Cheyenne, in a two-story
clapboard house on Jackson Street, in the northern part of Dubuque,
Iowa. The neighborhood was notorious for its street crime, and
Presley, who was, as she put it, in "the housing community"--she
received Section 8 housing vouchers--had grown used to the shootings
and break-ins that punctuated life there. After talking to Cheyenne,
who was in tears, Presley rode with Mills back to her house, where
police were sweeping the perimeter of the property. As Presley
recalled, Mills looked at her and said, "We're not doing this
anymore." It was decided that Presley and Cheyenne would move in with
Mills and his son Austin.

Mills, a long-haul truck driver and the father of four grown
children, lived in a three-bedroom single-wide in the Table Mound
Mobile Home Park, a quiet community of more than four hundred mobile
homes arranged in a tidy grid. The homes in the park are not as
portable as its name implies; they've been placed on foundations, and
their hitches have been removed. From afar, they look a little like
shipping containers sitting next to small rectangular lawns. In Iowa,
park owners can choose whether to accept Section 8 vouchers--which are
distributed to 5.2 million Americans--and many, including the owner of
Table Mound, do not, citing the administrative burden. By moving,
Presley would lose her government subsidy, and she and Cheyenne would
have less space, but, as Presley told me, "I was sacrificing material
goods for a sense of safety." She and Cheyenne held a garage sale,
and watched as their neighbors walked away with the kitchen table, a
dresser, armoires, and most of their clothes.

Published in the print edition of the March 15, 2021, issue, with the
headline "Trailer-Park Trades."
[kolhatkar-]
Sheelah Kolhatkar is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she
writes about Wall Street, Silicon Valley, economics, and politics.
She is the author of "Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money,
and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street."
More:TrailersParksHomesWall StreetCorporationsAffordable Housing
HousingIowaPovertyRentTenants

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