Bev Adrian, a retired career placement counselor for people with disabilities, lives in Woodlawn Terrace, a mobile home park just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota. The nearby streets are full of bustling local businesses – a Sota Boys Smoke Shop, a Pump N Munch Gas – but Woodlawn is a quiet park tucked away under maples and pines.
Adrian moved there four years ago, coincidentally right as Woodlawn’s owner was looking to sell. Woodlawn’s landlord was well liked, but for years the park’s residents had been hearing rumors about possible sales to much less friendly owners.
“People lived here in fear,” Adrian says, “because these places are just swallowed up.”
Mobile home parks, also known as trailer parks, are officially and more accurately called manufactured housing parks. Prefab homes are substantial constructions; once placed in a park, more than 80% of them are never moved.
In these parks, residents own their homes but pay rent to landlords who own the land and its infrastructure (including water and gas hookups). Over the last decade, private investors have discovered one very simple thing: owning a manufactured housing park is an incredibly lucrative thing to do. Now, throughout the country, local landlords are making way for out-of-state owners notorious for jacking up rents while letting conditions deteriorate.
As private owners work to maximize profit, Roc USA is fighting for a radical oppositional model: resident-owned communities, or Rocs. According to an industry analysis from 2019, the average annual rent increase in privately owned parks is 3.9%. In recent years, according to the Washington Post, some park residents have seen their rents rise much more rapidly, even doubling or tripling. According to a 2020 Roc USA analysis, the average annual rent increase in community-owned parks is just 0.9% – or $3 a year.
For the kinds of people who traditionally live in manufactured housing communities – retirees and low-income earners – the best chance to protect their housing is to take ownership of it themselves.