Singlewide: Chasing the American Dream in a Rural Trailer Park
Sonya Salamon and Katherine MacTavish
Abstract
When a rural family of modest means buys a new or used mobile home, unless cash is paid up-front, they become entangled with the highly profitable mobile home industrial complex, made up of home producers, dealers, financiers, and trailer park entrepreneurs. For most working-poor rural families, with few exceptions, this engagement means being caught in an expensive trap as they chase their American Dream for housing. Rural trailer parks house approximately 12 million people, and we describe this population’s diversity across rural Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina. We ask whether living ... More
When a rural family of modest means buys a new or used mobile home, unless cash is paid up-front, they become entangled with the highly profitable mobile home industrial complex, made up of home producers, dealers, financiers, and trailer park entrepreneurs. For most working-poor rural families, with few exceptions, this engagement means being caught in an expensive trap as they chase their American Dream for housing. Rural trailer parks house approximately 12 million people, and we describe this population’s diversity across rural Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina. We ask whether living in a rural trailer park has a negative neighborhood effect on working poor families, children and youth. We found only Whites report being stigmatized as trailer trash in contrast to Hispanics and African Americans who did not report this experience. Stigmatization negatively affects youth in school and parents in the adjacent rural community.
Keywords:
Trailer parks,
Mobile homes/ Manufactured homes,
Mobile home industrial complex,
Rural families,
Working-poor families,
Rural children and youth,
Neighbourhood effects,
Rural housing,
Rural communities,
American Dream
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501713217 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: May 2018 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501713217.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Sonya Salamon, author
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Katherine MacTavish, author
Oregon State University
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