Becoming Visible in the Public Sphere: Mobile Home Park Residents’ Political Engagement in City Council Hearings

Abstract

In the United States, mobile homes provide the country's largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing. Yet, state planning policies have relegated mobile home parks, the communities where many of these homes are located, to inferior lands in nonresidential areas of towns and cities. These practices spatially and socially marginalize mobile home parks while creating conditions that facilitate their redevelopment. When mobile home parks are redeveloped, entire communities are evicted en masse. This article examines how residents in closing mobile home parks engage state power through the public sphere of city council meetings, a primary place where average citizens directly confront political authority. Through a multi-year, multi-sited ethnography of city council hearings on redevelopment projects that closed mobile home parks in three US states-Texas, Florida, and Colorado-I analyze how mobile home park residents encounter state power as they assemble, make claims, and debate municipal responses to their eviction. I consider how marginalized residents perform citizenship differently-as suppliants, as watchdogs, or as self-advocates-and compare the outcomes of these different modes of engagement. I consider the implications for the "communicative turn" in urban governance and show that mere participation-lauded as a major goal of civic engagement-is not enough to produce effective outcomes for evicted residents.

Personal, Not Real: Manufactured Housing Insecurity, Real Property, and the Law

“…This is not to say that MH exists only in the United States. Researchers in Canada and Australia are documenting large and growing MH populations; the importance of MH to aging and low-income populations in those countries; and housing insecurities in Canadian and Australian MHCs (August 2020, Lund 2020-2021, Towart & Ruming 2021.…”

“…This perpetuates the inequalities MH residents face. City councils do not treat MH as a crucial source of affordable housing in need of protection (Sullivan 2014(Sullivan , 2021. MHCs are disadvantaged by omission in local plans that do not address them as central to the area's affordable housing stock (Rumbach et al 2020).…”