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, whowas 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.
In the U.S., approximately twenty million people—many of them senior citizens, veterans, and people with disabilities—live in mobile homes, which are also known as manufactured housing. Esther Sullivan, a sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver, and the author of the book “Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place,” told me that mobile-home parks now compose one of the largest sources of nonsubsidized low-income housing in the country. “How important are they to our national housing stock? Unbelievably important,” Sullivan said. “At a time when we’ve cut federal support for affordable housing, manufactured housing has risen to fill that gap.” According to a report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there isn’t a single American state in which a person working full time for minimum wage can afford a one-bedroom apartment at the fair-market rent. Demand for subsidized housing far exceeds supply, and in many parts of the country mobile-home parks offer the most affordable private-market options.
In the past decade, as income inequality has risen, sophisticated investors have turned to mobile-home parks as a growing market. They see the parks as reliable sources of passive income—assets that generate steady returns and require little effort to maintain. Several of the world’s largest investment-services firms, such as the Blackstone Group, Apollo Global Management, and Stockbridge Capital Group, or the funds that they manage, have spent billions of dollars to buy mobile-home communities from independent owners. (A Blackstone spokesperson said, “We take great pride in operating our communities at the highest standard,” adding that Blackstone offers “leading hardship programs to support residents through challenging times.”) Some of these firms are eligible for subsidized loans, through the government entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In 2013, the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm that’s now worth two hundred and forty-six billion dollars, began buying mobile-home parks, first in Florida and later in California, focussing on areas where technology companies had pushed up the cost of living. In 2016, Brookfield Asset Management, a Toronto-based real-estate investment conglomerate, acquired a hundred and thirty-five communities in thirteen states.
Residents of such parks can buy their mobile homes, but often they must rent the land that their homes sit on, and in many states they are excluded from the basic legal protections that cover tenants in rented houses or apartments, such as mandatory notice periods for rent increases and evictions. One sign that a large investment firm has taken over a neighborhood is a dramatic spike in lot rent. Once a home is stationed on a lot, it is not always possible to move it; if it is possible, doing so can cost as much as ten thousand dollars. Most buyers aren’t eligible for fifteen- or thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages, so many of them finance their homes with high-interest “chattel loans,” made against personal property. “The vulnerability of these residents is part of the business model,” Sullivan said. “This is a captive class of tenant.” A leader of an association for mobile-home owners in Washington State has compared life in a mobile-home park to “a feudal system.”
When I visited Table Mound, in February of 2020, Presley welcomed me into the cluttered kitchen of her home—her third in the park. The home, where she has lived since September, 2019, has two modest bedrooms, wall-to-wall beige carpeting, and a “God Bless America” sign on the kitchen wall. Presley is forty-nine, with a strong build, curly auburn hair, and black-framed glasses. She and Mills attended the same high school in Dubuque, but Presley, who said that she was a “troubled” teen-ager, didn’t graduate; in her twenties, she spent time in a women’s shelter, then moved into transitional housing, where she had her first child, Keenan. In 1994, she got married, and a few years later Cheyenne was born. Soon afterward, Presley and her husband attempted to set up a transportation company, but the marriage fell apart. “I lost and regained everything,” she said. Her relief on moving into the park had been immediate. On weekdays, Mills was usually away, but she no longer feared the walk to her door when she returned early in the morning from a shift at the bar where she worked. On weekends, she and Mills would play video games, cook, and go fishing. In the summer, residents barbecued while kids rode their bikes around. “You could sit outside and see the stars,” she told me. “You knew who your neighbors were.”
Whereas traditional homeownership can form the basis for intergenerational wealth, mobile homes depreciate in value, like cars or motorboats. Still, many of Presley’s neighbors had saved for years or used inheritances to buy their homes. Karla Krapfl, Presley’s second cousin, has lived in Table Mound for three decades with her husband, Dennis, an Army veteran. In 1993, they bought their current home new, and had it fitted with large windows, so that Krapfl could watch from the kitchen as their three boys played outside. Their sons are now grown; two served in the armed forces and the third is a controller at a local company. When I stopped by, Krapfl showed me around the house, which was decorated with quilts, porcelain animals, and silk flowers. Princess Diana plates from the Franklin Mint hung in a triangle in the master bedroom. Krapfl had enjoyed raising a family in Table Mound, and compared living in the park in those years to being on a military base. “Everybody knew everybody’s kids,” she said. “It was all very friendly.”
Table Mound’s owner, Michael Friederick, was from Dubuque, and had made typical investments in the park, plowing the roads in the winter and repairing the curbs. He raised the rent by no more than two per cent a year. During the summer of 2017, less than a year after Presley moved to Table Mound, she and the other residents learned that Friederick had sold the park. It had gone for more than six million dollars, and was now being managed by RV Horizons. As it later emerged, according to court documents, RV Horizons is one of several foreign limited-liability companies controlled by another L.L.C., Impact MHC Management. RV Horizons announced that it would be charging residents for water and trash removal, which had previously been included in the rent. It installed new digital water meters on each property, billing residents five dollars a month for the meters. It also raised the rent on lots: Mills’s lot rent rose from two hundred and seventy dollars a month to three hundred and ten. According to Jim Baker, the executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a think tank that monitors the effects of private-equity firms’ investments, extracting profits by increasing lot rents and decreasing expenditure on upkeep is common. “In many cases, residents have invested forty, fifty, sixty thousand dollars into the homes,” he said. “There is such a strong incentive to pay, because are you going to walk away from this home that you put your retirement into?”
A year later, RV Horizons raised the lot rent again. By then, Presley had moved out of Mills’s single-wide and was living with Cheyenne in her own home, a dilapidated trailer built in 1974 that she acquired for twelve hundred dollars. Her brother, Buddy, who worked at a company that sold and installed building supplies, delivered flooring, drywall, and insulation. Presley suffers from spinal stenosis, which sometimes leaves her hobbling in pain. The condition entitles her to federal disability benefits, provided that she works only part time—a situation that requires a delicate financial balancing act. At the time, she was employed as a substitute cafeteria worker for the Dubuque Community School District, in addition to bartending. She immediately started worrying about how she was going to make the new lot rent.
RV Horizons had sent all the residents a new lease, forty-seven pages long and full of addenda, which contained some provisions that struck Presley as unfair and potentially illegal, including an eight-hour limit on street parking for guests, a requirement for a hundred-thousand-dollar-minimum insurance policy to cover accidents related to pets, and the institution of quiet hours. Despite the fact that the land belonged to the park, residents were now responsible for repairs to the water pipes connected to their homes. Clotheslines were no longer permitted. There would also be a fifty-dollar late fee for any rents received after the monthly deadline. RV Horizons claimed that the money from the rent increases would be spent on repairing the roads and installing satellite-television service.
“It’s not necessary that we agree on a radio station.” Cartoon by Frank Cotham Link copied
As Presley discussed the complexities of the lease with Mills and their neighbors, she felt a surge of fury. “I was pissed,” she said. “I thought people were being played with.” The next day, she and Mills printed flyers inviting residents to a meeting the following Sunday afternoon in the yard outside the community storm shelter. A hundred and fifty people showed up. Presley and Mills handed out yellow stickers that read “No to ILLEGAL LEASE.” Presley used the bed of Mills’s white pickup truck as a stage, announcing that the two of them were collecting names for a petition, and gave an impromptu speech. When I asked Presley whether she had ever been involved in activism before, she said no. “I was a rowdy teen-ager,” she told me. “My friends and family are very surprised that I took this on.”
Trailer parks first sprang up in the nineteen-twenties, as campgrounds designed to attract wealthy tourists. As the country entered the Great Depression, some unemployed Americans, known as “hobo-tourists,” took to compact travel trailers, migrating in search of work. Soon, local governments began to pass zoning restrictions that dictated the size of the lots on which mobile homes could be placed, forcing them into less dense areas of town, and limited how long trailers could be stationed. In the fifties, manufacturers started producing trailers that were more like small bungalows. Trailer parks began to serve largely as housing communities for lower-income and working-class families; many had amenities like clubhouses and swimming pools, and fanciful names like Shangri-La. By the time Table Mound was established, in 1963, there were at least three million Americans living in mobile homes; during the next two decades, the structures became more elaborate and harder to move.
Frank Rolfe, a co-founder of several corporations that invest in, manage, or are linked to mobile-home parks, grew up in Dallas and graduated from Stanford with an economics degree. In 1983, he founded a company that rented billboards to advertisers; before long, it owned more than three hundred billboards, mostly around the Dallas-Fort Worth area and in Los Angeles. He also offered a class called Billboard Boot Camp for aspiring investors. Rolfe sold the billboard company in 1996 for $5.8 million, and used the proceeds to buy his first mobile-home park, Glenhaven, in Dallas, for four hundred thousand dollars. In a 2016 interview, he recalled that he had assumed that almost anyone who lived in a mobile home was a “drug addict, a hooker, and just the scum of the earth,” and claimed to have felt so unsafe walking around Glenhaven that he applied for a concealed-weapon permit. But, he went on, he came to realize that just because tenants were poor didn’t mean that they were “dangerous” or “stupid.” It was possible to provide clean, safe housing for working people who were “just like you and me,” but who had very little money.
Rolfe met Dave Reynolds, an accountant whose parents owned a mobile-home park in Colorado, at a mobile-home-investing conference in 2006, where both of them were speaking. Soon afterward, they created Mobile Home University, a program for potential park owners which offered, among other things, three-day seminars in Southern California and Denver, for almost two thousand dollars a ticket. (The program is currently being offered virtually.) Later, they established a partnership that invests in mobile-home parks. In 2017, Rolfe was reported to have compared a typical mobile-home park to “a Waffle House where customers are chained to their booths.” (He has said that the quote was taken out of context, and was meant to refer only to the “incredibly consistent revenue” of mobile-home parks.) Esther Sullivan, who attended one of Rolfe and Reynolds’s Mobile Home University seminars in California while researching her book, summarized the advice that they offered participants: “Look for a park that’s got high occupancy and that doesn’t need a lot of investment. Take out any possible amenity you’d ever need to invest in, such as a playground or a pool that’s going to need insurance. Make sure it’s got a nice sign, and pawn off any maintenance costs onto your tenants.”
