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Mobile homes provide the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the United States. However, in mobile home parks residents live at risk of eviction because they rent the land on which their homes are located. This study formulates a methodology to examine the residential turnover and displacement that result from the closure of these parks. I investigate the spatial distribution of closing mobile home parks through ArcGIS modeling of land–use data for all 1.2 million parcels in the case study region of Houston/Harris County, Texas, from 2002 to 2011. Findings demonstrate that the spatial distribution of closing mobile home parks is clustered along Houston's expanding city limit in areas where affordable housing development is taking place. Beyond providing spatial documentation of the process through which this important source of affordable housing is lost, this study highlights how low–income housing pressures and urban redevelopment intersect to shape affordable housing in contemporary metropolitan areas.

Most scholarship on informal housing focuses on developing countries and little research investigates how low-income populations in the US participate in homeownership through self-built and self-provided housing. Meanwhile, informally developed areas are increasingly being uncovered in the US, especially in the urban periphery of growing metropolitan regions. This paper documents and analyses largely unknown housing conditions and needs for the growing number of people that live in such communities. Data for this paper were collected through a survey of 133 households in two unincorporated low-income, self-help settlements in Central Texas. In this survey we address (1) household composition, (2) specific housing conditions, and (3) reported structural and infrastructural problems. Through regression analyses we identify factors that mitigate or aggravate the severity of overall housing problems and identify the most significant concerns for residents. Our results offer future lines of action regarding property titles, financing and dwelling upgrading.

The last four decades of US housing policy have seen a shift from the federal allocation of affordable housing as a public good to the neoliberal model of private and for‐profit provision of affordable housing. This shift warrants a study of the link between the interests that now shape low‐income housing markets and the stability of the housing they provide. Nowhere are the effects of this shift more evident than in the homes of the 20 million Americans living in manufactured housing, which is installed largely on the private lands of for‐profit developers who can close mobile home parks and force residents to move themselves and their homes with as little as 30 days' notice. This ethnography of mass eviction in a Florida mobile home park examines state regulations intended to protect residents of closing parks and analyzes how private interests shape the implementation of these policies.

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