This Land is My Land: Absence and Ruination in the American Dream of (Mobile) Homeownership

Abstract

Manufactured homes occupy a unique space in the American sociopolitical landscape. Colloquially referred to as “mobile homes” or “trailers,” manufactured housing’s ambiguous social, legal, and financial categorization produces continuous displacement pressure for millions of mobile‐homeowners living in for‐profit mobile home communities (MHCs). This article examines the consequences of mobile‐homeowner disparagement as “trailer trash” through the case study of Isabel, a mobile‐homeowner whose twofold eviction—of both owner and home—was justified based on her possession of socially undesirable (mobile) housing. Drawing on fieldwork in urban MHCs from 2011 to 2016, this article reconstructs Isabel’s story via the materiality of eviction and demonstrates a methodology for urban ethnographers who encounter displacement after the fact. Whereas corporate and municipal narratives attempt to delegitimize mobile home residents as “not quite” homeowners, reintroducing Isabel as an absent subject illustrates how potent sociocultural disdain produces, and even anticipates, the material ruination of “trailer trash.” [Housing; United States; Absence; Materiality; Ruination; Mobile Homes]

Property without Prosperity: Subjective Valuation, Financial Citizenship, and Negotiating Moral Personhood among Manufactured Homeowners

“…Unfortunately for Evette, the Nebraska Mobile Home Landlord-Tenant Act does not require her landlord to pay any relocation costs for her home should the MHC opt to terminate her land contract, which can be cancelled for no cause in as few as thirty days (Formanack 2018). Were this to happen, Evette would be required to remove her unaffixed chattel property from park grounds-at a cost ranging anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 (Sullivan 2014)-or else risk being sued for breach of contract by her landlord and having her home repossessed as collateral.…”

Modifying the American Dream: An Ethnography of Foreclosure Prevention in the Great Recession

“…She continues that, through mortgage debt, homeownership ties homeowners into citizens loyal to the financial and public institutions that have made homeownership possible. As Formanack's (2018Formanack's ( , 2020 work on mobile homeownership forcefully demonstrates, there continues to be a hierarchy of cultural and legal ownership categories, with single-family homeownership on top and mobile homeownership, not dependent on owners' participation in debt regimes, remaining suspect and excluded.…”

Carceral spectres: Hyperincarceration and the haunting of Aboriginal life

“…My fieldnotes are filled with objects like these: an old hat, a stack of unopened letters, broken‐down cars, empty rooms, empty houses. Fanon identifies ‘tinctures of decay’ in the social remnants of imperial power (1963 p. 249), while Allison Formanack asserts that ruins in the wake of displacement yield a potent and ‘tangible force’ (2018, p. 295). Decay is the theme in my case studies too, not moral or emotive but material and relational.…”