Resident ownership helps US mobile homes weather climate change

FRESNO, California - The temperature at Juanita Pérez Sierra's mobile home community in California has dropped to about 38 degrees Celsius (100 F) from the day's high as she strolls across the sun-scorched land upon which her family home sits.

It is early July, and the forecast is for the heat to routinely pass 42 C as summer continues.

Her manufactured house, also called a mobile home, is one of 60 that form Comunidad Nuevo Lago, eight miles southeast of the city of Fresno in the blazingly hot Central Valley.

"We want to make the space greener, so people can come out and enjoy the space because those mobile homes - they get really hot," Pérez Sierra said.

Residents were not allowed to plant trees for shade until last year when, with the help of a nonprofit organization, they formed a cooperative and bought the land their homes occupy from a commercial real-estate firm.

Resident ownership could help thousands of low-income residents in mobile home parks, or MHPs, across the United States strengthen their resilience to heat, floods and other climate change-induced weather extremes, experts said.

Cooperatives allow resident owners to decide on infrastructure changes, like erecting storm shelters or planting trees, to protect against these dangers.

Comunidad Nuevo Lago is one of more than 300 communities across the United States that have become a cooperative, out of roughly 43,000 mobile home parks.

Prefabricated housing provides the most affordable unsubsidized housing stock in the country, low-income residents affordable rents and, for some, their only chance to own a home.

Compared with traditional, site-built houses, mobile homes are overexposed to extreme weather hazards, including tornadoes, floods and storms, largely because of their location. In the western United States, deadly heat and wildfires are the predominant threats.

In California, manufactured housing is more common in the hottest parts of the state, as well as in rural areas, said C.J. Gabbe, a professor at Santa Clara University, whose work has focused on mobile homes in extreme climate zones.

"Those would be places where we would expect higher future wildfire risk," he said.

Ovens in summer

In the United States, some 22 million people live in manufactured homes, most of which are situated in purpose-built parks, according to U.S. Census data.

Household incomes skew lower than average for both renters and owners of these homes. In California, the heads of these households are an average age of 63, compared with 51 in traditional housing, research shows.

Older, low-income residents are more vulnerable to the dangers of sizzling temperatures and fire risk, said Gabbe.

The stigma of poverty has led to local zoning laws that usually prohibit mobile homes in residential areas, and "oftentimes allowed (them) in places that were kind of out of sight and out of mind," Gabbe said.

That puts about 37% of California's MHPs in high-risk zones for wildfires and deadly heat, he said.

Many of the homes at Comunidad Nuevo Lago are old and made of corrugated metal, including the roofs, turning them into ovens in summer.

The cost of cooling these homes is high, particularly because they often lack sufficient insulation, forcing MHP residents to spend about double the proportion of their income on electricity than the national average, Gabbe said.

Now that Pérez Sierra's neighbors are no longer worried about being priced out or evicted from their land, some are thinking of replacing old homes, increasing their resilience to climate change.

"The homeowners ... have the full control to make the decisions for the betterment of the entire community," said Nicholas Salerno, chief program officer at Resident Owned Communities, or ROC USA, the nonprofit that helped Comunidad Nuevo Lago purchase its land.

Under ROC's resident-ownership model, Salerno has seen MHPs build storm shelters in the tornado-stricken Midwest and install adequate drainage in flood-prone regions in Texas, all of which boost climate security.

Resident priorities

MHPs were traditionally owned and operated by individuals who lived on site and managed the property. That pattern has changed in the last 15 years, when an influx of private equity firms bought up thousands of parks.

To increase the real estate value, these firms usually cut services and raised site rental fees — the money a homeowner pays to lease their small plot of land.

At Comunidad Nuevo Lago, site rents nearly quadrupled when the park was bought from individual owners by a commercial real estate brokerage in 2019, Pérez Sierra said.

Now, the community, guided by a five-member board of residents, votes on its own priorities.

It plans to invest in planting more trees and explore options for solar energy and a swimming pool.

Board president Jesús Felipe Sierra López walked through the neat rows of mobile homes, pointing out the lead trees, called guaje in Spanish, springing from tiny gardens.

"Any time you see a tree like that, you know people from Oaxaca live there," he said.  

The community's roots are largely in southern Mexico, and most work in agriculture in the Central Valley, blanketed in almond groves and grapevines.

The stability that ownership provides has made residents more optimistic, even in the face of climate change, López said.

Pérez Sierra, who works for a nonprofit organisation, represents a younger generation that wants to stay in the park.

"You grow up with that stigma," Pérez said, as she watched  residents and guests gather under the shade of several mature trees.

"It's like, 'Oh, you live in the trailer park,' like if you haven't moved out, [you are] stereotyped."

But "there's a lot of pride here now. So now I don't want to leave," she said.

(Editing by Anastasia Moloney and Ayla Jean Yackley.)