Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Trailers on the Edge
For the past century, there has been a mixture of ignorance and intolerance towards mobile home communities and the people they house. At best count, as many as twenty million, or around one in fifteen, people in the United States live in trailers, as they are still largely called by residents. What is often seen as life on the fringe is actually at the center of what, and where, it means to be an American. Residential trailers predate the motel, supported cross-country migration after World War I and during the Great Depression, filled housing shortages during and after World War II, and came into their own as housing for millions from the 1950s onwards.
Figure 1. A stalwart mid-century trailer, Germantown, WI. Older examples have aged in place. Not only are relocations expensive, but they often damage older models beyond repair. Mobile homes are hardly mobile. Photograph by Eduard Krakhmalnikov, 2021.
Often hidden in plain sight, this predominantly American housing form is where people live, children grow up, adults grow old, and the vulnerable find shelter and community. Still, they remain largely ignored in professional circles and derided in popular culture. With few exceptions, geographers, sociologists, and historians treat them as “here today, gone tomorrow” aberrations even though they are often older than the neighborhoods around them. My field, historic preservation, has ignored them entirely.
In that they are untethered to the land, as J. B. Jackson explains in his seminal essay “The Westward Moving House,” trailers are the modern kin of the cabin. The comparison is apt in the functional sense, though there is a monumental gap in perception between the two. While one has become a representation of an idealized, foundational belief in overcoming adversity through hard work and perseverance, the other is a reminder of fragility and impermanence. Life at the edge, it seems, has lost its luster. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are well over five hundred cabins in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places but not a single trailer or trailer park. This should change.
Figure 2. Residents often decorate their small patches of yard, even when they rent, as at this trailer in Germantown, WI. Note here the mini-white picket fence, a tongue-in-cheek nod at normative expectations. Photograph by Eduard Krakhmalnikov, 2021.
In part trailers are neglected because they are hidden from view, tucked away in backlots at the urban margin, a blur from rural highways. But it is also a consequence of not taking the time to look. And in ignoring trailer parks, historians, preservation professionals, city leaders, and others have made it easier for them to disappear. Especially, though not exclusively, in metropolitan areas, mom-and-pop park owners are finding it harder to hold on to thin profit margins. Meanwhile, communities are being bought en masse by private equity firms. Billionaire investor Frank Zell’s Equity Lifestyle Properties owns some 200 communities across the country. Much larger firms have also taken positions in this previously unexplored asset class. Brookfield, for example, bought 135 communities in 2016 alone while Blackstone Group acquired sixty parks for an estimated $750 million in 2020.
Through subsidiaries, these firms extract profits not just by renting out lots but by charging tenants high utility and service fees and by making high-interest “chattel loans” on trailers. Costs skyrocket for residents, many of whom are working poor, single women, immigrant families, disabled veterans, or retirees living on limited incomes. In one notable example, rents along spiked 58% and 69% at two Iowa parks bought by an out-of-state real estate investment trust. The race to the bottom for millions of Americans is feeding the race to the top.
More worrisome is the fact that many new owners are buying parks for the land and clearing them for redevelopment. What is gone when they are destroyed is often the last corner of private low-cost housing. Of note, while race is an imperfect proxy for class, a report from 2007 found that in Minnesota 54% of residents displaced by closures were people of color.
Figure 3. John, a longtime resident in a suburban park in Germantown, WI, lives next to several abandoned trailers whose residents have been evicted. Photograph by Eduard Krakhmalnikov, 2021.
The bias against trailers, and the people that live in them, is as old as the type. As early as the 1910s, car-camping allowed travelers to explore far-flung places, including the growing list of national parks. This association with personal liberation stuck, but only for the purposes of leisure. A hard line emerged between temporary and permanent use. While trailers as holiday accommodation connoted prosperity and accomplishment, year-round trailer residents came to be stereotyped as transient and unproductive. Such insipid views still linger.
During the Great Depression, workers began to take their trailers with them on itinerant job assignments with the Works Progress Administration. Life in a trailer was cheap. Many found that their otherwise small savings could be stretched. In urban areas, camper trailers were converted to more-or-less permanent living quarters for the under-employed and out of work. Tightly packed trailers on abandoned lots became housing of last-resort for the urban poor. Their capacity to be rapidly deployed, however, proved essential in the transition to a war-time economy.
Figure 4. Trailer parks are out of sight, out of mind places. Here, one is tucked between a six-lane highway and a wooded lot, Germantown, WI. Photograph by Eduard Krakhmalnikov, 2021.
While the overall effect is difficult to estimate, the ability to quickly house workers meant that the United States ramped up defense manufacturing far faster than would otherwise have been possible. One study found that about one in eight war workers were housed in trailers near new production facilities in San Francisco. Many war-related factories were built by roving bands of workers who took their trailers with them, with trailer sites popping up across the country on an as-needed, where-needed basis. In this way, the trailer became one of the unsung heroes of the home front. By 1948, during the acute housing shortage following the return of millions of veterans, approximately seven percent of the country’s population lived in a trailer according to Allan Wallis.
“The race to the bottom for millions of Americans is feeding the race to the top.”
This temporary top-down legitimization gave the green light to private development, which grew tremendously in the postwar years in concert with the growth of car-and-road culture. Beginning in 1950, Wallis continues, the number of residential trailers in the United States grew by some thirty percent in just five years. As during the war, trailers were particularly popular with veterans, itinerant workers, and their families; many baby boomers spent their early years in trailers.
By the late 1950s things began to shift. With design innovations, such as the ten-foot-wide and then the double-wide — essentially two units welded together to form a bungalow — manufacturers created new, larger units marketed as “mobile homes.” At the same time, “recreational vehicles,” or RVs, inherited the lineage of earlier, much smaller trailers, and were promoted exclusively for travel. During this mid-century divergence, Virginia and Lee McAlaster suggest, trailers became “the dominant folk house of contemporary America.” In this way, trailers and trailer parks can be seen as successors not just to log cabins but also to shanties and self-built homes. As sociologist Esther Sullivan notes, this role was reinforced beginning in the 1960s with the gradual defunding of public subsidies for low-income housing.
Figure 5. An abandoned trailer with skirting removed, showing concrete block supports, Germantown, WI. Note the hitch and chassis. Photograph by Eduard Krakhmalnikov, 2021.
With the exception, perhaps, of areas like Florida and Arizona, where many parks catered to seniors, planners relegated parks to peripheral and other less desirable areas, if they were allowed at all. Their banishment to marginal and unincorporated sites perpetuated negative stereotypes centering on crime and transience. These are unjustified.
A 2014 study, for instance, found that “the majority of trailer parks were in fact relatively peaceful law-abiding residential communities,” partially due to high homeownership rates and baked-in sightlines. Meanwhile, trailers, especially older units, and their residents, rarely move (a situation that, along with the introduction of federal construction standards, prompted the industry to adopt the term “manufactured housing” in the 1970s). Indeed, the average period of ownership is some ten years — not far off from site-built homes. The problems with how these communities are viewed does not lie with the people that live in them.
Figure 6. An example of new manufactured housing, Germantown, WI. Photograph by Eduard Krakhmalnikov, 2021.
This prejudice toward the trailer has endured — including, and perhaps especially, in the field of historic preservation, which, despite some recent progress, privileges unique forms, craftsmanship, and authorial intentions. Engagement by preservationists is further complicated by the ephemerality of the trailer. When parks disappear, they leave few physical ruins to be adapted for new uses. There are no façades to incorporate into new structures (with the exception of the odd boutique hotel like the El Cosmico in Marfa, Texas).
It’s time that historians’ — and preservationists’ — attitudes changed. One way is through the simple act of observing, as Kathleen Tunnell Handel has recently been doing in her striking photographs. Another is to begin protecting them with legal tools. Trailers have much to tell us, about themselves, about those who live in them, and, critically, about equity in preservation. Trailer parks deserve attention rather than derision, and professionals — as well as the culture — need to start taking them seriously.
