Mobile Home Park News Briefing

Charlotte Bishop was standing at her kitchen window in January 2019 when she saw water streaming into her yard. A block of ice had clogged the brook that snakes around the mobile home park where she and her husband Rollin live in Brattleboro, Vermont. Bishop grabbed her keys and rushed outside to move their cars to higher ground. Within minutes, she was wading through knee-high water. 

Bishop lives in Tri-Park Cooperative, Vermont’s largest and oldest resident-owned mobile home community. The co-op represents a crucial source of affordable housing for about 1,000 residents, but many of its lots are vulnerable to flooding. Bishop said her...

BARNSTABLE — A Superior Court judge found on Wednesday that Crown Communities LLC is the rightful buyer of a Pocasset mobile home park.

The 15-page decision comes after a years-long legal battle between the Wyoming investment firm and the Pocasset Park Association, with both sides seeking ownership of the Bourne park, which is home to about 170 people at its prime location off Barlow's Landing Road.

"The Association lacked sufficient support (and authority) to exercise lawfully its right of first refusal and to purchase the park," wrote Judge Michael Callan, who decided the jury-waived trial.

In a statement to the Times, Walter B....

His shoulders hunched against the raw wind and freezing rain, Gerson Lima trudged through puddles earlier this month with his 6-year-old son, Cristian. But they didn’t have far to go: It was just a few minutes’ walk from their trailer to the parking area where the food truck was parked. Every two weeks it brings ingredients for meals for the family of two adults and two children, who arrived seven months ago from Guatemala.

“It’s made a big difference,” said Lima, 28, one hand gripping a black umbrella, the other holding his son’s hand. “It’s helped a lot. It’s everything, especially now, because we just arrived and have no other...

If you have a favorite cashier at the store, or a favorite nurse’s aide at the nursing home who takes care of your mother, or you belong to a veterans association, you might know someone who lives in a mobile home park in Iowa. If you do, they, like me, are either already in trouble, or headed that way. Here’s why.

Mobile home parks are the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the U.S. The residents own their homes, but not the land their homes are on. So, they must pay lot rent every month to the park owners. Therein lies the problem.

Several years ago, out-of-state investment firms started buying up MHPs in Iowa and...

Large investors have been buying up mobile home communities at a rapid pace over the past few years, including here in Massachusetts. WBUR reporter Simon Rios dives into his reporting on two local mobile home communities that were faced with corporate buyouts, and the two very different outcomes they saw.