Immobile Homes
Sheelah Kolhatkar describes how, when investment firms acquire mobile-home parks and suddenly raise rents on the land, mobile-home owners become trapped (“Trailer-Park Trades,” March 15th). One solution, as Kolhatkar discusses, is for the law to treat mobile-home parks more like rental housing, and to extend tenants’-rights laws to cover them. This may help in the short term, but it does not change the fundamentally feudal relationship between homeowner and landlord.
A better answer is for residents to organize themselves in coöperative mutual-aid associations and together buy the trailer-park land. Successful examples of this approach exist. I worked with residents near Cumberland, Wisconsin, who, when faced with the sale of their mobile-home park and possible eviction, formed the Countryside Park Cooperative and purchased the property. Each mobile-home owner has one share in the co-op, and the accompanying right to lease his or her lot; lots are owned collectively by the residents through the co-op. For mobile-home owners, the threat of withholding rent payments can be a source of power. And, by forming a co-op with the intention of keeping monthly holding costs low, residents can ward off absentee investment groups, which will be discouraged by unstable revenue streams.
Stephen Parliament
Department of Teacher Education
University of Wisconsin–River Falls
River Falls, Wis.
Kolhatkar’s article highlights the terrible situations that low-income people face when they rent space from politically powerful interests. This story is part and parcel of a larger issue: the monopolization of land itself. Mobile homes are relegated to rented space in the first place partially because zoning laws for the perimeters of urbanizing areas tend to prevent entry-level housing from encroaching on tony exurban developments. The laws, which tend to require a minimum lot size and only one family per lot, make it nearly impossible for mobile-home owners to afford to buy land within commuting distance of a major city. Such rules are usually justified as protecting farmland or deterring sprawl. But the truth is that landowners fear that someone might park a mobile home nearby.
Those who build McMansions in the exurbs and use zoning to deny homeownership opportunities for adjacent properties have effectively established a monopoly. In a free housing market, people should have the right to buy a small plot of land and develop it in accordance with their means—even if doing so offends a neighbor.
Richard Cowden
Takoma Park, Md.
Hidden Life on Sixty-Third Street
Casey Cep’s review of Paulina Bren’s new book about the history of the women’s-only Barbizon Hotel, in Manhattan, is insightful and, for me, evocative (Books, March 8th). I lived in the Barbizon for five weeks in the mid-nineteen-sixties, while working as a guest editor for Mademoiselle. In retrospect, I feel as though I inhabited a metaphor. I will never forget the contrast between the elegant reception area, which was on display for outsiders, and our airless, confining, basic bedrooms. The Barbizon’s façade projected desirability, and masked the constraints we encountered behind the scenes, in our careers and love lives. We may have appeared to be sophisticated and carefree, but even those of us who went on to achieve luminous successes faced daunting obstacles during our time there.
Joyce Wood
Rottingdean, England
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An earlier version of a letter misidentified the name of the mobile-home park in Wisconsin.
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