Abstract
The topic of displacement of mobile home residents has been largely neglected in demographic studies. Mobile homes are an important form of low-income housing in the United States and facilitate the fulfillment of basic American values such as home ownership, self-reliance, and independence. Since mobile home residents usually rent the land under their trailers, they are highly vulnerable to forced migration when that land becomes valuable to developers. This is a growing phenomenon across the United States. With the rapid growth of many cities such as Anchorage, Alaska, mobile home residents, who settled in what were outlying areas when the parks were opened, now find themselves on land that is centrally located and seen as valuable for the building of high-density housing, office buildings, and strip malls. With insufficient resources, aging trailers, and low-income, mobile home residents often have little recourse and few good options. This study explores the problem, using the 2000 Census and the 2005–2009 American Community Survey for Anchorage Municipality. Other main sources of data were Google Earth (2008), Anchorage Planning Department maps and lists of mobile home parks, and 2011 data on mobile home parks and housing units from the Anchorage Assessment Office. Massey’s (Demography 33:395–412, 1996) “Age of extremes” theory is used to study the relationship between mobile home housing and economic status by census tract, with implications for mobile home housing elsewhere in the United States. Finally, some possible solutions are discussed.
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- 1.
The Anchorage population is relatively well to do, making it difficult to apply the criteria of poverty used for cities such as Philadelphia, which has a much greater extent of poverty. For example, the median household income in 1999 for Anchorage was $ 55,546 while the comparative number for Philadelphia was $ 30,746 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2000, table P53). The 55 Anchorage census tracts have percentages of persons under the poverty line that range from under 1 % (0.93) to over 25 % (25.10) in the 2000 census. Kasarda (1993), cited in Massey (1996), defined a “poor” neighborhood as one with a poverty rate over 20 %. By this criterion, only four Anchorage tracts (6, 8.02, 10, and 11) can be described as “poor.” Of these, tract 11 is in downtown Anchorage which has only a handful of mobile homes (10) and no mobile home parks. Tract 6 has only one park left with four mobile homes. Tract 10, adjacent to downtown, has no parks left. However, tract 8.02 has two mobile home parks with a total of 266 housing units combined. Anchorage does not have concentric circles with a poor center city and wealthy suburbs in outer rings. Instead, the orientation is North/South. The city started from the port in the north and was settled from there, with the newest and wealthiest areas in the southeast.
- 2.
The sources are the 2000 Census (SF 3), American Factfinder, Table H32, Tenure by Units in Structure: Occupied Housing Unites; American Community Survey, 2005–2009 (American Factfinder) B25032 Tenure by Units in Structure: Occupied Housing Units.
- 3.
Due to discrepancies in data on mobile home parks between the Municipality Assessor and the Planning Department, this list eliminates Twin Birch mobile home park that appears as open in the Assessor’s office, and includes Cupid mobile home park, which is considered closed by the Tax Assessor but not listed as closed by the Municipality (due to recent closing), and three others with addresses that could not be found in the Factfinder2 address locator.
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Shai, D., Eaton, K. (2015). Mobile Home Population Displacement: The Case of Anchorage, Alaska. In: Hoque, M., B. Potter, L. (eds) Emerging Techniques in Applied Demography. Applied Demography Series, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8990-5_14
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