Esther Sullivan: Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Author | Dave Cowan |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12135 |
Book Reviews
MANUFACTURED INSECURITY: MOBILE HOME PARKS AND
AMERICANS' TENUOUS RIGHT TO PLACE by ESTHER SULLIVAN
(Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018, 264 pp., $85.00)
In the last few years, there has been a renewed focus in socio-legal studies of
the housing systems on issues around precariousness.
1
That is, perhaps, not
surprising, given that more and more households are being accommodated in
precarious circumstances, whether in the private rented sector or vans on
highways.
2
The most significant cause of statutory homelessness in the
United Kingdom now is being evicted from a privately rented property.
3
Precariousness is a given, and there has been discussion in the literature for
over twenty years linking housing with labour market casualization. How-
ever, the empirical record about where households go after eviction is largely
missing. Scholarship has also been developing over home making and, in
particular, un-making.
4
Making and unmaking home are processes which
appear to be always in action, most especially in precarious situations in
which they may well act symbiotically. Where the law and financialization
processes fit within this literature is something which has not been particu-
larly explored. In Expulsions, Sassen makes a number of observations about
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1 H. Carr, B. Edgeworth, and C. Hunter, Law and the Precarious Home (2018).
2 In the past couple of months, my local authority has published a new policy on people
living in vans which begins:
Bristol City Council is aware there are increasing numbers of people living in
vehicles parked on the highway in the City of Bristol. There are other cities in the
UK with similar levels of lived in vehicles including Brighton and Hove and
Blackpool . . . Bristol City Council notes that where people living in vehicles do
not self-describe as Gypsies Roma's [sic] and Travellers, local authorities have no
specific duties towards them such as the provision of a designated transit site.
Bristol City Council's Policy for Vehicle Dwelling Encampments on the Highway
(2018), at
encampments/supporting_documents/BCC%20%20Vehicle%20%20Dwelling%20
Encampment%20Policy%20final2.pdf>.
3 MHCLG, `Housing Statistical Release: Statutory Homelessness and Prevention and
Relief, October to December (Q4) 2017: England' (22 March 2018), at
.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attac hment_data/file/
692938/Statutory_Homelessness_and_Prevention_and_Relief_Statistical_Release_
Oct_to_Dec_2017.pdf>.
4 See, for example, D. Miller, Stuff (2010); R. Baxter and K. Brickell, `For home
unmaking' (2014) 11 J. of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space 133, which
introduces a series of important papers on the subject.
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mass evictions around the world and links these to global financial processes
and practices but the empirical record is relatively bare otherwise.
5
In Manufactured Insecurity, Esther Sullivan has provided an analysis
which pulls together many of these themes in the context of households
living in trailers in parks in Florida and Texas. That particular focus is of
interest for at least three reasons: first, there is a significant mobile home
market in the United States providing housing for around 18 million persons
± trailers, purchased at relatively low rates, occupy land at relatively cheap
rents, which makes them suitable accommodation for households unable to
afford anything else as well as a matter of choice;
6
secondly, 80 per cent of
households own their mobile home, but rent the land on which it is put,
making them, as Sullivan puts it, `half-way homeowners' but occupying land
at the whim of the park owner; and, thirdly, the analysis provides a historical
context for the discursive constructions of households, who live in such
homes. In fact, as Sullivan notes throughout the text, the notion of mobility is
problematic because the homes themselves, once parked, are not moved and
many subsequently cannot be moved ± a point particularly taken in the text.
They become immobile mobiles. This produces an `emplacing' of place.
This is an accomplished text, beautifully written, carefully researched,
and provides a particular counterpoint to the kind of research which is
produced in the neo-liberal university; that is to say, it is `slow research', the
product of eight years of academic labour, that has been packaged in to a
thoughtful text, the implications of which range far beyond its subject
matter. It offers a close ethnography of life in mobile home parks which are
at threat of closure, or, as Sullivan puts it, in the `spectre of dislocation'. The
book takes inspiration from the work of Bourdieu and Wacquant, which has
added new dimensions to socio-legal studies of housing because of the
framing of urban marginality and, as Sullivan notes, socio-spatial stigma.
What Sullivan does particularly well in the text is to give her research
participants' voice. Their stories spring out of the book, so that the reader
feels that most of all this is a book about people abandoned and marginalized
by the state, and communities torn apart by decisions taken `over their heads'
and about which they have no real say (despite attempts to do so). This is a
particular authorial skill, reflecting a methodological choice.
It begins with a discussion of the history of trailers and parks, unpacking
also the history of stigmatization. It is slightly jarring to read of the trailer
park as a `uniquely American housing invention' ± particularly because of
the role of manufactured housing as `a technology of colonial expansion' ±
but the uniqueness of the trailer park lies in its spatial segregation, fenced off
from other areas, as a result of zoning ordinances. Paradoxically, it was that
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5 S. Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (2014).
6 There is a quite shocking statistic that there is no state in which someone working full
time at federal minimum wage is able to afford a fair-market one-bedroomed rental
property.
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fencing off which facilitated the production of community and safety within
the park and along the roads in it.
`Trailer Trash' as a label derives from the depression period which was
when this form of housing was required, just as it is now. The shift from
mobile to immobile is also marked by the changing use of trailers from
temporary to permanent, and provided a boost to Nixon's numbers when he
included them in new housing statistics. Just as in many states across the
world, public housing has been drastically cut, and so the search for cheaper
housing becomes real. And, as in matters which intimately concern poverty,
there is profit to be made out of providing loans for the purchase of `chattels'
± the mobile home ± a point to which Sullivan returns subsequently.
However, just as significantly, the label `Trailer Trash' facilitates the
cultural structuring of second-class citizens which facilitates the park
closures. Sullivan demonstrates how the planning concept of `highest and
best use', which seeks the maximum economic and social value of land, is
used as a proxy for territorial stigmatization and to cleanse the built
environment. These points are particularly made in considering the roles of
local officials in making ordinances designed to clean up areas and decisions
approving the closure of park homes.
The meat of the book comes with the stories of the park closures, their
effects on residents, and how residents negotiate the movement of their
trailers ± or negotiate the communication from the trailer moving company
that their trailer cannot be moved. Whole communities are disbanded when a
park closes, and a particular strength of Sullivan's text is the way she follows
residents after that dislocation when they are forced to move (with or without
their trailer, depending on the mover's judgement as to its mobility) to
diverse locations, often on cheaper parks with less expansive regulation.
That gave rise to a `collective trauma of eviction through a similar emotional
framework in which pain and grief were central.'
There are some key messages of this part of the text which are sum-
marized in Sullivan's comment that, `The spectre of dislocation structures a
broader subjectivity whereby housing insecurity not only shapes processes
(dislocation) but also persons (the dispossessed).' However, what Sullivan's
ethnography neatly exposes is the reality of moving on set against different
levels of security. Broadly, in Texas, mobile home owners have limited
security; in Florida, on the other hand, they should receive six months notice
and a payment towards either their removal expenses or vehicle abandon-
ment. Florida's apparently more ameliorative regulation was experienced by
residents as being `displaced in place', whereas the shorter time frame in
Texas alleviated the emotional anxiety. In any event, the Florida six-month
notice was mediated through the moving company which scheduled, and
rescheduled the moving date. Indeed, the Floridan residents whose homes
were moved found that the state payment was insufficient to meet the
moving cost, but the remainder was met through a web of kickbacks such
that, as Sullivan tellingly puts it, the delivery of the regulations themselves:
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. . . create[d] markets that rely on the housing insecurity of evicted residents,
which further reduce residents from citizens, to consumers, to forms of
currency themselves. Their homes, their move, their (manufactured housing)
insecurity are traded by interested parties within a mobile home park
marketplace.
A further strength of this work, something which is unusual to find in
housing texts, is the confident way Sullivan `follows the money'. That is,
Sullivan demonstrates an appreciation for the significance of tracing capital
accumulation out of poverty housing. Thus, the research is not just with the
residents, but also the trailer home movers and potential investors. Sullivan
attended a `Mobile Home Investors Boot Camp' ± a three day immersion
course into `profiting off poverty housing' ± at a fancy California hotel and
at a cost of $2,000. Readers may wish to pause there, as I did ± what Sullivan
was describing in this final substantive chapter was a web of different local
and global financial players (billionaires, like Buffet and Zell) and whole
industries which surround poverty housing like trailer homes.
It is this kind of detail, which adds significantly to Desmond's thesis
7
that,
as Sullivan puts it:
The extraction of surplus value from housing insecurity occurs at a national
scale and supports entire industries. Only by zooming out from closing parks
to capture a picture of the mobile home park empire can we fully understand
the intersection of poverty and profit in the broader US affordable housing
market.
The thick description provided of the `Boot Camp', in all its quite sickening
detail, makes a significant contribution in its own right to this developing
literature, in which the mobile home park is discursively repackaged as an
`asset class', like self-storage properties. Mobile homes provide an excellent
`asset class' in the global economy because the residents generally own their
homes, so `. . . it makes the passive income more passive as landlords are
required to do less to maintain the property, passing much of this respon-
sibility on to residents.' Additionally, attendees were encouraged not to see
the poverty housing as such. This was an interesting observation because
capital, in the search for passive income, neutralized the stigmatization of the
residents just as it overcame the stigmatization of its packaging as an asset
class.
This book should be seen in one sense as a rallying cry for the
development of socio-legal studies of housing for, as Sullivan notes, scholars
have paid limited attention to evictions.
8
The book hits the notes about
housing precarity and insecurity, the ways in which home is made and
unmade, and the links between the park residents and capital. In one sense,
682
7 See, for example, M. Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
(2016).
8 Sullivan's text concerns the study of evictions in the United States; work in the
United Kingdom on evictions from non-home ownership accommodation is similarly
limited.
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all of this was made possible by its theoretical framing, which enables
Sullivan to move effortlessly between different scales of the operation of this
brand of poverty housing. Yet, there is more work to be done. For example,
although the residents mostly buy their trailer, the idea of this as home
ownership was lost in the text. This depends on one's starting point. If one is
interested in forms of housing tenure that are loosely collected into the label
of `low-cost home ownership', questions emerge about how this way of
living came to be regarded within that label, even though it is inherently
(legally) more complicated than that simplistic identity; and how does that
interact with the opposite discursive identity of `Trailer Trash'. The
residents' narratives at times exposed this contradiction, or miscognition, in
their housing tenure. Sullivan is also less interested in the documents which
underpin the residents' insecurity ± the licence or tenancy agreement granted
by the park owner, the chattel mortgage agreement, the moving contract, and
other similar artefacts. These documents were notable by their absence in the
narratives of the residents, but, in other studies of low-cost home ownership
where different methodologies have been employed, they have proved
valuable research objects in their own right.
Sullivan also makes suggestions for policy and regulatory reform in the
book's concluding chapter. These left this reader feeling that the book would
not have suffered if it had concluded without those suggestions. For
example, one suggestion is to establish a six-month eviction notice period
and for relocation to be managed by the state. The point here is that, if the
state managed the process rather than it being contracted out as in Florida,
then the issues raised in the Florida data would be mitigated. Sullivan notes
that this kind of regulation in Oregon has been `highly effective'. Experience
of regulation and security in the park home sector in the United Kingdom has
been `mixed', following the Mobile Homes Act 2013 (which allowed for
licensing, regulation of park home managers, transparency of site rules, and
enhancement of existing criminal offences, especially those of harassment
and unlawful eviction). Nevertheless, various problems remain, such as
obscurity in the identity of the park owner, complex arrangements, and,
strikingly in a government document, `Unscrupulous park owners [who] will
use any trick they can to avoid complying with licence conditions or notices
issued by the local authority.'
9
Examples of harassment of residents as well
as reasons for the failure to deal with it, provided in the same document, bear
striking similarity with those uncovered in previous government research.
10
Consequently and from that rather different vantage point, Sullivan's policy
and regulatory reform proposals require further thought and fleshing out.
683
9 DCLG, Review of Park Homes Legislation: Call for Evidence ± Part 1,Summary of
Responses (2017) 7.
10 A. Marsh et al., Harassment and Unlawful Eviction of Private Rented Sector Tenants
and Park Home Residents (2000).
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In Manufactured Insecurity, Sullivan has provided housing and socio-
legal scholars with further and different targets for their research. We have
focused perhaps too much on bureaucratic processes and practices, and too
little on their effects on the everyday lives of the insecurely accommodated.
Sullivan's brilliant, powerful book should encourage us to turn our attention
to these issues more broadly, as they affect such a significant part of the
population; and I would encourage all socio-legal scholars with even a
passing interest in housing relations or ethnographic research methods to
engage with this text.
DAVE COWAN
University of Bristol Law School, Wills Memorial Building, Queen's Road,
Bristol BS8 1RJ, England
d.s.cowan@bristol.ac.uk
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ß2018 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2018 Cardiff University Law School
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