Affordable Housing in Henry County, Georgia

An estimated 20 million Americans live in mobile homes – also known as trailers or manufactured housing, according to new Census figures. How did this become the cheap housing of choice for so many people?

“Not everyone who lives in a trailer park is poor,” says Charles Becker, a professor of economics at Duke University, and one of a handful of academics nationwide who has extensively studied the subject.

“And there are parts of the country, where living in a mobile home community doesn’t have the stigma. You also have retirement communities where people aren’t poor at all.”

Who lives in mobile homes:

There are 8.5m homes and about 20m people

57% of household heads in full employment, 23% retired

Household income half the national average

In late 1990s, nearly 400,000 new manufactured homes sold a year, down to 55,000 now

70% of all new single family homes sold for under $125,000 are manufactured

Source: US Census, Manufactured Housing Institute

Mobile homes make up 6.4% of the US housing sector and there are 8.5m of them, down slightly on 2011, according to the US Census. The number of occupants is not recorded but it’s estimated to total about 20 million.

According to the Manufactured Housing Institute, about 57% of the heads of mobile home households are in full employment and another 23% are retired. But the household median income is only a little over half the national average.

West Virginia has the third highest proportion of trailers in the US. And in the rolling hills near the Shenandoah River, amid the country roads made famous by John Denver’s signature song, there are any number of mobile home parks, usually tucked away from view, up the hill or round a corner.

The 22 units at Oak Haven Mobile Home Park outside Martinsburg are neatly arranged, 25ft apart, nestled in a dip just the other side of Needy Road from the Bakers Height Baptist Church, which stands alone on a wide expanse of green fields.