Everybody knows everybody, sharing sugar and snow shovels, conversation and child care. But according to a 1990 study compiled by the American Association of Retired Persons, more than half of all mobile-home owners live on someone else's land, tied down by the huge investment of a trailer yet subject to the whims of an unregulated landlord. While almost all states regulate the relationship between apartment tenants and their landlords, few laws exist to protect residents of mobile homes from those who own the parking pads beneath them. The rural states of the South and West, where mobile homes are most popular, tend to offer the least regulation. Although one in five residents of Montana and one in six residents of Wyoming and South Carolina live in mobile homes, none of these states has a single law specifically protecting people who live in trailer parks.
Mobile homes are more expensive than they look.
Federal manufacturing standards enforced since 1976 have done away with the stuffy tin boxes whose paneling reeked of formaldehyde. But as mobile homes have gotten better, they've gotten a lot more costly. Although trailers cost about half as much per square foot as a conventional house, banks usually lend the money at consumer rates, which means an interest rate up to 5 percent higher than that of a mortgage. For many of the sixteen million people who have taken the mobile-home route to the American dream, life in the trailer court is a risky game. Helen Studt lets the screen door slam behind her, dangles her bare feet over the edge of her front stoop, and, as though to illustrate her gripes about trailer-court life, lays down the law.