Why trailer parks exist all over rural America, but not Iowa
Trailer-park America is vast — about 18 million people lived in a mobile home in 2015. In most counties, trailers outnumber apartments. In some, mostly in Florida and Georgia, they even outnumber standard singlefamily homes.
For the most part, the outline of this often-marginalized swath of America conforms to stereotype. It’s rural, and it’s poor.
The highest share of mobile homes are in the rural South and Southwest, in Sun Belt retirement communities, and on Indian reservations. They attract residents of every race and origin and, outside of cities and densely populated coastal areas, they’re everywhere. Everywhere, that is, but the Corn Belt.
For the purposes of this article, mobile homes or trailers are built at a factory and towed to their final destination. They are distinct from RVs, which are not used as stationary residences, and modular homes, which are manufactured in pieces and assembled on site.
It’s an oddball correlation. What is it about corn that made it the antidote to mobile-home living? Is it just a coincidence?
Well, we think we’ve found the key factors.
• Farmland isn’t likely to run dry or move to Mexico.
The Corn Belt’s deep topsoil, a legacy of the tall grass prairie that was plowed over by early white settlers and eventually replaced by maize, creates an economic base that isn’t as likely to evaporate as it is in areas that depended upon manufacturing, mining or logging.
• Population in the Corn Belt peaked a century ago, and it hasn’t needed extra housing since the dawn of the mobile-home age.
According to Census Bureau figures, Americans made most use of mobile homes from the 1960s to the ‘90s. If a region didn’t need affordable housing during those decades, then it probably hasn’t added many mobile homes overall.
• Corn prices made it more expensive to plow under crops to build mobile home parks. On the other side of the coin, it might have been getting harder to find affordable land to build trailer parks. Eightyfive percent of Iowa is covered in farms.
• Corn is a highly mechanized crop that doesn’t require as many migrant workers. Iowa demands fewer migrant workers than other agricultural states. And while it’s hard to find data on such a transient and poorly documented population, anecdotes suggest migrant workers are often lodged in manufactured homes.