Why are there no trailer parks in 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 single-family homes.
For the most part, the outline of this oftenmarginalized 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 (with more American Indians and fewer African Americans than the population at large) and, outside of cities and densely populated coastal areas, they’re everywhere. Everywhere, that is, but the Corn Belt.
We’ll define mobile homes or trailers as being 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, but we’d love to hear your explanations.
• Farmland isn’t likely to run dry or move to Mexico
The Corn Belt’s deep topsoil, a legacy of the tallgrass 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 (at least within the next century or so) as it is in areas that depended upon manufacturing, mining or logging.
To be sure, farming is subject to near-catastrophic booms and bust cycles of its own, such as the crisis that inspired the Farm Aid concerts in the mid-1980s. Then, a few years of strong commodity prices encouraged farmers to borrow, invest in their farms and ramp up production.
When prices didn’t hold up, the new production flooded the market, exacerbated the problem and left farmers with unsustainably high debt, triggering the now-familiar “farm bust.” It’s a familiar cycle: According to The Wall Street Journal, the country is in the midst of “the next American farm bust” at this very moment.
But in the long run, corn and other crops seem to have provided a buffer against the persistent poverty that has led to widespread mobile-home adoption in other regions.
• 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 the 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.
Mobile homes became a less attractive option around 2000, according to the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, when easy credit made it more affordable for low-income families to buy full-scale homes instead of manufactured ones.
Home manufacturers’ problems continued during the Great Recession, when home and condominium values plunged. Why would you shell out for a trailer that would depreciate over time when you could instead buy low on a real estate asset that was likely to regain its value?
Meanwhile, the retirees who would have otherwise bought mobile homes in the Southeast hung on to their existing homes, waiting for their mortgages to pop back above water. And the ones who were in the market were increasingly looking toward modular homes, which are assembled on site instead of trucked in.