A cornerstone of the American Dream has been home ownership, and the capacity for ordinary Americans to achieve that dream has been seriously challenged in recent years, particularly following the housing crisis. Among the alternatives to permanent home purchases that Americans have opted to pursue is the manufactured (or mobile) home. These make up a significant proportion of the U.S. housing market and are the primary residence for at least 20 million Americans. Categorized somewhere between renters and homeowners, mobile home owners have been subject to intense legal, financial, and social marginalization for decades. In situating this research around mobile homes and their owners, this project ask what other factors, apart from financial precarity and/or the material degradation of particular structures, can explain the changing complexities of housing in the United States following the housing market collapse.
Allison Formanack, under the supervision of Dr. Carla Jones of the University of Colorado at Boulder explores how residents of mobile home communities (MHCs) across the United States respond to "precarity", a state of uncertainty characterized by risk, vulnerability, and material and symbolic degradation. This project will use an array of ethnographic methodologies, including participant-observation, formal and informal interviews, archival research, and other methods photographic analysis across three key sites in Lincoln, Nebraska: 1) MHCs scheduled for redevelopment; 2) the management agencies operating these communities; and 3) the government offices handling redevelopment efforts. This multi-leveled approach will generate the quantitative and qualitative data necessary to understand how knowledge about MHCs is generated and circulated within the process of community closure and redevelopment. The project will contribute to anthropological, sociolegal, and social scientific debates about precarity, resilience, symbolic and material conceptions of home, and risk discourse and calculus. In addition to training a graduate student, this research will contribute to public policy debates about affordable housing following economic crisis.
