Mobile Home Mobilization
How trailer park residents are banding together against the speculative real estate market.
Eleni Schirmer
For Gayle Pezzo, it started with the snowplows.
In the fall of 2018, following a winter distinguished by the biggest snowfall in years, the town of Colchester, Vt., stopped plowing the nearly five miles of roads that snake through Westbury Mobile Home Park, where Pezzo, 72, lives. She and her neighbors were furious that the local government could simply withdraw its services and leave the park in the lurch. According to the Colchester Selectboard, the town’s five-member governing body, clearing Westbury’s roads was not the responsibility of public plows. They had decided that Westbury was a private residence — in effect, one with a long, rambling driveway that happened to shelter 250 working-class Vermont families.
As is common in mobile home parks, the actual homes generally belonged to the Westbury residents who lived in them, but the land under the homes — 183 sprawling acres — belonged to the private owners, Betty Atkins and her family, who opened the park in 1972. The residents paid a monthly lot rent to Atkins, who was responsible for maintaining the property and whose personal decisions ran the park. She decided whether residents could own dogs, how long trash bins could stay on the curb, how fast cars could drive and when the mailroom would be open. As Westbury resident Kathy Scrodin explained, “Betty was the top dog, the ruler of the castle. We had to follow Betty’s rules to live in that place.” It was Atkins who decided whether to pump out a gurgling septic system or investigate the status of water pipes below a driveway that kept eerily pooling with water. According to residents, Atkins cared about the park but often did the bare minimum maintenance — or nothing at all.
“Lipstick on a pig,” Pezzo grumbled to me.
When Colchester called off the plows, it exposed the residents’ vulnerability. It was as if the town had, overnight, redefined the boundary between public and private— and the residents found themselves caught precariously between a retreating public sector, on one side, and a private owner with little incentive to finance the park’s maintenance, on the other.
Westbury folks wrung their hands. Without sufficiently plowed roads, would the local school bus still be willing to drive into the park to gather students? Would the private owners raise their lot rents, already the highest in the state, to pay for private plowing?
Then came the next blow. Later in 2018, shortly after the plow debacle, the Atkins family decided to sell the park. Fear spread among the neighbors. What if a developer bought the land and raised lot rents impossibly high? The location alone would make an investor’s eye gleam: mere minutes from the outdoor clothing shops and cafes of Burlington but wrapped in forest, the Green Mountains cresting the distant skyline. A new owner could decide to turn the prime Vermont real estate into flashy condos. Westbury offered rare affordable housing in a state caught in the grip of a dire affordable housing shortage.
Without Westbury, residents would struggle to find other homes.
The situation laid bare the power imbalance and precarity that underlie the traditional mobile home park housing model. Residents depend on the park, but park owners can raise rent or sell the park at any moment; a constant threat of mass eviction looms. What’s more, because they are privately owned, the parks are often left out from public infrastructure, like plowing snow or upgrading the roads.
In Westbury, rather than throwing up their hands, Pezzo and her neighbors got to work exercising their collective power. They started by trying to buy the park themselves.
In doing so they joined a growing movement of mobile home park residents who have formed cooperatives to collectively purchase their parks. In effect, it’s a national effort by working-class families to wrest their fate away from the hyper-commodification of real estate markets, but its tenor runs pragmatic, stoic and understated. Residents talk more about securing low interest rates and stable rents than breaking the shackles of financialized capitalism. Nonetheless, these mobile home residents are organizing a collective exit from the caprices of the speculative real estate economy.
Pezzo moved to Westbury in 2016, from her longtime home in Long Island, to be closer to her grandson, Liam. “I love my grandson more than I hate the cold,” she told me. If the park closed, she would lose her home and her proximity to Liam. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Burlington, these days, is more than $2,000 a month, more than 25% higher than the national average and well above Westbury’s monthly lot rent.
Like so much of the country, Vermont is in the throes of an affordable housing shortage. The crisis here accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, when droves of out-of-staters, flush with cash, flocked to the state’s dirt roads and pine-scented air, driving up prices and cutting into the state’s limited housing stock. More than one in four Vermonters now spend more than half of their monthly income on housing costs, and the state has seen its per capita homelessness rate increase by 300% since the start of the pandemic, becoming fourth highest in the nation. Chittenden County, where Westbury is located, has a rental vacancy rate just over 1%, lower than New York City. Amidst this crisis, mobile homes, about 6% of the state’s housing stock, have quietly shored up an important form of affordable housing for working-class Vermonters.
In fact, mobile homes provide the largest form of unsubsidized affordable housing in the United States. The cost of a mobile home — less than half the cost per square foot of a built home — has made the housing an attractive option for working-class families. The median income of people who own mobile homes is less than half the median income of people who own single-family homes, and residents typically have less education than the national average (33% have a degree beyond high school). Latinx people, American Indians and immigrants disproportionately live in mobile homes over brick-and-mortar homes. But while mobile home parks provide critical shelter for working class families, they do not provide a full exit from the speculative housing market; in fact, the traditional model of mobile home parks often hyperexposes residents to its lashes.
Despite the name, mobile homes are prohibitively difficult and expensive to transport. More than 80% of owner-occupied mobile homes have never moved from the site they were first placed. This erroneous association between mobile homes and mobility has contributed to the downgrading of mobile homes’ legal codification. In part because of outdated associations with the travel trailers of the 1930s and 1940s, mobile homes are typically purchased as personal, or “chattel,” property, rather than as real estate, or “real” property. As personal property, the mobile home units devalue over time, like a car, instead of appreciating, like brick-and mortar homes. Additionally, the loans are subject to higher interest rates and have far fewer consumer protections than traditional mortgages, particularly in the event of foreclosure. Whereas a traditional mortgage turns housing into an asset, mobile homes present working-class families with liabilities.
In addition to depreciating, the difficulty of moving mobile homes means the asset can be easily lost outright. Should a developer purchase a park, most residents would realistically lose the homes they own in addition to getting evicted from the land they rent.
This threat has escalated in recent years. Although many mobile home parks, like Westbury, originated as mom-and-pop operations, big investors are increasingly acquiring them. For hedge fund investors, the parks provide steady and captive rents with low upkeep costs. One real estate investor calls them “cash cows.” In 2020 and 2021, institutional investors, such as private equity companies and hedge funds, accounted for 23% of all mobile home park purchases — an increase of nearly 77% over the previous three-year period. The Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private equity company, spent almost a billion dollars between 2018 and 2020 to purchase 50 mobile home parks that housed 10,000 poor and working-class families. Private equity’s snap-up of mobile home parks has been facilitated by federal financing; nearly half of mobile home parks owned by private equity companies have been financed through governmentbacked lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. By contrast, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac only finance 9% of mobile home park purchases overall. Once parks are acquired by private equity firms, residents often see rent hikes, rising fees and inferior maintenance.
Fortunately for mobile home park residents, Vermont passed a law in 1989 designed to balance the scales between the low-income families and multimillion-dollar developers competing for ownership. The law requires park owners to give residents the first notice of sale and to negotiate with residents if they make an offer. Since that law’s passage, some 67 mobile home parks in the state have converted to either cooperative or nonprofit ownership — accounting for 49% of all mobile home lots in the state. By contrast, in Michigan and Texas — where no such state laws exist — private equity companies own the highest proportion of mobile home parks in the country.
In 2018, as the fears of losing the park rose to a fever pitch, a neighbor knocked on Pezzo’s door to ask if she would be interested in forming a co-op to buy the park. Pezzo, who did not consider herself a joiner by nature, said yes. “My motivation, just like anyone else, was fear,” she told me. “I love living here. It’s a beautiful park.” They could form a cooperative and buy it, or a developer would potentially displace the entire community.
Pezzo has long gray hair, a thick Long Island accent and warm twinkling eyes. Although she has never really been politically involved, she is deeply concerned with how people exercise their voice. “A voice is not just for complaining, you know,” she told me, grinning and raising her eyebrows. She has a natural predilection for leadership, the combination of a sharp, analytic mind and easy capacity to connect with people, especially the overlooked.
Before moving to Vermont, Pezzo worked for more than 25 years as a substance abuse counselor. Working in an outpatient clinic animated one of Pezzo’s life philosophies — helping people focus on what they have, not what they are missing — but the work was draining. She got tired of all the funerals. In 2012, she shifted to another line of work — selling exotic pets, with a specialty in behavioral consulting for parrots. Today, the side room of her mobile home is an aviary, sheltering 10 birds. She loves parrots for their uncommon beauty and their intelligence. “People don’t have parrot problems,” she told me. “Parrots have owner problems.”
Pezzo, along with a small group of other residents, started to investigate how the park could become a co-op, owned and governed by the residents. If the residents bought the park for themselves, they would no longer have to live under the looming fear of eviction. But how could they afford to buy a park? Although Colchester’s tax assessor valued Westbury at $4.8 million, throngs of interested developers had driven the asking price close to $12 million.
Fortunately, a regional nonprofit — the Cooperative Development Institute (CDI) — began working with Westbury. CDI works in tandem with a national organization, Resident Owned Communities USA (ROC USA), to support mobile home residents who want to form a cooperative. The organizations help residents grapple with the complex process of acquiring a multimillion-dollar mortgage, as well as the technical aspects of governing it: getting insurance, budgeting for infrastructure repairs, setting and collecting lot fees, running meetings. ROC USA also operates a financial arm to help residents procure low-cost debt financing to buy their parks. So far, the organization has helped more than 1,000 mobile home park communities across the country purchase their own parks, roughly 2% of all mobile home parks nationwide. As of 2020, ROC USA communities are the 12th largest holding of manufactured housing units.
By the end of August 2018, after months of going door to door, Pezzo and her colleagues had enough signatures to form a cooperative. By the next spring, they were ready to take the leap. In March 2019, they took on a $12 million limited-equity loan to cooperatively buy Westbury, becoming the second-largest cooperatively owned mobile home park in Vermont.
Cooperative ownership of Westbury has eliminated the risk of sudden eviction at the hands of private developers, the most vicious form of precarity faced by residents. And it has shifted the vibes of the place, at least a little. Westbury’s woodsy atmosphere adds to its secluded charm, but it can make for tough organizing. Many residents are drawn to the park precisely because solitude is easy to come by, a function of the unstated agreement that neighbors generally leave one another alone. Yet, through the process of forming a cooperative, Pezzo and her neighbors have managed to shift that norm, ever so slightly. There’s the annual celebration at the bus stop on the last day of school. There’s the volunteer crew, mostly men in their 70s and 80s, who clears brush on the weekend. There’s the group of older women who called every single member of the park during the pandemic to inquire about their well-being, making sure everyone had home-cooked meals to eat. (One of these volunteers, Kathy Scrodin, even met her husband through the effort. On her call list was a resident whose wife was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease; for months, Scrodin left voicemails to check in. After the man’s wife passed, he finally called Scrodin back: “I’ve been hearing your voice for months on my answering machine,” she recalls him saying, “and I’d like to meet in person.” Shortly after, they married.)
Collective ownership, however, also has its limits, as Westbury residents soon found out. For one thing, collectively owning private property is not the same as becoming fully incorporated into the infrastructure of a functional and economically just public sector. For Pezzo and other Westbury residents, it was an attempt to secure more equal treatment for mobile home park residents, but it turned out to be only the start.
Today, a vinyl banner flutters over the park’s community offices that says, “We own it.” When I first met Pezzo on a cold February afternoon in 2024, she was smoking a cigarette in front of the sign. I offered my congratulations, to which she shrugged and ashed her cigarette. “Actually, the bank owns it,” she corrected. I blinked. Pezzo’s reformulation accurately defines a mortgage, whose etymology traces to Old French, as meaning “death pledge.” In modern French, the word for mortgage shares the same root as the English word “hypothetical.”
While full ownership was far off, the maintenance needs of the park’s aging infrastructure were not. The park needed septic work, electrical upgrades, road work — all on residents’ dime. And although Westbury residents paid taxes to the town of Colchester,they were not eligible for many of the town services that would support these types of projects. Once again, they found themselves caught between the public sector and private ownership.
Take water utilities, for example. Typically, a water utility charges a wholesale rate to municipalities, which then sell the water to residents at a higher retail rate and use the difference to maintain the water pipe infrastructure. Westbury, however — despite being larger than at least 50 Vermont towns — was not a municipality and paid the retail rate for its water — rather than the significantly lower wholesale rate. And as a private park, it was not eligible for any of the services, like pipe maintenance and repair, offered to other retail customers. Effectively, residents were spending close to $50,000 annually to subsidize the upkeep of other communities’ water systems, but were ineligible for such services themselves.
Atkins had been responsible for financing maintenance and infrastructure improvements at Westbury, presumably drawn from lot rents — but, according to Pezzo, Atkins deferred a lot of maintenance. “The owners didn’t invest their profits back in the park,” Pezzo told me. “They would do what I call ‘spit and polish.’ ” Upon assuming collective ownership of the park, the residents themselves became responsible for financing needed repairs — and for the maintenance backlog Pezzo says Atkins left behind.
Forming a cooperative had changed the question of private property ownership for residents, but it had not altered the park’s designation in the eyes of the state, which still deemed the park an oversized private residence.
“Resident ownership alone doesn’t fix systemic inequities,” ROC USA CEO Emily Thaden explained to me, “especially when local governments continue to treat these neighborhoods as private enclaves rather than integral parts of the broader community. Many resident-owned communities, like Westbury, pay municipal taxes but are still denied essential public services, such as snow removal, road repairs, or water and septic upgrades.”
Pezzo and her colleagues began to wonder whether Westbury Cooperative could become something even more public and more democratic. Could Westbury become a municipality and access the wholesale water rate? Then, as a village, they could also compete for state grants to upgrade their electrical and sewage systems, and they could access municipal bonds to finance larger infrastructure. As a village, they could also benefit from their municipal tax payments instead of paying for services they themselves could not receive.
One Colchester resident who lived down the road from Westbury, Ralph Perkins, took special interest in the co-op’s effort. Since the snow plowing uproar, something hadn’t sat right with Perkins about Colchester’s decision to deny services to a neighborhood whose primary distinction was that it housed low-income families. He began to come to meetings and follow the debates. The technical aspects of the dilemma especially interested him — the arcane layering of zoning codes, the obscure divisions between private and public entities, the dusty pages of state statutes that render the boundaries of a society. And he found an equally curious mind in Pezzo.
Together, they pored over the details of Vermont legislation and developed an outline to keep the co-op in charge of most day-to-day governance of the park, but also establish a village to receive public services from Colchester. As a village, Westbury would still be part Colchester, but with more access to municipal services than a mobile home park.
No new village had formed in Vermont in more than 90 years, and for good reason. As Pezzo and Perkins quickly learned, the process was arduous, requiring significant education and organizing among the 500 park residents. Throughout the fall of 2021, Perkins and Pezzo set up forums to take residents’ questions — would becoming a village change the bus route, would the co-op still exist, why not just hire a private plowing company? They went door to door to talk to everyone, approaching each resident’s question as an opportunity to investigate and learn more about the nature of the project.
Their motto was: “Discussions are the only way we find solutions.”
After months of research and conversation, Perkins, Pezzo and other Westbury residents agreed that becoming a village posed few costs and many potential benefits. So, in early 2022, Pezzo sent a letter to Aaron Frank, Colchester’s town manager, inquiring about the possibility of becoming a public entity.
The town board, however, showed little interest. After several months of back and forth, Frank and the Colchester Selectboard sent a letter to Westbury residents explaining the town’s opposition to Westbury forming a village.
Westbury residents bristled. The town seemed to be asserting a divide between Westbury and Colchester despite the fact that Westbury residents were also citizens of Colchester. Residents could only assume it was because, as mobile home owners, they were not the “right kind” of Vermonters.
“It’s about stigma, it’s about labels, it’s about people in trailer parks dot dot dot,” Kathy Scrodin told me. “I got the feeling the town of Colchester would be happy if we weren’t here, if our property had not become a co-op, and some builder had bought it [so] there’d be a half-a-million-dollar plus home in here.”
When I reached Frank by phone this May, he declined to comment on Colchester’s response to Westbury’s effort to become a village. Frank did not respond to emailed questions concerning the allegations that the town discriminated against Westbury because it is a mobile home park.
In addition to sowing ill will, the board’s letter impeded the organizing work. Many residents were confused by the town’s opposition and became doubtful of their possibilities. The process of getting signatures for the village, already a slog, became even more exhausting. But Pezzo, Perkins and other park residents pressed on, and by the following summer, Pezzo delivered a thick stack of signed petitions to the Colchester Selectboard, tied with a ribbon. The majority of Westbury’s residents had elected to form a village. A month later, Frank and the town board officially recognized the status. As Pezzo put it in one of her exchanges with Frank that spring, we are “citizens of Colchester who are no longer tenants of a private business but without some of the resources or expertise of the public sector.”
By becoming a village, they had nudged themselves a little bit more into the public sector.
Since Westbury became a village, however, little has changed. Colchester still isn’t plowing Westbury’s streets; after forming a co-op, the residents decided to pay for their own snow plowing as part of their annual budget. (Lot rents went up as a result.) And the park has yet to receive lower water rates. Shortly after Westbury formed a village, the Champlain Water District (CWD)— which distributes water to Westbury — formalized their policy distinguishing which municipalities can access wholesale water rates and decided Westbury was not big enough to make the cut.
Joe Duncan, head of CWD, told me he does not see a path for Westbury to receive a wholesale water rate under existing arrangements but is sympathetic. He suggested one route forward might be for Colchester to offer Westbury a discounted rate as an act of charity.
That idea doesn’t sit well with Pezzo: “It pisses me off,” she told me. For her, it’s not a matter of charity, but equity.
Although Westbury’s challenge to the power dynamics embedded in mobile housing has run into obstacles, the driving energy has not dissipated. Not long after Westbury became a village, Pezzo ran for an open seat in the state legislature. It was a tough race: Pezzo was an unknown outsider, running against a sixth-generation Vermonter with heavyhitting endorsements. Pezzo had no expectations to win and mostly hoped to run to do networking that could eventually benefit Westbury.
“I’ve lived my life by the mantra that I’m responsible for effort, not for outcome,” she told me.
But when Pezzo won the seat — by a mere 52 votes — she realized she was also now part of the outcome. One of her main objectives? To propose a manufactured home bill to bring about a new code of law for cooperatively owned mobile home parks to ensure their dignified and just treatment. Pezzo’s dream legislation would hold private park owners responsible for addressing deferred infrastructure maintenance before passing the park on to residents who collectively buy it. She also wants to make it easier for mobile home owners to get a conventional mortgage, rather than the riskier, more expensive personal property loans often used to buy mobile homes. And she wants co-op residents to be eligible for public services.
As Pezzo’s endeavors suggest, addressing the power imbalances requires changing the laws that enable the subordination of mobile home owners and allow the denial of public-sector services to this type of working-class housing. Despite the obstacles, Westbury offers a radical reimagination for the future of housing, in which privately owned property becomes cooperatively owned and the co-op becomes ever more public. Winning this new future for public housing, as the struggle at Westbury shows, will require safeguarding working-class neighborhoods not only from private developers, but from inequitable treatment by governments — with snow plowing for all.
Eleni Schirmer is a writer living in Montréal. She is a Spencer fellow at Columbia’s School of Journalism and organizes with the Debt Collective.
