Trailer Park America

Reimagining Working-Class Communities

By Leontina Hormel

Rutgers University Press

In rural northern Idaho in the winter of 2013-2014, Syringa Mobile Home Park’s water system was contaminated by sewage, resulting in residents’ water being shut off for 93 days. By summer 2018 Syringa had closed, forcing residents to relocate or face homelessness. Trailer Park America chronicles how residents dealt with regulatory agencies, frequent boil order notices, threats of closure, and class-based social stigma over this period. Despite all this, what was seen as a dysfunctional, ‘disorderly’ community by outsiders was instead a refuge where veterans, women heads of households, and people with disabilities or substance use disorders were supported and understood. The embattled Syringa community also organized to defend the rights and dignity of residents and served as a site for negotiating with local government, culminating in a class-action lawsuit that reached the federal level. The experiences Syringa residents faced in this conservative, predominately white region of the United States are emblematic of the growing national and global crisis in affordable housing and home ownership, with declining work conditions and incomes for the working-class.

'Trailer Park America explores three critical crises of our day – economic inequality, ecological disaster, and housing insecurity – through deeply-engaged, collaborative research with impacted communities in one of our nation’s most overlooked, and most important, sources of affordable housing.' Esther Sullivan, author of Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place

Trailer Park America is exceptionally well written, in clear, direct language, making vivid the real, human dramas at the heart of broad social systems, relationships and institutions. One of the best books I have read in decades. Elaine Coburn, editor of More Will Sing Their Way to Freedom

Immersing herself in Syringa, Idaho, for more than five years, Leontina Hormel is clearly passionate about both the issue of housing and this community itself. Trailer Park America is a welcome contribution to the existing literature on low-income housing and mobile home residents in particular. Daisy Rooks, University of Montana

LEONTINA HORMEL is a professor of sociology at the University of Idaho. Her research interests include political economy, environmental sociology, international development, community action, and gender and class inequalities. She has conducted ethnographic and survey work in Ukraine, in the Russian Federation, and throughout the state of Idaho.

FOREWORD BY DAWN TACHELL
CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION
Crisis

1 WHO BELONGS ON THE PALOUSE?

2 INVENTING WORKING-CLASS COMMUNITIES

3 MAKING A FUNCTIONAL COMMUNITY AMID DISORDER

4 VOLUNTARY COMPLIANCE
Flushing the Public Good

5 RED TAGS
The Letter of the Law Kills

6 SYRINGA REFUGEES

7 DEATH OF A COMMUNITY

8 TRAILER PARK POLITICS
Recognizing Working-Class People’s Knowledge
and Mobilization

9 TRAILER PARK AMERICA
Syringa Residents’ Lessons to the Public

APPENDIX: METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
INDEX