Mobile home parks shelter many who seek low costs, but they can’t keep out risk 

In their 17 years at the Boulder Meadows mobile home park, Miriam De Santiago and Bernardo Padilla have got used to the hustle that comes with living in Boulder, one of Colorado’s least affordable cities.

“They raise the price of rent, they raise the price of groceries, but our wages stay the same,” De Santiago said in Spanish.

This Boulder mobile home park is where the couple have raised their two children. They’ve faced their fair share of challenges along the way: working multiple jobs, dealing with rent hikes on their lot and the time, De Santiago said, when her landlord threatened to evict them over a rent dispute.   

While they’ve had frustrations with management, their mobile home has allowed the couple to stay in Boulder as housing prices soared in recent years. They bought the place for just $28,000 and pay $900 per month to rent the lot, less than half the median for a one-bedroom apartment, according to Zillow.

And while the couple have considered buying a bigger home outside Boulder, they’ve stayed because of the resources the city makes available for their son, who has autism. They get a front-row seat to Boulder’s housing disparities running their business, which involves cleaning expensive homes. They also volunteer with the nonprofit 9to5 Colorado, helping other Spanish-speaking mobile home park residents learn their rights as tenants.

“Mobile homes are the first option to have an affordable home,” Luz Galicia, an organizer with 9to5 Colorado, said in Spanish. “The majority of the people that we know are people who work from 7 a.m., they end their shift at 5 p.m. and [after that] take a part-time job to cover expenses.”

Often, these low-wage workers support multiple children and may lack work authorization due to their immigration status.

Even in Boulder, which offers eviction defense and protects mobile home parks from redevelopment, legal protections have their limits — and residents have to understand their rights in their rental agreement and how an eviction process should work.

For mobile home residents, eviction can be especially devastating for families, said David Valleau, an attorney with the Colorado Poverty Law Project, because mobile homes are designated as personal property.

“When the sheriff comes to conduct the lockout, any piece of personal property that is left at the rental unit, at the rental space, is deemed abandoned,” he said. “Even though the homeowner has a title to the home, has ownership of the home, when the sheriff conducts a lockout, if they haven’t moved the home, they are going to be locked out of their mobile home and they’re going to eventually lose title to that piece of property.”

Colorado has improved protections for these residents — so there are more options in responding to eviction threats, rent increases and poor conditions. Even so, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis refused to sign a law to limit lot rent hikes, which is the biggest challenge for mobile home park residents, especially when a new owner buys up a park, according to Valleau.

“I’ve seen new owners come in and raise rents as high as 50%,” Valleau said. 

Across the state, many Coloradans have been displaced from their homes over the years because of the affordability challenges. They face increasing housing costs amid the rise of remote work, which has allowed wealthier families to move to the state. In Boulder, many people have been forced to move farther away from their community and jobs.

Roughly 60,000 people commute into the small city because so few can afford to live there, according to Kurt Firnhaber, Boulder’s housing and human services director.

“Not only are more people commuting, but they’re commuting longer distances,” he said. 

Mobile home parks can be a refuge for those seeking affordable housing — but they haven’t been immune to rent hikes, evictions and rising land values. 

To keep low- and middle-income residents in high-quality housing, the city is rolling out a new project — its own factory that will start to build manufactured homes this year.

“The first year to 18 months, we expect to do 12 houses a year,” Firnhaber said. “And then we want to double that after about two years.”

The factory — a partnership with Habitat for Humanity — is meant to boost access to homeownership.

“If we were to sell these on the free market in Boulder, they’d be million-dollar homes. And they’ll be sold for, depending on the household, between $280,000 and $380,000,” Firnhaber said.

New owners won’t be allowed to resell the homes above a certain value so they stay relatively affordable. And current mobile home park residents in old units can buy these homes for even less, thanks to city subsidies. 

“We’re actually pricing them at a level which they can afford,” he said. 

It’s a big investment — the factory alone cost $11 million. Still, it’s cheaper to build homes this way, which is why policy analysts like the Urban Institute’s Daniel Pang see these facilities as a tool to address the affordable-housing crisis. 

“You can sort of wholesale buy a lot of the material that you need to build these homes and property, and you have a sort of standardized, almost like a car creation line, where a lot of the parts are very similar in all the different builds. … [It] definitely makes the cost a lot lower,” Pang said. 

The average cost per square foot of a new manufactured home is about half that of a site-built home, excluding land, according to the Census Bureau. It’s likely why manufactured housing shipments have increased nationally, reaching nearly 90,000 in 2023. And there are more manufactured home factories today than just a few years ago, according to data from the Manufactured Housing Institute and the Urban Institute.

“We think that an additional 70,000 homes created per year, so another 700,000 over the next decade, would certainly ease the shortage that we’re seeing,” Pang said. 

It’s not a silver bullet, but producing more manufactured homes and protecting residents of mobile home parks is one way to address a major economic challenge for the country.