Mobile Home on the Range: Manufacturing Ruin and Respect in an American Zone of Abandonment

Formanack, Allison Beth

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Mobile Home on the Range: Manufacturing Ruin and Respect in an American Zone of Abandonment Public Deposited

Analytics

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/m613mx627

Abstract

How does the symbolic transference of material ruination onto mobile-homeowners produce impermanence, social precarity, and financial risk? Achieving the “American dream” of upward class mobility, self-actualization, and respect through hard work is, for most Americans, materialized through homeownership. As markers of social status however, not all homes are created equal. Advertised as the American dream “on a budget,” manufactured homes—also referred to as mobile homes or trailers—represent an economical alternative to conventional homeownership, and as such meet a critical demand for affordable family housing in the United States. However, as occupants of nontraditional housing, mobile-homeowners are denied the legal and financial benefits of homeownership due to widespread cultural disdain for “trailer trash.” Situated in post-recession Lincoln, Nebraska, a “recession winner” with the highest reported rates of resident happiness and wellbeing in the United States, this dissertation explores the everyday reproduction of housing precarity for urban mobile home community (MHC) residents threatened with displacement due to redevelopment and revitalization. Drawing on 28 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in five MHC neighborhoods, my research illustrates how housing form mediates social expectations for ruination and respectability. By considering the complexity of housing—as shelter, the symbolic realm of the domestic, or as a financial vehicle for upward mobility—this project analyzes the social costs of abjection and contested belonging in aesthetics, finances, and stigma mitigation techniques for an estimated six to eight million mobile-homeowners living in 40,000 MHCs nationwide.

Creator