Trailer trash.
Most people would prefer not to be called that.
The term has surpassed "white trash" as a pejorative for folks who are supposedly poor, ignorant and lazy, speak in double negatives and will crawl across broken glass to get on a tabloid talk show. You don't even have to live in a trailer to be trailer trash.
Why such a negative image associated with residents of mobile home parks? There's more to it than stereotypes.
Allan Wallis, a professor in the School of Public Affairs at University of Colorado Denver and author of the book Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes, says that dating back to the 1930s, mobile home dwellers have been treated as outsiders, mistrusted and looked down upon by the establishment.
It goes back as far as the late '20s, Wallis says, when mobile homes were trailers that families towed behind cars on vacations. Cities would attract tourists by setting up municipal trailer parks. "It was 'come on down,' but what they found was that the people in the trailer parks wouldn't spend [much] money in town," Wallis says. "That made them less desirable to have around."
In the 1940s, the travel trailer gave way to the house trailer. During the domestic war effort, manufacturing plants were placed in remote areas for fear that they might be bombed. Trailers provided an ideal form of temporary housing for workers. The trend continued in the post-WWII period, when labor was needed for large public works projects. Townies looked down on these itinerants, Wallis says.
In the 1950s, trailers became known as mobile homes — but were increasingly immobile. When manufacturers expanded their width from 6 feet to 8 feet, the "tin cans" became increasingly more difficult to haul. The 1960s and early '70s were the golden age of mobile home living. Mom 'n' pop parks cropped up, offering to rent small splits of land for people to place their mobile homes — usually on a permanent basis. The Southern states, and especially Florida, became hotbeds of the movement. Lower-income Northerners realized their dreams of owning a place in the Sunshine State by purchasing an inexpensive trailer and leasing a lot in a park. Northern retirees flocked to them.
"That was especially true of Bradenton and Sarasota," Wallis says, "where the rapid growth of the population was significantly being accommodated by mobile homes. Bradenton had some of he country's largest mobile home parks. Trailer Estates was the first mobile home subdivision."
In the mid-'70s, mobile homes started to wane in popularity. 1973 was the peak year for shipments of new units: 579,960. That number declined steadily, bumped upward in the latter half of the '90s and then plunged in the 2000s, culminating in a low of 89,813 shipments last year. Today's manufactured homes, which can cost in the six figures, in no way resemble the classic mobile homes we consider trailers. They look like, well, houses. Another trend: Manufactured home communities (the preferred term) are increasingly owned by resident co-ops, thus avoiding the pitfall of having the land sold out from under their homes.
Throughout their run as an affordable housing alternative, the reputation of mobile home parks and mobile home residents has continued to dip in the eyes of the mainstream.
"There was growing criticism of these people who lived in cheap housing that they did not pay their own way," Wallis says, "They don't pay real estate taxes; they mooch off the people who are real property owners."
But Wallis sees the derision directed at mobile home dwellers — the notion of "trailer trash" — as "blatant classism."
"In any municipality you're going to have a range of incomes," he explains, "The people who are washing dishes, flipping hamburgers, making beds often times end up in low-end rental housing, because that's what they can afford. Why is that OK, but folks who actually buy their homes, as humble as they are, and pay rent to a property owner, why are they trash?"
Perhaps because "apartment trash" just doesn't have the same alliterative ring.
Cover story: The mobile home holdouts of Pinellas' Golden Lantern.
This article appears in Feb 20-26, 2008.