Mobile homes account for a lot of affordable housing. They can cost less than half of what other homes go for, and there are nearly 3 million households living in mobile home parks across the country. But even if you own your mobile home outright, you still have to pay rent on the plot of land that your house sits on.
And ownership of those plots has been changing. A lot of the mom and pops who have been running mobile home parks for decades… they’re retiring. Looking to sell. Big investors are swooping in with billions of dollars to buy them up, because they think the parks could be more profitable. Today on the show, what happens when big investors like private equity firms spend billions of dollars buying mobile home parks, and make them less affordable for the people who live there — and how the government’s helping them do it, with super low-cost loans that were meant to support affordable housing.