Real Property Supremacy and Manufactured Housing: Debtscapes on the Margins of Financialization

Keywords: Finance, Lending, Property, Housing
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 64

Abstract

Manufactured housing communities have emerged as a high-profile and lucrative asset class. Despite this it is costly or impossible to get loans to buy homes in most mobile home parks. This paper explores this ostensible contradiction -- that while MH parks are desirable and liquid assets, the individual homes compose them, are not. Our analysis draws from scholarship on race and capitalism (Robinson 1983; Melamed 2015), and the “whiteness of credit” (Robinson 2020) to argue that the marginality of MH in US housing markets is also about the historical and systemic privileging of real property to expand homeownership. We argue that the “American dream of homeownership” has always actually been much more narrowly an “American dream of real property”. We make this argument using a variety of sources, including interviews with Federal officials and analysis of Duty to Serve Underserved Markets hearings. We show how efforts to serve underserved markets have privileged institutional actors over individual MH borrowers and Community Development Financial Institutions. This material is supplemented with resident accounts of semi-formal financial practices, including contract sales, peer-to-peer lending, and lease/rent‐to‐own contracts that have filled the void created by lack of access to conventional home lending and mortgage markets. We conclude that contract sales, personal property and exclusion from federal financial market support work together to create and reproduce unique financial ecologies (Leyshon 2020) that we describe as “predatory subsistence niches” at the lower end of the MH market (Fairbanks 2009, Davis 2006).