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In Singlewide, Sonya Salamon and Katherine MacTavish explore the role of the trailer park as a source of affordable housing. America's trailer parks, most in rural places, shelter an estimated 12 million people, and the authors show how these parks serve as a private solution to a pressing public need. Singlewide considers the circumstances of families with school-age children in trailer parks serving whites in Illinois, Hispanics in New Mexico, and African Americans in North Carolina. By looking carefully at the daily lives of families who live side by side in rows of manufactured homes, Salamon and MacTavish draw conclusions about the importance of housing, community, and location in the families' dreams of opportunities and success as signified by eventually owning land and a conventional home. Working-poor rural families who engage with what Salamon and MacTavish call the "mobile home industrial complex" may become caught in an expensive trap starting with their purchase of a mobile home. A family that must site its trailer in a land-lease trailer park struggles to realize any of the anticipated benefits of homeownership. Seeking to break down stereotypes, Salamon and MacTavish reveal the important place that trailer parks hold within the United States national experience. In so doing, they attempt to integrate and normalize a way of life that many see as outside the mainstream, suggesting that families who live in trailer parks, rather than being "trailer trash," culturally resemble the parks' neighbors who live in conventional homes.
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Reviews
"This book addresses an important aspect of rural communities that have been understudied. Its strength is the in-depth stories drawn from the field studies that detail how families enter into trailer park living, and more importantly, how they become trapped there. It also effectively demonstrates how the stigmatized rural landscapes of trailer parks can impact youth opportunities and social netw
Social & Cultural Geography
"Singlewide is an excellent addition to the rural sociology literature because it provides a rich account of the role of trailer parks in rural areas and of low-income households' housing strategies... This book is enjoyable to read since it is well researched, well written, and well organized. Beyond rural scholars interested in housing and the wider topics mentioned above, this book should be su
Rural Sociology
"Singlewide provides a rich and valuable picture of mobile-home park life, and the lessons learned spread well beyond these contexts. Scholars of poverty, housing, exploitation, families and communities, and child development will have much to gain from this important work."
Journal of Children and Poverty