Misty Muñoz’s bathroom had been rotting for four years. That was before radiant heat from the 1,000-degree blaze that consumed most of Medford Estates during September’s wildfires rendered the front of her home unusable.
As Muñoz prepared to abandon what remained of her neighborhood due to concerns about contaminated water and lingering toxic substances, a real estate agent told her there were four buyers in line ready to pay $75,000 for her home — more than four times what she paid to purchase it.
“I sold my home for $5,000 because ethically I could not even imagine taking more,” Muñoz said. “When the Almeda Fire ripped through here, our community members exploited their own.
“We’re talking 15% hikes in rental costs,” she said. “People selling their homes for 20% more than the market value in this valley. We’re talking complete and utter exploitation of people that just literally lost their livelihoods.”
Fires that wiped out thousands of homes for some of the most vulnerable populations in Oregon have ratcheted up the pressure on elected leaders to preserve a vanishing form of affordable housing: manufactured homes. They can provide refuge for those confronting soaring rents, homelessness or a fast track to institutionalization in a nursing home. Unofficial estimates from the state count 1,500 to 1,600 manufactured and mobile homes lost to fires this year across 18 parks.
But the fates of many manufactured home communities increasingly stand at the mercy of petrochemical oligarchs and transnational financiers responsible for obscuring and accelerating the climate crisis that makes future conflagrations more likely and more destructive.
Many manufactured homeowners fortunate enough to avoid floods and wildfires are trapped in a legal and financial system that exposes them to predatory loans, toxic substances and ruthless market forces that can transform dreams of homeownership into a living nightmare.
“Owning a manufactured home in a manufactured housing community must be the most vulnerable type of homeownership available to anybody in this country,” said Ishbel Dickens, a Washington-based attorney and former executive director of the National Manufactured Home Owners Association. “I would suggest they are prisoners in their own homes because their options are so limited.”
The price of affordability
“Sitting in our homes in Oregon,” state Rep. Pam Marsh (D-Jackson County) said, “we’ve read about climate impacts all over the globe; we theoretically understood, intellectually understood, that the most vulnerable people are the ones who are going to be impacted first. … And that is exactly what we saw here in Southern Oregon.”
Even before more than a thousand manufactured homes in Jackson County went up in flames, the region struggled to cope with decades of soaring rents and anemic wages that afflict most of the nation.
Manufactured homes are in demand due to their lower price tag compared to traditional housing.
Oregon lawmakers passed legislation last year establishing an advisory council in charge of preserving what Marsh and advocates call “naturally occurring affordable housing.”
Marsh’s bill allocates $15 million to programs designed to help finance acquisitions of manufactured home parks by nonprofits or resident co-ops, in addition to providing funding for decommissioning and replacing old manufactured homes.
Just under 300,000 Oregonians — or 7.5% of the population — live in the roughly 140,000 manufactured homes in the state, according to the American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates from 2013-17.
Over the past decade, the state has invested millions of dollars in programs to decommission older manufactured homes and replace them with new, energy-efficient models.
But in every instance, the programs missed targets and struggled to make a dent in the tens of thousands of homes that were built prior to 1976, when consistent federal construction standards were introduced.
In the early 2010s, Oregon Housing and Community Services (OHCS) received grant funding to replace disintegrating manufactured homes in Curry County. Their goal was to replace 25 homes, but the program ultimately managed to help only seven families.
“While the positive impact to individual families is significant and meaningful, it is less clear what the community-level impact will be given the limited and artisanal method of production,” read a report prepared by program partner NeighborWorks Umpqua.
Last December, OHCS reached the deadline of another pilot, which deployed $5 million in funding toward replacing 100 manufactured homes across the state.
The program replaced only 24 manufactured homes before it was rolled into new programs, according to the agency.
While the state pools resources to incentivize preservation of manufactured home communities, the government faces competition with deep pockets.
Joining billionaire manufactured home investors Warren Buffet and Sam Zell is Blackstone, the private equity firm that has grown into the world’s largest real estate company after buying distressed properties following the last financial crisis.
In some cases, Wall Street investors are able to take advantage of federal loans with favorable terms that were originally designed for low-income individuals pursuing homeownership.
Instead of turning manufactured home parks into rent-controlled communities managed by nonprofits or the residents themselves, corporate parks are often rolled into real estate investment vehicles like real estate investment trusts, or REITs.
In recent years REITs have been popular with casinos, private prisons and chain stores such as Walmart looking to avoid federal corporate taxes.
According to a 2019 report from Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit watchdog group, private equity-backed acquisitions of manufactured home communities received more than $1.5 billion in financing from Fannie Mae, the U.S. government-controlled mortgage backer.
Despite efforts to improve financing options for seniors and other groups on fixed incomes, most manufactured-home owners are saddled with high interest rates on personal property loans that treat their residence as a depreciating asset like a car.
‘Place of bondage’
In 2018, The Register-Guard reported allegations of systematic exploitation of seniors at a Eugene manufactured-home park owned by a subsidiary of Sam Zell’s mobile home empire, Equity Lifestyle Properties.
James Houston, a resident at the time who blew the whistle and submitted testimony during a May 2018 Judiciary Committee meeting in Salem, called Falcon Wood Village a “place of bondage.”
Houston suggested to legislators that at the time, the most urgent priority was “a pervasive failure by park owners to fund ‘routine, reasonable and preventative maintenance.’”
Richard Blackwell, then policy manager at the Department of Business and Consumer Services’ Division of Financial Regulation, told lawmakers that his agency had identified a laundry list of complaints from park residents across the state who feared retaliation and eviction for speaking out.
“In terms of scope, we’re aware of potential irregularities in a dozen parks across eight counties throughout the state,” Blackwell said. “And those are just the ones that have come to us.”
During the same committee meeting, an Equity Lifestyle Properties executive, Ron Barker, assured lawmakers “these activities do not reflect our company’s business practices.”
“If there was a feasible way for us to prevent such acts of deception, we would do so by continuing to maintain our high ethical standards and business practices, and fostering relationships with our residents,” Barker said.
A year later, residents of Falcon Wood Village were in the news again. Local TV station KEZI broadcast residents complaining of ongoing water quality issues and lapsed maintenance — despite consistently rising rents — following a water main break and boil advisory.
Resident Loleta Drake told reporters, “If I had a place to go, I’d be out of here.”
Toxic loans, toxic homes
Up until this year, all new manufactured homes came with a sticker that read: “DANGER: Formaldehyde.”
Despite an extensive body of studies linking formaldehyde to chronic diseases including cancer and respiratory illness, the ubiquitous industrial chemical and abundant fossil fuel byproduct is still used in countless commercial applications representing hundreds of billions of dollars in annual economic activity.
“I guarantee it’s all around you, wherever you’re sitting right now,” said Linda Kincaid, an industrial hygienist who has worked for years testing air quality in workplaces for big tech companies in California.
Last year, in an effort led by formaldehyde producer Koch Industries alumni and the American Chemical Council, the Environmental Protection Agency shelved an assessment on the chemical. A report by Politico said the assessment was expected to find most Americans are at risk of leukemia and other conditions from the levels of formaldehyde they breathe in on a daily basis.
The same industry lobbying groups fighting to preserve the market for formaldehyde have also funded disinformation campaigns to promote fossil fuels and accelerate the climate crisis that contributes to the frequency and severity of events like those that swept across Oregon in September.
An epidemic of acute health issues among survivors of Hurricane Katrina who were housed in trailers provided through the Federal Emergency Management Agency led to a push to regulate formaldehyde emissions in common building materials. The toxic trailers ended up scattered across the country after FEMA auctioned off thousands of them to dealers who simply removed the warning stickers and resold them to homeless shelters, Native American reservations and other communities in need of disaster housing.
Indigenous people living on reservations are more likely to live in a manufactured home than the general population. They are also more likely to pay higher interest rates for home loans. And, because the federal government holds the land beneath most reservations in trust, residents run into many of the same barriers to financing that people encounter in manufactured-home parks.
Nicholas Shapiro is a medical anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles who has traveled the country tracking and testing toxic FEMA trailers. He sees direct links between increased use of mobile homes on reservations, predatory financing regimes targeting marginalized communities and the disproportionate exposure of low-income populations to known human carcinogens.
“Affordable housing solutions that tout the potential of manufactured housing, but do not reckon with the toxicity and colonial violence that they perpetuate, are bound to reproduce asymmetries in health and capital,” Shapiro wrote in 2019 in the Journal for Anthropology of North America.
Shapiro described the composite wood products that are ubiquitous in manufactured homes as little more than sawdust glued together with formaldehyde.
“From roughly the 1950s to the ‘70s, architects had this fantasy that homes would be made entirely out of plastic,” Shapiro said. “So we do have this residue of this dream of the plastic home that didn’t get realized.”
While chemical companies like Monsanto are no longer featuring all-plastic homes in Walt Disney World, the powerful plastic lobby hopes cash-strapped jurisdictions with decaying infrastructure will be attracted to the lower upfront costs and flexibility of plastic piping.
Earlier this year, Oregon legislators joined a $300 billion nationwide battle between plastic and iron lobbyists over who will replace 1.6 million miles of dilapidated water and sewer pipes across the country when they considered House Bill 4043, which would have limited government authority over piping material selection.
State Rep. Paul Evans (D-Monmouth) introduced the legislation that was similar to bills backed by the American Chemical Council in at least five other states and would preclude localities from restricting certain types of piping in design and procurement contracts. Since 2016, the American Chemical Council has contributed $126,000 to dozens of lawmakers and committees on both sides of the aisle, including $2,000 last year to Evans.
Evans’ office did not respond to questions about the legislation as of press time.
Andrew Whelton, a nationally recognized expert on water infrastructure disaster response and recovery, suggested they keep their options open, and let local governments decide what material to use for their drinking water.
“I would ask that you consider whether 4043 is in the best interest of the ratepayers, your constituents, water system resilience, and maintaining public health,” he told the House Committee on Water in February.
But when Oregon Health Authority officials started making post-disaster water quality testing missteps that echoed what Whelton had observed in 2017 and 2019 during California’s wildfire disaster response, the advice turned toward what might already be in the pipes.
In an October email to Oregon Health Authority, Whelton urged agency officials to update water quality testing guidance documents for consumers that were supported by what he characterized as “a nonscientific magazine” with “ZERO credibility.”
“My assumption is that OHA just copy and pasted from California’s document (and all of California’s mistakes are now being projected onto Oregonians),” Whelton wrote to Drinking Water Services. “This can and should be quickly corrected.”
OHA updated the document four days later, which included a disclaimer:
“This document was prepared by the California Water Resources Control Board, Division of Drinking Water, with input from other drinking water professionals. It has been adapted for Oregon. Information provided below is based on limited experience and understanding of how public drinking water systems are impacted by wildfires.”
It also stated, “It cannot be guaranteed that following the recommendations below will necessarily protect water system users from adverse health impacts associated with the water.”
Whelton said Oregon officials seemed more open to evidence and advice on protecting public safety compared to California health agencies during the aftermath of record-setting wildfires in 2017 and 2018.
But he also noted that a lack of properly conducted water testing, along with financial incentives to look for only the most common and easily traceable contaminants, could leave some communities with a false sense of security.
“Who is looking out for the best interest or the health and well-being of these individuals in mobile home parks that have to live there because their insurance company won’t allow them to be up in a hotel?” Whelton asked. “Nobody.”
The New York Times linked this nationwide push to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an industry-friendly bill mill funded by Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries.
ALEC is also affiliated with the American City County Exchange, a new group designed to extend corporate influence over policy at the county and city level.
When she’s not busy winterizing the motorhome she plans on living in for the next three to five years, Muñoz has been rallying displaced citizens for a committee to take their health, housing and safety issues directly to the Legislature, she said.
Asked about her vision for the future, Muñoz said she sees the charred land left behind as a blank canvas, an opportunity to decommodify land and humans.
“I want to see the people who support, live, thrive and create in this valley to be the people who own, tend and care for each other and the land,” Muñoz said. “No more profiting off the people, no more profiting off the land.
“I just see people who are willing to rise, because that’s all you can do. We’re not going to be protected, but we’re going to set the precedent for the future for our children. Because right now we’re being exploited.”