Cornell University Press Singlewide: Chasing the American Dream in a Rural Trailer Park

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. Review "Singlewide is an important and much-needed contribution to our understandings of rural poverty. Given the numbers of Americans who live in mobile home parks across the country, this is an important book. Sonya Salamon and Katherine MacTavish do an excellent job of situating the demand for trailer park housing in the larger context of rural economic changes and housing policies." Author: Lyn C. Macgregor, University of Wisconsin–Madison "In Singlewide, distinguished ethnographers Sonya Salamon and Kate MacTavish tell an extraordinary story of trailer people―segregated, stigmatized, and cut off from mainstream society and the rural communities in which they live." Author: Daniel T. Lichter, Cornell University "In Singlewide Sonya Salamon and Kate MacTavish provide a fascinating study of the meanings and implications of trailer park life.  Readers will find a thoughtful analysis of the industry as well as a comprehensive and policy-rich account of the difficulties encountered by low-income families ‘chasing the American dream’ through mobile home ownership." Author: Ann R. Tickamyer, Pennsylvania State University, co-editor of Rural Poverty in the United States "The book realistically portrays trailer living in each unique area chosen by the authors." Source: Pasatiempo "The authors discuss four research questions involving the lasting effects on a family from living in a trailer park, financial payoffs, sense of belonging in a community, and the possibility that children and youth can improve their life chances. They also summarize the role of mobile home manufacturers, dealers, financers, park operators, and nearby communities." Source: Choice "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." Source: Journal of Children and Poverty About the Author Sonya Salamon is Professor Emerita of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Prairie Patrimony and Newcomers to Old Towns. Katherine MacTavish is Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Science at Oregon State University.