But last month, before they got word of the eviction, they took out a note on a new car for their family of six. If they can wait for their tax refund, they can pull it off. Moving the trailer will cost 34 times their monthly rent. Tasha makes phone calls about potential lots to move to. The day of the move, they huddle in old chairs around a bonfire of new plywood, keeping an eye on the children playing in a patch of sand. That steep cost is certainly the case for Tasha Thompson and her partner, John. That's what one discerning legalist once wrote, when she said: "The term 'mobile home' is somewhat misleading." Because? "Because the cost of moving one is often a significant fraction of the value of the mobile home itself." That was Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. It's obvious, when you think about it, that we just haven't bothered to fix the pesky little language that comprises the law. That's why their landlord owed them only 10 days prior to kicking them out. They rent the land on which the home sits - the same way you'd rent a parking spot. Pine Haven residents, like nearly half the mobile home residents in America today, own their home, but not the land beneath it. Ask an expert in the field and you discover that almost no one has expertise in or even knows much about mobile home law - property-law textbooks devote only a page or a mention to mobile homes.Īll of this is complicated by the fact that the world of mobile home living is topsy-turvier than the average landlord-tenant situation. In some cases, states afford a mobile home resident no more legal rights than a car owner, leaving them in a strange semantic limbo that puts them on the outskirts of mainstream property law. In Louisiana, for example, landlords can evict mobile home renters in as little as 10 days, and while the time periods are greater in some other states, nearly all of the nation's 20 million mobile home dwellers are in a similarly precarious situation. "This coffee's damn strong, but not strong enough for a day like this."Ī day like this is happening only because of a little-noticed oddity of America's laws on mobile homes, a system that offers this group of people the least protection of anyone else in housing. Soon, as in … 10 days.Īs her guys bounce around the gravel corner in trucks dragging oversize dollies, Kathie finishes off her coffee in three gulps. What's left, soon enough, will just be an empty clearing in the marshy, mossy southwest Louisiana forest. In fact, Kathie is there to move all 35 mobile homes, the whole of the Pine Haven community: all told more than 150 people, including dozens of kids and pets.īefore long, Pine Haven will be gone, and along with it the shrieks of children running its one dirt street, the porch huddles of drawled chatter and cigarettes, the smoke of its nightly neighborhood bonfires that unite the families. And Tasha Thompson and her boisterous family of six. And Miss Bonnie, with her ventilator and newborn baby. There's also Miss Ramona and her two adult sons, each with their own trailer. Kathie knows the risks she's a professional mobile home mover. But you can imagine that if you leaned on it the wrong way, it might just crumble. It's survived 40 years of hard-luck life and hurricanes. Miss Rose's mobile home is in poor condition. "I just don't know how we're going to get your home up on the toter without the whole damn thing falling apart." It's moving day for Miss Rose, and Kathie is concerned. "I've got a bad feeling about this, you know," she says. Her guys with the toters and hookups should be arriving any minute, so for now, Kathie just shoots the shit with Miss Rose. Here, rents are low and crawfish is in season. The sun is just beginning to break over the tops of the pines here in Moss Bluff, a town in an unincorporated part of Calcasieu Parish, in a small corner of Louisiana's Cajun country. Leaned against her navy pickup truck, wearing a mottled purple scrubs-liketop, Kathie Clement sips strong coffee and surveys the scene.
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