Trailer Park America

Reimagining Working-Class Communities

LEONTINA HORMEL

“Immersing herself in Syringa, Idaho, for more than five years, Leontina Hormel is clearly passionate about both the issue of housing and this community itself. Trailer Park America is a welcome contribution to the existing literature on low-incoming housing and mobile home residents in particular.”

—Daisy Rooks, University of Montana

“Trailer Park America is exceptionally well written, in clear, direct language, making vivid the real, human dramas at the heart of broad social systems, relationships, and institutions. One of the best books I have read in decades.”

—Elaine Coburn, editor of More Will Sing Their Way to Freedom

In popular culture, trailer parks are frequently stigmatized as places where only the trashiest Americans would choose to live. In reality, however, they are one of the few viable living options for workingclass families in the midst of a nationwide affordable housing shortage. Trailer parks can provide a supportive community for marginalized Americans—but what happens when a trailer park is forced to close?

Trailer Park America offers a detailed study of one such case, when the Syringa Mobile Home Park in rural northern Idaho suffered a sewage contamination, resulting in residents’ water being shut off for over three months, eventually leading to the park’s closure. Sociologist Leontina Hormel puts a human face on residents whom local authorities largely viewed as a nuisance— the single-mother households, veterans, recovering addicts, and people with disabilities who were forced to either relocate or face homelessness. Yet she also shows how these marginalized people fought back, defending the rights and dignity of residents, negotiating with local government, and filing a class-action lawsuit that reached the federal courts. In the trailer park, she finds not only stories of adversity but also hope for Americans from different backgrounds to rally together and battle against an unfair system.

LEONTINA HORMEL is a professor of sociology at the University of Idaho. Her research interests include political economy, environmental sociology, international development, community action, and gender and class inequalities. She has conducted ethnographic and survey work in Ukraine, in the Russian Federation, and throughout the state of Idaho.

284 pp 22 color and 9 b/w images

6.125 x 9.25

978-1-9788-2946-6 paper $34.95AT

978-1-9788-2947-3 cloth $69.95SU

November 2023

Current Affairs • Sociology • American Studies

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Foreword by Dawn Tachell

Chronology

Introduction

1. Who Belongs on the Palouse?

2. Inventing Working-Class Communities

3. Making a Functional Community amidst Disorder

4. Voluntary Compliance

5. Red Tags

6. Syringa Refugees

7. Death of a Community

8. Trailer Park Politics

9. Trailer Park America

Methodological Appendix

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index