On a Saturday morning in the ski town of Durango, Colo., a family of five lounges in their pajamas inside a small, rectangular mobile home. This is the trailer Verónica and her family have called home for almost a decade.
Down a narrow hallway, there are a couple of closet-sized bedrooms and a small bathroom with a cheerful gnome shower curtain. But the open-floor-plan living room-meets-kitchen is the preferred hangout space. Right now, a kid's cartoon blares on the TV.
"To the outside world, it might just seem like a tiny little trailer," Verónica said in Spanish. "But to us, it's a home, cozy and full of love, peace and calm."
Verónica requested that only her first name be used in this story due to a fear of deportation related to her immigration status.
Over the years, Verónica and her husband have fixed up the place. They've repainted rooms and added cheerful decorations like artificial poinsettias and twinkle lights. They just constructed a new rumpus room for the kids to study and play in.
More than 22 million people in the U.S., like Verónica, live in mobile home parks. That makes manufactured housing the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the U.S., according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Affordable, but for how long?
But affordability isn't always a guarantee. Manufactured-housing residents usually own the trailers themselves but not the land underneath. When that land sells, residents often face the threat of imminent displacement.
That was Verónica's fear when Durango's Westside Mobile Park, where she lives, went up for sale in 2022. Harmony Communities, a mobile home park operator notorious for spiking rents and imposing strict new park rules, was poised to offer $5.5 million in cash for the lot that houses about 60 trailers.
If the corporate sale went through, Westside's residents feared they would be pushed out. It's no unfounded fear. A 2025 report from Princeton University's Eviction Lab found eviction filings rose by 40% in the months following the sale of mobile home parks in Florida, one of the states with the most trailer parks in the United States.
"For manufactured-housing communities, one of the biggest challenges that they face is instability," Meagan Ehlenz, an associate professor at Arizona State University's School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, said. "Evictions and displacement and rent hikes are very common as private investors have come in and recognized this as an opportunity."
Verónica and other Westside Mobile Park residents weren't going to let their homes go without a fight. They started raising money to try to match or beat the corporation's offer. Some sold tamales and hosted rallies. They got support from local businesses and elected officials in their town of 20,000 people.
It took more than tamale sales
Still, it was an uphill battle. Many Westside residents work multiple jobs and support young families. A majority are immigrants. They knew it would be a stretch to gather the money and resources necessary to fully buy out and operate their mobile home park.
That's where Denver-based Elevation Community Land Trust came in. Community land trusts provide permanent affordable housing through a unique model. Basically, the nonprofit land trust buys a piece of land but only resells or rents the homes on the land. Residents enter into a long-term lease on the land beneath their homes and also face caps on resale value to keep the property affordable for future residents.
Land trusts often work directly with individual buyers who meet requisite income limits. The goal is to make homeownership attainable for lower-income families.
Land trusts aren't just in the business of homeownership, though. Some land trusts also rent out units or even take over entire mobile home parks. That's the kind of opportunity Elevation's CEO, Stefka Fanchi, identified at Westside Mobile Park.
"It was one of those things where all the stars aligned," Fanchi said.
Nobody said it was going to be easy
Fanchi's first step in working with residents to buy Westside was to educate residents about the community land trust model and get them on board. It wasn't easy.
"We were speaking different languages. We were from different areas. We were at different points in our lives, in our careers, in our families," Fanchi said.
With plenty of community meetings and a will to keep the park in residents' hands, they managed to eventually find common ground.
Still, the timeline was tight. Fanchi had just over a month to work with residents to leverage public subsidies alongside major loans from banks, local governments and foundations to pull together enough to make a competitive bid.
Their first offer was rejected four days before the deadline.
Fanchi said it was the support of so many in Durango that really sealed the deal and got the second offer past the finish line. If Westside fell into corporate hands and residents were forced out, there would be virtually nowhere else for these vital members of the local workforce to go.
"It was the Durango community that came together and said, 'The fate of these people is intertwined with the fate of my family,'" Fanchi recalled.
Since 2022, Elevation Community Land Trust has partnered with residents to manage Westside. While a private corporation typically makes decisions with the bottom line in mind, the land trust works under a nonprofit model that helps manage the park for the benefit of residents.
Some four years after the sale, the results at Westside are promising. The land trust has helped stabilize rents and made numerous upgrades to the aging trailer park, like clearing sewage lines and transitioning the park from well water to the city water supply. The land trust also managed to buy the neighboring 12-unit Triangle Trailer Park after it faced the threat of a similar corporate sale to Harmony Communities in 2022. Some residents are now preparing to trade in their deteriorating old trailers for homes on permanent foundations, with construction on the first new housing units expected in 2027.
About 1,000 mobile home parks across the country are communally owned by residents.
In comparison, about a couple of hundred community land trusts exist across the United States. Only a handful of those land trusts work with mobile home parks.
Ehlenz said she would like to see the community land trust-manufactured housing collaboration replicated elsewhere — if the funding can catch up. Local and state governments play a key role.
"If you pour that money and those resources into something like a community land trust, it stays there for the first homeowner and the subsequent and the subsequent, all the way down the line," Ehlenz said.
Land trusts could be particularly useful in supporting mobile home communities whose residents have less time and resources to take on the task of owning and operating the park all by themselves.
"It requires a huge amount of technical expertise and just a labor of love. That can be really challenging for folks," Ehlenz said. "A CLT [community land trust], on the other hand, can come in, and they have the capacity and the technical expertise and the resources to really help provide that technical advising and that stability."
Merging a land trust with a trailer park isn't without setbacks. Taking over a mobile home park requires the ability to make a major down payment — often at short notice — to buy out the park. Plus, managing the park requires significant ongoing cash flow to support maintenance, services and property management.
Unlike selling affordable-housing units to individual buyers, replicating the land trust model in an entire manufactured-housing community requires working closely with residents to make decisions.
Back at Westside, Verónica, for one, is tremendously relieved that her family can keep their home.
"We'd invested a lot in this just to say, 'Oh, we're going to have to sell it,'" she said in Spanish. "It was really scary to think that we could have lost everything."
Support for this story was provided by the Neal Peirce Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting journalism on ways to make cities and their larger regions work better for all people.
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