When you hear the words “trailer park” or “mobile home park,” what comes to mind? Crime? Poverty? Vulnerability to natural disasters? These negative images reflect the stigma, reinforced by popular culture, that many U.S. residents assign to manufactured home parks – the official name for these dwellings under federal standards adopted in 1976.

Over 20 million Americans live in manufactured housing – more than in public housing and federally subsidized rental housing combined. Yet many people, including urban planners and affordable housing researchers, see manufactured housing parks as problems. In contrast, we see them as part of the solution to housing crises.

We are urban planning scholars who study climate vulnerability, community economic development and equity in urban land use. Our research suggests that misguided stereotypes blind scholars and policymakers to the possibility that mobile homes can help address the affordable housing crisis and climate change. Here are some misperceptions about this widespread form of housing.

Stereotype 1: Manufactured housing is shoddy

Many people think manufactured homes are poorly built, even though these structures, unlike site-built houses, have had to meet federal safety standards since 1976. These safety standards have been periodically updated, often in response to disasters. Today, new well-installed factory-built homes are comparable to site-built homes when it comes to standing up to wind, fire and other disaster threats.

Compared to homes built on-site, manufactured housing costs half as much per square foot – partly because it’s easier, more predictable and cheaper to build homes in factories. Many quality problems associated with manufactured housing arise from home installation, park maintenance and infrastructure issues. No matter how well-built homes are, residents can suffer if they are installed on unstable foundations, or if park owners allow water, sewer or power utility infrastructure to crumble.

Stereotype 2: Manufactured housing parks are always exploitative

While many manufactured housing residents own their homes, they may not own the land the homes sit on. This can leave them at the mercy of predatory park owners and investors. Moving manufactured homes is difficult and expensive, despite the “mobile” label, so residents of manufactured home parks can’t easily relocate when park owners allow conditions to deteriorate, raise rents or evict residents.

But there are alternatives. Residents at over 1,000 manufactured housing parks in the U.S. have jointly bought their land, creating Resident Owned Communities.

This cooperative model gives residents control over their homes and neighborhoods. Resident-owned parks preserve affordability and help residents address their own problems, including vulnerability to climate-driven disasters.

Stereotype 3: Manufactured housing parks aren’t urban or dense

Manufactured home parks are often dismissed as rural and low-density, and therefore irrelevant to urban housing needs. However, 61% of all manufactured housing is located in a metro area, and 8% is in urban centers.

The density of these communities, typically eight to 15 homes per acre, is often greater than nearby neighborhoods. In Houston, for example, many manufactured housing parks are located in suburban areas close to the central business district. If anything, local zoning in many cities limits the density of manufactured housing parks.

Stereotype 4: Manufactured housing parks are uniquely disconnected

Critics often assert that manufactured housing parks are disconnected from surrounding neighborhoods. In reality, this pattern applies to most U.S. residential neighborhoods built since World War II, including gated communities and cul-de-sacs. Residents of these communities value the privacy, safety and neighborhood cohesion their street patterns provide.

Biased local zoning regulations also frequently reinforce manufactured housing parks’ isolation by requiring them to be separated and hidden behind tall privacy fencing. Where fragmented street networks create problems for residents, like reduced walkability, they can be retrofitted by reconnecting streets.

The real challenges

While these stereotypes often don’t reflect reality, manufactured housing communities face real challenges.

Local governments and park owners often are eager to convert parks to what they describe as “higher and better uses,” which frequently means evicting residents for commercial development or more expensive housing. Private equity investors, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds are buying up manufactured housing parks, which they view as reliably profitable investments. When owners redevelop parks, they can evict residents with little recourse.

Residents of manufactured home parks are also increasingly vulnerable to climate change impacts. Biased zoning rules have forced many of these communities to locate on less desirable land, including flood-prone sites, industrial areas and highway fringes. In a 2021 review, we found that 22% of manufactured housing parks across nine states were located within current 100-year floodplains – zones with a 1% chance of flooding every year.

Manufactured housing is especially common in hurricane-prone regions like Florida, Louisiana and Texas. While updated building standards have substantially improved safety, increasingly ferocious storms still pose a real threat.

Aging manufactured home park infrastructure, including sewer, water and electricity systems, is highly vulnerable to extreme heat, wind, drought, flooding and wildfires. And since residents typically have lower incomes, they have fewer resources to respond when extreme events strike.

Manufactured housing, resilience and justice

With economic, political and technical support, evidence shows that manufactured housing can overcome these challenges.

To date, 20 states have adopted laws that help residents purchase the manufactured home parks where they live. These policies have helped ROC USA, a nonprofit social venture, create a network of over 280 cooperatively owned, limited-equity resident-owned communities that are home to over 18,000 households.

ROC USA provides low-cost loans to resident cooperatives to buy land and make needed capital improvements such as upgrading water, sewer and electric systems. Their network of regional housing experts then works with communities for at least a decade to develop and sustain their ability to manage their parks.

Over three decades, no ROC USA community has ever defaulted on a loan or sold their park. A growing number have adopted climate-responsive measures, such as building storm shelters and community centers, upgrading drainage infrastructure and providing emergency post-storm tree clearance and other forms of mutual aid. Other resident-owned communities are investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy costs for their residents.

Policymakers are paying attention. The Biden administration’s 2022 housing plan includes extensive support for manufactured housing parks.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for increasing state funding to preserve manufactured housing parks as affordable housing. The U.S. Department of Energy recently adopted more ambitious efficiency standards to reduce energy costs for residents of manufactured housing.

In our view, these efforts should be coupled with legislation that protects manufactured housing park tenants and expands the limited-equity ROC model. Governments could enact laws that offer tenants opportunities to purchase their rental units and provide subsidized loans and grants to resident cooperatives. Decades of experience shows that resident ownership can transform manufactured home parks from sites of stigma and vulnerability into stable and resilient communities.

Zachary Lamb, Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley; Jason Spicer, Assistant Professor of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto, and Linda Shi, Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As of July 16, 2022, people have only to press three digits, 988, to reach the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline when they need help during a mental health crisis.

Mental health issues such as anxiety and depression were a leading cause of global health problems even before the spread of COVID-19; however, they’ve gotten worse. Since the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety and depression rates worldwide have increased by an overwhelming 25%. In the U.S., 4 in 10 adults have reported symptoms of anxiety or depression during the pandemic, compared with 1 in 10 from January to June 2019.

Among the most affected are young adults and women. The surge in people struggling with mental illnesses has coincided with gaps in mental care services as well.

Research suggests that the pandemic has exacerbated the impacts of loneliness. Additionally, people’s fear of missing out, also known as FOMO, hasn’t decreased even since in-person social gatherings became less frequent. But small daily actions – such as a short walk, break from social media or even a catnap – can add up to have an impact on mental health. Separately, counseling, therapy and medication prescribed by health care providers are effective treatments for those experiencing mental illness.

The Conversation U.S. gathered four essential reads that explore some daily habits and practices that have been shown to improve mental health. These are food for thought, not guidelines or medical advice, but reading these articles could be the first steps toward a healthier lifestyle.

1. A short break goes a long way

Reducing screen time can alleviate feelings of isolation, loneliness and envy, which may arise from scrolling through social media, according to Jelena Kecmanovic, adjunct professor of psychology at Georgetown University.

“Several studies have shown that even a five-day or weeklong break from Facebook can lead to lower stress and higher life satisfaction,” she writes. “You can also cut back without going cold turkey: Using Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat just 10 minutes a day for three weeks resulted in lower loneliness and depression.”

2. Exercise is like medicine for the brain

Arash Javanbakht, associate professor of psychiatry at Wayne State University, shares the science behind the connection between exercise and mental well-being as well as his personal experience with the positive impacts of physical activity.

“Working out regularly really does change the brain biology, and it is not just ‘go walk and you will just feel better,’” he explains. “Regular exercise, especially cardio, does change the brain. Do not see it as all or none. It does not have to be a one-hour drive to and from the gym or biking trail for a one-hour workout vs. staying on the couch.

"I always say to my patients: ‘One more step is better than none, and three squats are better than no squats.’ When less motivated, or in the beginning, just be nice to yourself. Do as much as possible. Three minutes of dancing with your favorite music still counts.”

3. Think therapy is navel-gazing? Think again

People in need of therapy and counseling have long suffered from social stigma around mental illnesses, but these services are vital to protecting and improving our health.

“Decades of research show psychotherapy is effective for alleviating the most common forms of psychological suffering, such as anxiety and depression. But wellness is about more than reducing suffering,” writes Steven Sandage, professor of the psychology of religion and theology at the Boston University School of Theology. “Counseling informed by positive psychology can be effective in improving well-being and increasing such qualities as forgiveness, compassion and gratitude.”

4. Doing ‘nothing’

Though it may not always feel plausible or even comfortable, slowing down and allowing yourself a dedicated moment of rest can do wonders for mental well-being, especially when speed and efficiency seem to have become integral to our lives.

“In this 24/7, ‘always on’ age, the prospect of doing nothing might sound unrealistic and unreasonable. But it’s never been more important,” writes Simon Gottschalk, a professor of sociology at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“To equate ‘doing nothing’ with nonproductivity betrays a shortsighted understanding of productivity,” he explains. “In fact, psychological research suggests that doing nothing is essential for creativity and innovation, and a person’s seeming inactivity might actually cultivate new insights, inventions or melodies.”

Jacqueline Kim, Editorial intern, The Conversation and Michelle McAdams, University Relationship + Internship Manager, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If you look at homes on real estate websites today, you’ll likely see risk ratings for flooding, hurricanes and even wildfires.

In theory, summarizing risk information like this should help homebuyers and renters make more informed housing choices. But surveys show it isn’t working that way, at least not yet. Housing developments and home sales are still expanding in flood- and wildfire-prone areas.

The problem isn’t necessarily that consumers are ignoring the numbers. In our view, as experts in hazards geography, it’s that the way risk information is being presented ignores long-established lessons from behavioral science.

These ratings tend to appear as a single number for each hazard and lack an intuitive interpretation. What does it mean to have a heat risk of 84 (“extreme”) with 52 hot days in 2050, or a flood risk of 10 (“extreme”)?

We believe that current and future hazard and climate risks can more effectively be translated as costs, savings and trade-offs.

Making risk personal

Studies show that people rely on personal experience as the dominant driver when considering risk. In the absence of having personally experienced a flood or wildfire damage, they need actionable and understandable information.

We belong to a group of more than 20 interdisciplinary researchers at universities in Arizona, Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina who are trying to improve risk rating information. We’re currently testing an online tool for the Gulf Coast that provides residents with actionable resilience information. It is an early model of what residential risk reporting could look like.

Rather than just presenting a score, the tool offers information on the costs annually and over time that one can expect from each hazard, such as flooding or wind damage, and how the home’s census block compares with the local area, county and state. To capture the effects of sea-level rise, for example, we model the number of years it will take for a home to go from outside a high flood risk area to being inside.

Homebuyers’ psychological hurdles

The development of real estate-focused climate and hazard risk metrics, such as those offered by First Street Foundation and ClimateCheck, is a step in the right direction, going beyond government risk maps that provide risk data by county. The next step is to ground those numbers in behavioral science research.

People do not ignore risk ratings per se, but the point at which information motivates people to take protective actions varies.

The motivation hurdle is lower for people with past experience, those who are aware of the risks and receptive to this kind of information, and those who have the financial resources to choose safer communities.

For others, the hurdle can be much higher. They might struggle with common decision biases, such as oversimplifying the severity of the risk, which leads to either an overestimation or underestimation of the threat depending on the type of hazard, focusing on today rather than the future, or simply assuming nothing bad is going to happen. They might just follow what others do – which research finds is what most of us do when deciding on a home.

Many people also have unrealistic beliefs that insurance and government payouts after disasters will fully compensate them for their losses, and a false sense of security that building codes and permitting mean homes are built to withstand any natural hazard.

The combination of these decision biases causes residents to underestimate the risk and impacts from disasters and climate change. Most people then underprepare and don’t consider these risks in their housing choices.

Risk ratings could help overcome those biases by expressing risk information in relatable terms such as the number of assistance requests made to the Federal Emergency Management Agency after disasters, the rejection rate and the average FEMA funds received per applicant in the area.

Next step: Pull it all together in one location

Ideally, homebuyers and renters would have a one-stop shop for all of this risk information about a property. To be prepared for climate change, risk must become a factor in housing choices similar to square footage and number of bedrooms.

Currently, risk data is scattered. For example, people can learn about insurance costs by checking flood insurance rate maps, which outline the areas with a 1% or greater annual chance of flooding. Or they can ask an insurance agent to generate a Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange report, which lists all flood insurance claims made on a property in the past five to seven years. A handful of states such as California require sellers to disclose the risk of natural hazards to the property.

In our view, the continuing influx of residents into high-risk areas, along with skyrocketing disaster losses, presents an urgent need to give prospective renters and buyers better information about the risks properties face.

Melanie Gall, Clinical Professor and Co-Director, Center for Emergency Management and Homeland Security, Watts College, Arizona State University; Christopher Emrich, Associate Professor of Public Administration, University of Central Florida, and Marie Aquilino, Senior Research Analyst in Emergency Management, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.