Adaptation at the Margins: Mobile Home Parks, Climate Hazards and Risk

Keywords: housing, vulnerability, flood, risk, exposure, mobile home, planning
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 69

Abstract

Mobile home parks are home to nearly 3 million households in the United States and are at high-risk to extreme weather events like floods and wildfires. Mobile home parks are especially common in the Sunbelt region, which is at high-risk from present and future climate change. Mobile home parks are an important climate adaptation issue because they concentrate socially vulnerable people in hazardous areas and are poorly served by hazard mitigation and disaster recovery policies. Yet, there is virtually no research on the likely exposure of mobile home parks to natural hazards under future climate conditions.

In this paper we seek to advance the climate adaptation literature by presenting a first (to our knowledge) study of climate change and mobile home parks. We ask, how will future climate-related hazards impact mobile home parks in the United States? Our study centers on three coastal metropolitan regions that are particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise and diverse in their geographic size, population, population density, and socio-demographic makeup: Houston, Miami, and Panama City. We use a geospatial research design with several steps of data collection and analysis to critically compare hazard exposure across these metropolitan regions to characterize the mobile home parks that will likely be at greatest risk.

We then draw broader comparisons between our findings and the climate adaptation literature on precarious housing generally, and outline some of the likely policy and practice challenges that will face local, state, and federal government governments tasked with disaster risk reduction and climate resiliency.