Across the blueberry barren with its course sandy trails and the odd stand-alone pine is the back side of a large, neat trailer park. With the sun behind me the trailers stood-out, a sliver of glaring white marking the transition between the twiggy March grey brown of the blueberry bushes, and the winter green of the pines on the horizon.
As the anomaly settled on me—a trailer park next to a giant conservation easement—bits of an article I had recently read emerged. Details were foggy—I’d read it in that bleary state before sleep familiar to second shifters: the mind is still too active for sleep, but not active enough for anything productive or pleasurable. Why not fill that gap with dread by reading, “Trailer Park Trades. Private equity’s impact on low-income residents” from a recent New Yorker?
I once learned—during my days of civic involvement—that ten percent of my town lived in mobile homes, and the vast majority of the them lived in a handful of largish trailer parks. What would happen if a couple of these were snapped up by some investment conglomerate?
This trailer park had always struck me as among the nicer ones. Unlike many, it isn’t night up against a highway. In fact it’s pretty close to the more affluent neighborhoods in town. And I stared at it from the middle of a big swath of conservation land. Since 1995 it has stood cheek-by-jowl with the town’s high performing high school. “Walking distance to schools.” Anybody can sell that.
Part of this is a trick of time. In fact the trailer park has been there more than sixty years—since the blueberry fields were more numerous and a bigger part of the work culture of town. Brunswick’s younger teens all raked berries for a few weeks each August for cash. The few frame houses out this way stood next to old chicken barns, the fragrant remnant of the poultry industry.
This park used to go by the family name of its owners though that might have been a colloquialism—once they all seemed to have a person’s names attached to them rather than the current wistful botanical or nautical names.
The dreadful take-away from this New Yorker article was that local owners of big trailer parks, particularly in the west and southwest, were being made huge offers by distant equity funds which, upon closing, cranked up fees while diminishing or eliminating services. The appeal of these properties to a private equity fund—from an analytical standpoint anyway—is that “mobile home parks are the only segment of real estate that grows stronger as the economy declines,” which is because the vulnerability of the “residents is part of the business model. This is a captive class of tenant.”
Less analytically, as one of the principals in something called “Mobile Home University” put it, the typical mobile home park was a like “a Waffle House where customers are chained to their booths.”
It’s hard to read that without being reminded of the Countrywide mortgage crisis that brought the country’s economy to its knees in 2008. According to a New York Times recapitulation of Countrywide case, similar strategies were “intended to increase Countrywide earnings from default-related services during an economic downturn…. In other words, if profits from home loan originations fell, Countrywide could make up for it by increasing the burden on its most troubled customers. A choice statistic from this case: Countrywide charged some borrowers in foreclosure $300 to mow their lawns.”
But this wouldn’t happen in Brunswick would it? This particular trailer park has been owned by one family for seven decades. And the high performing high school next door? It has a theatre named for another family who own a different trailer park—once eponymously known before it too had its bucolic rebranding. These are places where young couples get their starter homes, where snow-birds move once they’ve down-sized and just need a place to be near the grandkids for six-months of the year. I hope I am right.
(I have no information that suggests any of the trailer parks in Brunswick are currently for sale. A website called censusreporter.org notes 15% of the housing stock in Brunswick, Maine is mobile homes which is more than double the rate in the Portland metro area (5%) and nearly double the statewide rate of 8%)
Looking south from the Maquoit trail toward Linnhaven Trailer Park, opened, according to its website, in 1954. The Maquoit trail is part of the Crystal Spring Farm network and offers access to it directly from Maquoit Road just about 100 meters to the left of where this photo was made.