Yawns in mobile home parks

I want to update my earlier post on YAWNS. I mentioned there that it might be ok for a successful filmmaker and his family (YAWN) living near Berkeley, California to dry their clothes on a line, grow their own vegetables and buy what they need at garage sales and second-hand stores, but if you happen to be a low income person in a mobile home park you better think again!

Home Grown Food Network represents an outcome for such an alternative low income household. In its demonstration house project in Desert Hot Springs we seek to emulate a household “self-excluded” from consumerism. The project has been subject to endless legal conflicts on account of its policy of not wanting to use new “bought in the store” methods of creating a sustainable low cost housing unit in a mobile home park.

Our experience through this project is that mobile home park rules exist to deliberately prohibit creative re-use of artefacts in remodelling and landscaping projects, prohibit practices that promote water conservation and that even prohibit food growing! Mobile home park owners and their management companies achieve this “rule enforcement” by deluging tenants in litigation. This litigation is couched in terms designed to intimidate and bully low income tenants into giving up plans for creating a sustainable lifestyle in their homes if they want to use recycled items and practice water saving landscaping techniques. The core tactic of the litigation is to allege violations of rules saying that everything in the mobile home space should be “clean”, or “neat”, in “good condition”, or “neat,clean,attractive and well-kept fashion”, or “clean. attractive, and well kept fashion”. Armed with rules couched in such overly ambiguous terms, “mill” attorneys representing mobile home park owners beat a path to court again and again claiming “repeated violations’ without specifying how or why the violations occurred as they are required by law to do. Without the resources to be represented in court each and every time they are required to do so, a low income family falls into disrepute with the court, and so will inevitably drown in this litigation deluge.

Rules saying that everything in the mobile home space should be “clean”, or “neat”, in “good condition”, or “neat,clean,attractive and well-kept fashion”, or “clean. attractive, and well kept fashion” appear, in my experience, to be club jargon for “store bought”. In fact, to our horror, whenever faced with the allegation that some artefact we were using in the project was “stuff’ or “clutter”, we produced evidence that an item had an original value of $100 or more, it appeared to became allowable, even though previously it had been called “clutter” and/or “stuff”.

The basis for the “neat,clean,attractive and well-kept fashion” based rules seems to be a club mentality. This implicitly expects everyone who wants to be in the club to, in the words of Molly Scott Cato, comply with “what is an ‘acceptable’ way to live, what items club members should all have, how often club members should wash, how their children should be dressed and should behave. And the most serious cause of being excluded from the club is being unemployed”. more.

The same exclusionary rationale is at work against mobile home owners who choose to exclude themselves from the “buying new stuff in a store” behavior because they want to exemplify an alternative view of the provision of basic housing, food supply and energy demands. Their behavior results in exclusion from the club for reasons that are related to the inability of the owner to show he/she has items to display in a certain way acceptable to the club/community.

In these “clubs”/mobile home parks, as the other members accumulate more gadgets, the poor/or those who choose not to consume, will be forced to follow along, always a little behind, always rather ‘deprived’, but always in the direction of an inexorable increase in consumption “decided on” by the “clubs”/mobile home parks. If they do not follow along, they will find themselves forced out of the club.

It does not matter what their reason for not following along is. Whether it is because of their low income or through their choice to adopt a frugal, energy saving, sustainable lifestyle, the evidence points to the same result. The pressures of the accumulating “store bought stuff” club turns their lack, manifested for whatever reason, into a fatal flaw. And the club seeks to take away the ability of the low income/frugal mobile home dweller to be a fully functioning member of the club whenever that low income/frugal mobile home dweller does not follow along. Taking away that ability is expressed by managers through their refusal to grant normal social rights to those so judged. This refusal to grant normal social/constitutionally protected rights to those who are poor is flagrantly real in the mobile home park setting where park managers perpetrate privacy violations. deliberately aggressive behavior to reduce quiet enjoyment of the property, and, of course, the ubiquitous eventual litigation deluges mentioned above.

In the case of the Home Grown Food Network project in Desert Hot Springs, the owners and Park management attempted to use the litigation deluge in concert with a campaign to demean the project as “low class”. They attempted to conveniently forget the fact that it was a carefully thought out and previously approved project to demonstrate how a low income family could live a sustainable lifestyle.

The right not to consume is an aspect of freedom. At this point of evolution of the economy it is important to remove the road blocks that confront people who want to live a sustainable lifestyle whatever their income level, by whatever level of participation they choose to have in the market place.

Home Grown Food Network champions sustainability for low income families, and that is why I am looking forward to some serious contagious Yawning.

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network.