CEDAR RAPIDS — Communities throughout the U.S. now have a guide they can use to help manufactured home residents recover when natural disasters strike.
Local nonprofit Matthew 25 has developed a Manufactured Home Disaster Recovery Playbook as a resource that can be used throughout the U.S. to help residents living in manufactured homes recover from natural disasters and increase resiliency before disasters.
Matthew 25 received support from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy on the project as part of the center’s Midwest Early Recovery Fund to support home repair in Linn County after the August 2020 derecho, the costliest thunderstorm in U.S. history.
In the aftermath of the derecho, local partners quickly saw that the storm’s ferocious winds particularly affected manufactured home residents. Matthew 25 Executive Director Clint Twedt-Ball said the organization and other community partners worked to find solutions to help these vulnerable communities recover, but found little research or case studies available to guide their efforts.
So, Matthew 25 created a guide. This playbook is intended to be a guide residents, funders, park management, construction teams and community leaders can turn to nationwide before and after disasters occur to support manufactured home residents. It is made up of five overview videos and a 20-page overview document geared toward these different stakeholders who’d be involved in disaster response.
The playbook and the overview videos are available online at matthew-25.org/MHDR.
“We weren’t able to find materials that were structured where it was like, ‘If this happens, what’s the manufactured homes disaster recovery manual for dummies?” Twedt-Ball said. “That’s essentially what we’re looking at is, ‘Five minute panic and I don’t even know where to turn. Are there quickly accessible, easy-to-read and understand manuals out there that I could turn to?’”
According to the center, “more than 22 million people live in mobile and manufactured homes, which represent an important affordable housing option for many communities.”
And a recent report from the Alliance for Equitable Housing — a coalition of local government and nonprofit partners focused on getting to the root of housing issues — also highlighted the vulnerabilities affecting manufactured home residents.
The alliance found that mobile home communities can be more accessible for vulnerable populations, but provide fewer protections than traditional housing. As large corporations buy parks and hike lot rent, according to the report, tenants are left in a financially unstable position.
Twedt-Ball said mobile home residents often encountered difficulties accessing assistance or had aid denied after the derecho. These homeowners don’t own the land under their home, residents may not have insurance coverage to protect them from shouldering disaster costs, and it’s difficult to find contractors who will work on mobile homes.
Twedt-Ball said the center has worked with Matthew 25 since after the 2008 flood and officials contacted the Matthew 25 team about the funding gaps after the derecho. Seeing few communities work strategically on manufactured housing, the center asked Matthew 25 to develop some resources.
“When we started looking at putting money into (manufactured homes) and your return-on-investment equation, it’s like some funders will look and say, ‘Well, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to put a lot of money into these homes … let’s find somewhere else to live,’” Twedt-Ball said.
But he said there were countless stories after the derecho of manufactured home residents who were committed to staying in their homes, where they either lived with multiple generations or had built a strong community. Twedt-Ball said some had chosen to stay even with no running water or the ceiling caving in rather than move elsewhere.
Knowing that, Twedt-Ball said Matthew 25’s only option was to figure out how to invest in these typically older homes and make them livable. That meant navigating challenges such as finding people with construction skills to work on manufactured homes and working with oftentimes out-of-state park management.
“There’s just one speed bump after another, and that makes it not the easiest place to work, which really fits who we are as an organization — those places that are overlooked and the people that are kind of ignored sometimes,” Twedt-Ball said.
Matthew 25 was one of the partners that was instrumental in pulling together the PATCH program after the derecho, which helped fix storm-damaged homes with most funding support from the city of Cedar Rapids’ and Linn County’s federal American Rescue Plan Act allocations.
Twedt-Ball said the final PATCH project wrapped up last month. Local organizations are transitioning to work on housing projects receiving federal Community Development Block Grant disaster recovery funds. Information about how other communities can replicate the PATCH program is among the resources included in the playbook.
Ultimately, Twedt-Ball said he hopes this playbook spurs more conversation at the federal level to target more disaster recovery resources toward manufactured home residents. He said he also would like to see it encourage communities to better engage with residents who rely on this kind of housing before a disaster occurs.
To those overwhelmed by the immense needs that emerge after a disaster, Twedt-Ball said, “Hopefully they’ll see something that connects with them and helps them to think, ‘If they did it in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, we should be able to do it here.’”
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