https://reasonstobecheerful.world/mobile-home-park-flooding-relocation/
"Charlotte Bishop was standing at her kitchen window in January 2019 when she
saw water streaming into her yard. A block of ice had clogged the brook that
snakes around the mobile home park where she and her husband Rollin live in
Brattleboro, Vermont. Bishop grabbed her keys and rushed outside to move their
cars to higher ground. Within minutes, she was wading through knee-high water.
Bishop lives in Tri-Park Cooperative, Vermont’s largest and oldest
resident-owned mobile home community. The co-op represents a crucial source of
affordable housing for about 1,000 residents, but many of its lots are
vulnerable to flooding. Bishop said her property has flooded about five times
since the early 2000s, and while their home has been spared thus far, she still
worries.
“I get paranoid, because I don’t want to lose everything,” she said.
Ice jams are not uncommon in Vermont, but the heavier rains and earlier winter
thaws — both related to climate change — will likely cause more flooding in
communities near rivers and streams. Now, the Bishops have the option to move
to higher ground. In partnership with the Town of Brattleboro, the co-op has
organized a $7.9 million effort to relocate 26 homes out of the flood zone, and
into new mobile homes in safer locations within the park. Their out-of-pocket
mortgage expenses won’t change, according to the development firm working on
the project.
More than 20 million Americans live in manufactured housing — also known as
mobile homes — which costs about half as much per square foot as traditional
homes. Like Tri-Park Cooperative, they’re often on the outskirts of town, in
places that can be beautiful but also bring their own dangers.
Across the US, biased zoning has sited many manufactured housing communities in
precarious “fringe environments,” such as floodplains and fire-prone urban
edges, according to Zachary Lamb, a climate adaptation researcher at UC
Berkeley. In Vermont, researchers found that about one-third of mobile home
communities are at least partially in federal floodplains.
Now, many of those communities are grappling with how to keep their communities
safe, without driving up costs for residents, who often own their mobile home
and rent their lot."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
