youAs urgent as it is, the affordable housing crisis is a term that can make you lose your eyes. Media coverage of how Americans who don’t belong to the 1% are squeezed out of the housing market tends to rely on data and reports, statistics and charts. A Decent Home, Sara Terry’s intimate and disturbing documentary about the nation’s crisis, tells this ever-present story on a refreshingly human scale.

Terry spent six years working on his film, which follows groups of residents in a quartet of mobile home parks threatened by developers seeking to raise rents – sometimes by more than 50% – or reallocate the land to a use more lucrative. Moving a mobile home can cost up to $5,000, making it easier for landlords to get away with inflicting steep rent hikes. “I guarantee you they won’t move if they can avoid it. They’ll just go down to the local Walmart and get a few more hours of work,” Terry told the Guardian. “Greed is very difficult to put a face to, but that was my goal.”

A Decent Home was inspired by a 2015 Guardian article detailing how investment firms were coming after trailer parks, one of the nation’s last reliable sources of affordable housing. Mobile home owners typically buy their home, but unlike other homeowners, they have to pay rent on the land where they live. In the meantime, they have far less robust protections than typical apartment dwellers. This fact has become all the more evident over the past decade, when a wave of financiers raided family properties and rewrote the rules, declaring what houses should look like and issuing unmanageable rent increases. Terry’s film depicts the different ways his subjects fight back. Spoiler alert: There are few wins.

This shift in the mobile home market is a microcosm of what’s happening across America, where more and more private equity firms are buying single-family homes and turning them into rental properties, putting homeownership out of reach. for so many working Americans and thus forcing many communities to unravel. “I read a report from some academics that 41% of the real estate stock in Los Angeles is owned by corporations,” said Terry, who left an early career in print media to pursue photojournalism and filmmaking. documentary films. The math is mind-boggling. As inflation and stagnant wages hamper the average American’s ability to get by, rents are skyrocketing. “By the time the New York Times runs an article titled ‘The Next Affordable City,’ it’s already too expensive,” Terry said. “We are just pushing the affordable housing crisis, city to city, city to city.

As the opening of Terry’s film indicates, 4.7 million Americans lost their homes in the 2008 recession. Investors spent $60 billion buying the foreclosed homes. While the size of American households is decreasing, the typical house has evolved in the opposite direction, favoring mega residences accessible to a tiny part of the population. Modest-sized units that can keep their residents safe and warm, from two-bedroom apartments to locations in mobile home parks, are becoming increasingly rare. According to a 2021 report by market research firm Real Capital Analytics, institutional investors accounted for 23% of housing stock purchases in the previous two years, down from 13% in the previous two years. “The easiest homes to grab are the ones most needed by people who have the least ability to defend themselves,” Terry said.

Her film works to dismantle common perceptions of mobile home parks as sites of misery and despair. His film depicts humble, intelligent people doing their best – cooking and drinking coffee, caring for family members and pets, in slice-of-life scenes bathed in sunshine and birdsong. There are grandmothers and immigrants, children and veterans, who get together for Thanksgiving dinner or a block party with a bouncy castle. “You hear people call them ‘trailer trash’,” she said, “but the truth is they’re vulnerable and in many cases they’re wise. So many people I’ve worked with know when enough is enough.

It was easy to find members of mobile home communities willing to talk about their plight, Terry said. The film contains interviews with people living in Santiago Villa in Mountain View, California, the expensive mobile home park that is down the road from Google headquarters, and scenes from a community of mobile homes owned by residents in New Hampshire. The fulcrum of the film is the fight the residents of Denver Meadows in Aurora, Colorado fought to stay put when the landlord played to rezone the land.

The scenes featuring those looking to make a profit are thrilling in their simple depiction of callousness. The obvious comfort of sympathetic investors and politicians with their position is disconcerting – from Frank Rolfe, one of the founders of the get-rich-quick course Mobile Home University, to Bob Legare, who was until recently Aurora’s mayor, Colorado. A former real estate developer, Legare held meetings behind closed doors and paved the way for the Denver Meadows owner to put the land on the market, displacing an entire community.

“I think of this expression from Hannah Arendt: the banality of evil,” said Terry. “There was a banality in the way they responded to me not knowing how outrageous what they were doing and saying was.” Footage of Terry from a session at Mobile Home University, where Rolfe is seen teaching aspiring mobile home park owners edicts such as never be friends with residents, ended on a 2019 segment of John Oliver Tonight. After the damning episode aired, Rolfe stopped cooperating with Terry.

Which was good. His top priority was to capture the grace and tragedy behind the story. There is a scene near the end of the film, after the residents of the Aurora mobile home community have been forced to pack up and move, when a displaced resident named Petra Bennet returns to the site of her former home. The land is now bare except for a few gnome figurines that have been left in the weeds. “When are the rich rich enough?” she thought softly.

“People who live in mobile homes may have to work two or three jobs to get by,” Terry said. “But I think they know a lot more than some of us.” The Denver Meadows site was gutted, but thanks to the efforts of activists and politicians who responded to what happened there, a new law has just been passed in Colorado that expands protections for mobile home owners. . While it doesn’t address rent hikes, it gives mobile park residents more time to prepare an offer to a landlord looking to sell the land, and it solves the problem of tenant complaints that often go unanswered. .

“It’s important to pay attention and connect the dots,” Terry said. “Most people don’t care until it’s right in their neighborhood, but we can’t wait that long. Because if we don’t act on this, all our neighborhoods will disappear. »