Resident-Owned, Informal Mobile Home Communities in Rural California: The Case of Rancho Don Antonio, Coachella Valley

Abstract

California's farmworkers are among the lowest-paid wage earners in the state. They often live in crowded or substandard housing. The Polanco Bill—state legislation enacted in the early 1990s—aimed to increase the supply of housing for farmworkers by encouraging the development of employee housing on land zoned for agriculture. This article discusses the implementation and effects of the Polanco Bill in the agricultural area of the eastern Coachella Valley. It finds, somewhat unexpectedly, that groups of farmworkers, often family members, have used the bill to collaborate and develop small, resident-owned, informal mobile home communities, called polancos, and focuses on one such case. Although the article's key contribution is to identify the informal approach and its key attributes, it also discusses whether a new housing model based on the collectively owned polancos is possible.

Keywords::

• Polanco Bill
• polancos
• farmworker housing
• rural poverty
• mobile homes

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of Daniela Simunovic. We also appreciatively thank Sergio Carranza of Pueblo Unido Community Development Corporation, Tom Flynn, and the residents of “Racho Don Antonio” for their guidance and support.

Notes

^1. The key physical characteristic of mobile home communities is that they contain manufactured housing units that are affixed to a chassis rather than a foundation. Colloquially, mobile home communities are sometimes called trailer parks.

^2. We have changed the name of this polanco and use pseudonyms for the names of the residents to protect the anonymity of respondents.

^3. Riverside County's housing voucher program is also stretched. It has the resources to cover almost 8,500 housing vouchers, but it has a waitlist of 50,000 households (Housing Authority of the County of Riverside, 2011). In addition, the county has only 469 units of public housing (Housing Authority of the County of Riverside, 2011).

^4. Other polanco owners we interviewed estimated total permitting and construction costs to upgrade a park at up to $250,000 (Gámez, 2012; Vargas, 2012). Similarly, a county planning official estimated a cost of between $175,000 and $300,000 for upgrading and legalizing most polancos (Lyman, 2012).