Mobile home residents’ tenuous right to the city: Uniform or varied?

Source abstract

Scholarly debates about a right to the city in the Global North have largely neglected the potential role of housing type and tenure in shaping displacement risk and socio-demographic disparities therein. Yet, past scholarship demonstrates that mobile home residents face a heighted risk of dispossession relative to residents of other dwelling types. Leveraging microdata from Canada’s 2021 Census of Population, I elucidate who would lose their right to the city if urban mobile home residents were displaced. First, I use latent class analysis to identify two distinct clusters of urban mobile home residents, each containing approximately 50% of Canada’s urban mobile home population, but whose socio-demographic characteristics differ along key dimensions of social vulnerability. Next, I conduct a series of logistic regression models to simulate between-cluster variation in the likelihood of displacement if mobile home dispossession were to occur. Results demonstrate significant variation in the likelihood of displacement across clusters, suggesting that the urban mobile home residents at the greatest risk of displacement are lower-income, white, older adults who are not in the labor force and who live alone. By bringing scholarly debates about a right to the city into conversation with the literature on mobile homes, I underscore the key role of dwelling type and tenure in shaping urban citizenship in Canada.