At 3:30 in the afternoon on the first day of Texas’ winter freeze in February, the temperature plummeted to 20 degrees F inside Roxann Swoyer’s manufactured home — colloquially known as a mobile home — in the community of Hilltop, an unincorporated area outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. The water she had been using to brush her teeth had frozen in its plastic bottles. The community’s water well had failed in an unrelated outage 10 days before the storm hit, and now her electricity was gone too.

For the first time in her 42 years living in the community, Swoyer was forced to abandon her home. Swoyer has stage-four cancer and hasn’t left her home for anything except doctors appointments since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic; but as temperatures continued to fall, she decided she had to leave, fearing she wouldn’t survive the cold. Despite her fear of contracting the virus, she went to stay at her son’s girlfriend’s apartment. That night, her neighbor’s trailer reached 2 degrees F, and he was forced to burn what he could in his fireplace to warm up his feet. “It was a living nightmare for everybody,” said Swoyer.

But the storm itself turned out to just be the beginning. When Swoyer returned to her home a week later, she found that her water and sewage systems had been almost completely destroyed by the storm — there were 19 breaks in the lines on her property alone. The lines to her washer and dryer had completely blown apart, and so had the sewage lines — raw sewage had spilled underneath her property. The damage took her son and brother 16 days to identify and fix, during which time she had no running water. The damage wasn’t just limited to Swoyer’s property — the community as a whole lacked running water for three days after the storm, on top of the outage preceding the storm.

Manufactured housing communities like Hilltop are home to 2.7 million households, and manufactured homes overall make up about 6.6 percent of the American housing stock. Manufactured home parks tend to house low- and fixed-income groups — often families, seniors, and recent immigrants — and in all comprise the largest unsubsidized type of affordable housing in the country. Despite this, they are often left behind in disaster recovery policy due to their unique split tenure: residents of manufactured housing communities often own their home, but rent the land that it sits on from a private landowner, and may have a water supply that is owned by a third private entity.

Read the full article about how manufactured housing communities suffer after disasters by Alexandria Herr at Grist.