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ANNIE BAXTER: We all know the stereotypes about mobile home parks. Terms like trailer trash get bandied about in jokes, and a lot of people think of mobile homes as rundown last-resort housing for the down and out, which you don't often hear, are the biases Mobilehome Residency themselves might harbor against other forms of housing.

DORIS ONSTAD: I hate condominiums, townhouses and apartments. I just detest them.

ANNIE BAXTER: Doris Onstad, 75. She's a retired teacher, and she has a three-bedroom mobile home in Oakdale in a park that Bears the romantic name of whispering Oaks. Green and red antique lanterns decorate the spacious living room, which is anchored by Onstad's piano.

DORIS ONSTAD: Here, I can play the piano as much as I want and nobody hears. If you're in a condominium, somebody's next door is going to hear you play. I can make all the noise I want and nobody hears me. I love it here.

[PIANO MELODY]

ANNIE BAXTER: Onstad moved into her mobile home nearly nine years ago after her house in Grand Forks, North Dakota, was destroyed by a flood. She bought her mobile home for $9,500. As is the case with most Mobilehome Residency, she owns the unit she lives in, but rents the lot on which it sits for just over $300 a month.

DORIS ONSTAD: Where else can you live for 310 a month? Where? What apartment can you get? Maybe a four-by-four in a basement someplace. I couldn't afford an apartment. Wow. So the minimum is over 600. Have you ever priced apartments? They're high.

ANNIE BAXTER: Mobile homes have become more permanent than they were in their early days when people used them for vacations or temporary housing. But now they face a transience of a different sort. A number of parks, including the one where Doris Onstad lives at Whispering Oaks and Oakdale, are closing down. Residents tried to buy the property to keep the park from closing. But the landowner, the Washington County Housing Agency, says the park needed major infrastructural improvements, and the return on investment just wasn't there to make the changes worth it.

Doris Onstad has some time to figure out what to do after Whispering Oaks closes, but she will have to relocate. According to a mobile home advocacy group called All Parks Alliance for Change, 12 parks have closed since the year 2000, displacing more than 200 households. Five park closings currently underway will force another 250 families from their homes, and a number of other parks are at risk of closing, which could affect more than 1,500 additional families.

ALL: No more park closing. No more park closings. No more park closing.

ANNIE BAXTER: Residents of Shady Lane mobile home park in Bloomington recently went through a relocation process themselves. They demonstrated outside the Bloomington city hall, along with supporters of the park earlier this spring.

ALL: Long live Shady Lane. Long live Shady Lane.

ANNIE BAXTER: Residents didn't come up with enough money to buy the park, and the city declined to kick in money to keep the park open. Shady Lane resident Vanessa Ramirez is an example of the kind of person who sometimes gets displaced by mobile home park closings.

VANESSA RAMIREZ: I didn't think I would have to move. I thought I was going to be here for a couple of years more, at least.

ANNIE BAXTER: On a Sunday morning, a couple of months before the park shut down, Ramirez was getting ready for a long day of work. She was fixing her wavy, dark hair with hairspray and brushing her teeth. Any given day, you might find her working at Sam Goody, or Nordstrom's Rack or Tony Roma's restaurant.

VANESSA RAMIREZ: I know I have three jobs.

ANNIE BAXTER: So how many hours altogether?

VANESSA RAMIREZ: 15 hours a day, and it is tiring.

ANNIE BAXTER: Ramirez is a wiry 24-year-old with muscular arms and long eyelashes. She came to Minnesota via the Bronx in Puerto Rico. Her husband and four-year-old daughter have been living in Mexico, but they'll come up to join her soon. Her mobile home is simply furnished, a picture of Jesus hangs on the wall and leopard-printed pillows decorate the couch. A big swath of mold covers part of the ceiling in the living room, but the trailer is tidy.

VANESSA RAMIREZ: I like everything in my house. It took us a long time to get this house. And like everything we have, we struggle to have.

ANNIE BAXTER: Ramirez didn't want to leave her mobile home. But when the park closed April 1, she ended up getting a voucher for subsidized housing. About 10 out of 60 or so households at Shady Lane received vouchers. The city of Bloomington says, it's sympathetic to the housing needs of its low-income residents. But the closing of shady lane had to do with forces beyond its control.

SANDA JOHNSON: It was simply a matter of money.

ANNIE BAXTER: Sandra Johnson is an attorney with the city of Bloomington. She says it would have been great to see Shady Lane residents buy the park and turn it into a co-op. But market pressures were at play. The land under the park is worth a lot more for redevelopment than it is for 50 or so mobile home units.

SANDA JOHNSON: Park owners are going to be tempted to sell that property for redevelopment because they can make a great deal of money. This park owner doubled his money in, I think, just seven short years or less. It's the economics of the situation that may determine the fate of mobile home parks or manufactured home parks in the metro area.

ANNIE BAXTER: Mobile home advocates say, in addition to the economics, there's another issue at play. They say cities have never been fans of the parks, and that keeps them from fighting to keep the parks open. Sandra Johnson had indeed been documenting problems at Shady Lane for a long time before the park closed. Banker's boxes of files on Shady Lane line the floor under her desk.

SANDA JOHNSON: I've got archives boxes on this particular file that start from the mid 90s when it became a real eyesore, at least, to city staff's perspective.

ANNIE BAXTER: Johnson reaches in and pulls out pictures of dilapidated units with junk strewn yards. Some files contain police reports. Johnson says the park has had an unusually high number of cop calls. And there's also documentation of some of the more idiosyncratic residents. As Johnson puts it, mobile homes sometimes draw people who want to live under the radar. She holds out a picture of a unit where the windows are covered with flies.

SANDA JOHNSON: There was a gentleman who had a psych issue, and he had dead cats and shoe boxes as his treasure in that trailer. And so we did a search warrant and was able to find the problem. And this is the trailer that he was evicted from, but the owner didn't want to remove from the property. And so he transferred title to me, but ultimately did take care of the trailer. [LAUGHS]

ANNIE BAXTER: Some of the stranger stories are the stuff of lore about trailer parks. But according to Johnson, the real problem at Shady Lane was the array of health, environmental, and building code violations. The culpable party on that front is hard to pin down. Oddly enough, it's the Department of Health, not a housing agency. That's the primary state body overseeing mobile home parks. That's a vestige of the era when parks were used by vacationers. But the Department of Health says it doesn't have the resources to oversee the parks efficiently.

That means they don't always issue citations to park owners who let their properties decline. And when park owners do face penalties, they might decide to sell their parks instead of spending the money to make necessary repairs. Margaret Lund is with the North country cooperative development fund, one of the main groups working with mobile home parks. She says the upshot of the park oversight problem is that critics just assume Mobilehome Residency are at fault when parks are in poor condition.

MARGARET LUND: It really has, led to situations, I think, where the residents were blamed were a community might say, well, look at that park. It's in such bad condition, and there's all these violations all over the place, and nobody ever fixes them. Therefore, we need to get rid of the park.

ANNIE BAXTER: Lund and other mobile home advocates say there's a way to make mobile home parks less vulnerable to that kind of judgment. A possible solution, they say, can be seen in Minnesota's first Co-op mobile home park in Cannon Falls. It's called Sunrise Villa. Dan Grunenwald, the president of the residents association, gives a tour.

DAN GRUNENWALD: This was one of the first projects. We redid the playground because this used to be a disaster. The playground that the previous owner had, some kids busted it up, and he never did nothing with it. And as soon as we took over, we cleaned up the area and put in a whole new playground.

ANNIE BAXTER: The park has been around for decades, but was turned into a co-op in September 2004. It's a community of about 50 mobile homes. The streets of the park are lined with neatly maintained rambler style homes. Yard ornaments and satellite dishes dot the lawns, which are otherwise totally free of clutter. Grunenwald has lived in the park since the '60s. He took interest in going co-op when he learned the owner of Sunrise Villa planned to sell the park. Grunenwald says he knew residents had the first right of refusal, which meant they could try to buy the park themselves. That prospect had a lot of appeal for him.

DAN GRUNENWALD: I wanted to wake up in the morning and know that I still had a place to live because with them selling out, you would never know when they'd give you a notice, and you'd have so many days to find new living quarters.

ANNIE BAXTER: The North country cooperative development fund helped residents get financing for the nearly $1 million purchase price, and once the residence succeeded with their purchase, north country advised them in hiring a management company that would enforce park rules and keep riff-raff out. For residents like Becky Ruddy, going co-op was an exciting change.

BECKY RUDDY: It was kind of fun. The morning after that sale had gone out, you look out, and it's like, whoa, I've never bought something this big before.

[LAUGHING]

I own this. You kind look around, and it's kind of fun.

ANNIE BAXTER: Supporters say co-ops provide a form of investment otherwise unavailable to mobile homeowners. If residents ever want to sell the park, they're the ones who benefit from increasing land values. And under a co-op, residents are more in control of their costs. The co-op decides what the maintenance and operating expenses are and charges residents only what's necessary.

This model of resident ownership is slowly picking up steam elsewhere in the US. About 1,000 co-op parks have sprung up around the country, and New Hampshire is leading the trend. 15% of that state's mobile home parks are co-op. Dan Grunenwald hopes the success of his parks co-op will dispel some of the negative associations with mobile home parks and paved the way for more.

DAN GRUNENWALD: It's the old myth of you live in a trailer park. Well, we're trying to get away from that and improve it so that it isn't what they call a mobile home. That's a trash area that, we're trying to get it to where it is, like if you were living in town in a house. I mean, these are our houses. This is what we can afford

ANNIE BAXTER: So far, a second mobile home co-op has sprung up in Lexington, Minnesota, and a third is under consideration in Moorhead. I'm Annie Baxter, Minnesota Public Radio News.