In some neighborhoods, water still rising.
Homeowners who can’t get to their homes. Mobile home communities in particular are affected. These are largely low income residents, and their living situation is becoming more precarious and unsustainable.
Roots of a coming climate migration.
By the time the murky brown water in the house reached his chest, Joe Rogers realized it was too late to leave safely. Then, in an instant, his mobile home shifted violently, creating a wave that swept up furniture and trapped his wife, Sandra, in their bedroom.
Mr. Rogers pleaded with his wife to leave, but she was stuck. He said he would break the bedroom window from the outside. He went to his front door, grabbed a rope thrown by a neighbor, and pulled himself to the nearest perch, pausing to catch his breath.
Before he could return to the trailer, it broke loose from its foundation and was pulled into the adjacent Pigeon River, churning with rain from the remnants of Hurricane Helene. He watched his home smash into a bridge, his wife still inside.
Her body was recovered days later, 16 miles from where they had lived in Clyde, N.C.
Back-to-back catastrophic hurricanes this fall, first Helene and then Milton, have exposed the risks climate change poses to the 16 million Americans who live in mobile or manufactured homes. Built in factories and lighter than conventional houses, manufactured homes are transported to a property and secured to the ground.
They are among the least expensive forms of housing; those who live in mobile home parks are three times as likely to live in poverty as those who live in traditional housing and are more likely to be older or disabled. Manufactured homes are also more likely to be located in flood zones, according to data compiled by CoreLogic, a property information and analytics company.
Manufactured homes make up 6 percent of the nation’s housing stock. But the proportions were much higher in several areas hard-hit by Milton and Helene. In western North Carolina, 14 percent of homes were mobile or manufactured. Around Tampa Bay, Fla., the share was 11 percent. South of Tampa, in Manatee County, 14 percent of homes were mobile or manufactured.
The people who live in mobile homes are often poorly served by federal disaster programs, experts say. The result is compounded loss as they are uprooted from their communities with nowhere to go.
“Manufactured housing shows how the affordable housing and climate crises collide,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow and expert on the issue at the Urban Institute, a Washington research organization. “Our most affordable housing supply is the most vulnerable to climate disasters and often falls through the cracks during recovery.”
Just how sturdy mobile and manufactured homes are during a disaster is the subject of some dispute.
Mobile homes built before 1976 were typically not required to meet any type of building code. That year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development set the first building standards for mobile homes, and it has since updated them several times. Prefabricated houses built after that year are called manufactured homes.
Across the United States, there are 1.3 million mobile homes built before 1976, according to data compiled by the Urban Institute, and they are generally considered unsafe in a disaster. In the North Carolina counties hit by Helene, there were 19,000 of these aging mobile homes. In the Tampa area, there were about 50,000. It is unclear how many were destroyed by the storms.