In JAPA, Zachary Lamb asks us to consider if manufactured home parks are “good urbanism”
Should “trailer parks” — which provide relatively affordable housing to more than 7 million Americans — be preserved and expanded?
Though often derided and rarely studied, manufactured home parks are a significant source of affordable housing in the United States. In a paper published recently in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning Zachary Lamb and his co-authors assess the spatial characteristics of manufactured home parks in the Bay Area to find out if, counter-intuitively, they could be examples of “good urbanism.”
Zachary Lamb, Yael Nidam, Kelvin Yeoh, and Calvin Tang, “Manufacturing Urban Form: Could Mobile Home Parks Be Good Urbanism?,” Journal of the American Planning Association (October 30, 2025).