Oliver talks mobile homes and predatory landlords on Last Week Tonight

Mobile homes are one of the few truly affordable housing options available in America. John Oliver explains how corrupt practices are fouling it all up

So, what’s your image of a mobile home? It’s okay, you can be honest. Lots of people have a pretty grim picture of a mobile home park at the edges of town, maybe with broken down vehicles and a scraggly yard. That may not necessarily reflect the truth, however.

It’s certainly true that the mobile home industry has been desperately trying to change that conception for years. Witness the struggle to refer to the structures in question as “manufactured homes”, rather than now-icky mobile homes.

The “tiny homes” movement has also been a boon to the industry. For all of their twee interiors and clever storage solutions, many tiny houses are really just HGTV-approved mobile homes. The wheels are a dead giveaway, you know.

Meanwhile, the situation for inhabitants of more traditional mobile homes is deeper than of semantics. While industry types are considering the merits of one term over another and a middle manager is ostentatiously downsizing to a tiny house, the people who are trying to live in mobile homes have other, very real concerns. That’s the subject of the most recent Last Week Tonight and its host, John Oliver.

The truth is, you may have trouble telling the difference between manufactured homes and their less mobile counterparts. An 1980s-era commercial clip shown on the show definitely feels that way, at least if we go by its excitable, jazzy soundtrack. Today, around 20 million people live in these homes nationwide. They’re one of the few affordable housing options that are readily available in America.

The problem with landlords

On the surface, that’s all well and good. But owning a mobile home is just one part of the puzzle. Meanwhile, companies and investors have been snapping up land where people are supposed to park their mobile homes. For many, that means growing rents, additional fees, and arguably unfair policies thanks to new landlords.

At this point, it’s worth asking: who sells the most mobile homes? That would be Clayton Holmes, which is controlled by Warren Buffet. You may have heard of him, what with Buffet being one of the richest human beings in the world right now. He’s not front and center in the marketing materials here, however. Clayton Homes’ ads more heavily feature the Duck Dynasty people.

The ads make it Clayton Homes sound good and exceedingly folksy, but mobile homes aren’t really a good use of your money. Their value plummets over the matter of a few short years, though Warren Buffett’s company earned hundreds of millions of dollars off of them just last year.

How did that happen? Clayton Homes has loans that, according to the Seattle Times, are exorbitant and predatory. The company has refuted it, but some of the people caught in these loans beg to differ. One woman whose situation was shared on the show was told to donate blood plasma in order to help make her monthly payments.

Much of this has to do with land. Even if mobile home dwellers own their buildings, they don’t necessarily own the ground on which it sits. So, if a mobile home park has exploitative landlords, the tenants there can be in serious trouble. Remember, a large number of people living in these homes are financially vulnerable, such as seniors who are on fixed incomes.

Moving out

If it’s so bad, why not just move? Turns out that the “mobile homes” term is a bit of a misnomer. Moving these units is very expensive and can damage the structure itself. That lack of mobility is pretty attractive for some investors, who consider tenants to be captive customers. To their minds, mobile home inhabitants are nearly helpless to resist rent hikes and other exploitative policies.

“The customers are stuck there. They can’t afford to move the trailer… so, you really hold all the cards,” said Frank Rolfe, investor and runner of Mobile Home University. Rolfe is, at least according to Oliver, one of the chief jerks in the mobile home industry. It’s hard to argue, given that Rolfe is actively encouraging people to engage in near-psychopathic investing practices.

What can people in mobile homes do to protect themselves? Organizing might be one powerful answer. Residents could band together and buy their own parks, sharing the land in a more mutually beneficial relationship.

That’s not just some pie-in-the-sky dream, either. A few nonprofit groups have actually succeeded in helping residents do just this. Yet, many states don’t have laws in place to protect residents of mobile homes. Until then, it’s worth remembering that buying a mobile home and renting land can be “financially catastrophic”, said Oliver.

Thankfully, D’arcy Carden is here to star in a 80’s-style commercial talking the real talk about life in a mobile home park. Her creepy friend isn’t listening, but viewers surely are. It’s pretty hard to look away from the predatory investors leering just outside her window, or the tasteful jars full of blood that Carden’s character must sell in order to make rent.

“It’s like a Waffle House where I’m chained to my food,” bemoans Carden. “That sounds delicious!” says her friend, before Carden finally runs her off with a shotgun. Hopefully, the rest of us can take the hint.