As the availability of affordable housing implodes, with eviction rates and financial instability surpassing crisis levels, the ongoing - Where the Heart Is: Portraits from American Trailer and Mobile Home Parks investigates and advocates for this deeply impacted, primarily American housing form and its residents. This multi-media, spatial justice collaboration challenges the ingrained stereotyping of the estimated 22 million Americans who live in communities of manufactured homes (as stigmatized trailer and mobile home parks are being rebranded), revealing and archiving what’s rapidly being lost in their communities while amplifying resident’s and advocate’s voices.

My eye and heart are informed by conversations and recorded interviews with communityresidents from around the country, collaboration with professionals and scholars like Dr. Esther Sullivan – Sociologist, author, and advocate at UC Denver, and my affiliation with the national housing advocacy non-profit – Manufactured Housing Action (MHAction).

I’m especially drawn to photograph the yards and entryways around homes where individual choices in ornamentation and landscaping reveal the personalities of the unseen occupants and capture their notions of welcome, of beauty, and of home. Portraits of individual homes are also visually classified and constructed into a library of typology grids, archiving differences and commonalities within and across communities and states.

Expanding gentrification around many parks has increased the vulnerability of the essential workers, families, veterans, immigrants, and retiree residents, who rely on this largest, un-subsidized form of low-income housing. The lack of protective regulations make parks the target of equity investors, often leading to the loss of affordability for the leased site under residents’ self-owned homes, with subsequent eviction and displacement.

Where the Heart Is was begun in 2017 with travels photographing, to date, within communities in Maine, New Jersey, California, Texas, Colorado, New York, Georgia, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Arizona. Recorded video interviews of personal experiences with residents of eleven additional states deepen the project’s narrative, as integral components available for book quotes, videos incorporating my imagery with drone footage and recorded interview clips, and collaborative exhibition opportunities, all in service to affordable housing advocacy.

Photographs are limited edition, archival pigment prints. For exhibition, photographs are printed in the standard sizes of 16.5” x 24.75” for the single images/16.5” x 47.50” for the grids, with white gallery float frames adding 1.5” to each dimension. Larger sizes are available upon request.

Video interviews are currently being edited into three minute clips per interviewee to collectively show the stereotype-dispelling diversity of people who live in manufactured housing communities and the range of their experiences and challenges.