Who We Are
MHAction is a growing national movement of manufactured home community residents who organize their neighbors, build campaigns to protect the affordability and quality of their communities, and fight to advance racial, economic, and gender justice. Our movement is built on a core belief that everyone should have a healthy, vibrant community and a stable, affordable place to call home.
MHAction relies on the power of well-trained, committed grassroots leaders. Through a robust online to offline organizing program, MHAction staff recruit, train, and coach manufactured home residents to be leaders and organizers in their communities. MHAction leaders fight for corporate community owner accountability and for policy reform to protect their and other tenants’ housing, health, and economic security.
MHAction’s work began as a special project under the Center for Community Change in 2012. MHAction launched as an independent project in May of 2016 and is fiscally sponsored at Tides Center.
A National Core Team of manufactured home community residents from around the country lead campaigns in their own regions and states and come together to oversee the strategic direction of our movement. MHAction Core Team Leaders serve as an informal organizational board and work with staff and MHAction members to set the priorities and strategies for the organization.
What We Believe
The work of MHAction is based on a set of core values, central to which are compassion for our neighbors and love of our communities. We believe that everyone should have a healthy, vibrant community and an affordable, decent place to call home. We believe that when others face housing insecurity and oppression, so do manufactured housing residents. We strive to build a movement that breaks down barriers and ends injustices on the basis of race, ethnicity, language, immigration status, class, religion, gender, or sexual orientation and gender identity. MHAction staff and leadership infuse these key values into the core programmatic work of the organization.
MHAction Staff and Core Team Leaders have signed the following document and pledged to hold each other accountable to these values. We ask all local groups that we support to also review and agree to these values as a guideline for our work together.
What We’re Fighting For
Manufactured home communities can be a critical source of affordable housing in rural and exurban areas for working families and seniors on fixed incomes. However, over the past 20 years, manufactured home communities increasingly have gone from “mom and pop” enterprises to ownership by large corporations and private equity firms. Corporate ownership has brought with it an unsustainable business model of rapidly escalating lot fees – the rent residents pay for the land on which their homes sit — and decreasing investment into community operation. Residents are stuck, choosing between paying increasing rent, sometimes at the expense of food or medicine, or abandoning their homes.
Together, we can fight back, keeping our neighbors in their homes and making our communities healthy places to live. Winning means pushing for a new vision for manufactured home communities: an end to exploitative, profit-driven ownership of our communities. We’re fighting to hold corporate owners accountable, and for the policy protections we all deserve, including rent control, protections from unfair eviction and unfair lease terms, guarantees of healthy homes and communities, and freedom from harassment.
MHAction leaders also recognize that we have a shared fate with other tenants, low-income people, and all who face oppression and injustices. MHAction leaders speak out and fight for reform on an array of social justice issues that impact their neighbors and communities, such as climate justice, immigrants’ rights, and strengthening social safety net programs.
Where We Work
We support residents in communities across the country and have state organizers based in FL, MI, CA, NY, IL, and MT. Click the images on the map to see our recent campaign work!
