Factors affecting mobile home prevalence in the United States: Poverty, natural amenities, and employment in natural resources

Abstract

AbstractMobile home residence in the United States is associated with negative social, economic, and health‐related outcomes. However, although research on mobile home residence at the individual level has been performed, a geographic understanding of mobile home prevalence in the United States remains absent from the literature. Therefore, the purpose of our analysis was to evaluate the county‐level drivers of mobile home prevalence in the continental United States in 2015. The influence of five groups of variables—demographic, economic, housing, industry and occupation, and natural amenities—were assessed in a series of nested ordinary least squares regressions. Additionally, the full model was run as a spatial lag regression to control for spatial autocorrelation. Our results indicate that the primary drivers of mobile home prevalence in U.S. counties were the percent of population in near poverty, the labour force participation rate, and the percent of the population employed in natural resource occupations.