Brianna Craig paid $45,000 for her manufactured home at Harmony Shores in Naples, Florida, in 2004. Nineteen years later, Hurricane Ian put four feet of water inside it. Before the storm, she'd tried to sell to the park's corporate owner, Cove Communities, for $20,000. A company representative laughed at her. Since Ian, she's been living in her carport. That was three years ago.
Keep Craig in mind. She'll be back.
Bob Kiefer bought his manufactured home in Bonita Springs in 2019. Lot rent was $540 a month. By January 2026, it was $970. The home didn't get bigger. The lot didn't get bigger. The rent nearly doubled anyway, and Kiefer told WINK News his budget is stretched thin, even when it comes to food. In Riverview, a woman cleaned out her 401(k) to buy a manufactured home. Lot rent was $468 when she moved in. By 2025, it was roughly $1,000, approximately her entire Social Security check. She was evicted before she could figure out what came next. In Haines City, Judy Schofield, 86, went back to work to help cover lot rent. In Osceola County, Olga Figueroa told News4JAX that after paying her bills she has about $100 left each month.
Florida has no cap on lot rents. A 2023 state law actually prohibited local governments from implementing rent control. Institutional investors now account for 23% of manufactured home purchases, up from 13% a few years earlier. They buy parks cheap and squeeze them. Raise the rents, add the fees, cut the maintenance. The residents own their homes and nothing under them.
That's the lot rent. Then there's insurance, which is to say the disappearance of insurance.
AMIE, one of the few insurers still writing policies on manufactured homes in Florida, pulled out before the 2024 hurricane season. Its reinsurance costs had grown bigger than its written premiums. "The market has absolutely fallen apart in Florida," a Lee County agent told the Insurance Journal. The cheapest manufactured home policy with wind coverage averages $1,210 a year. Between 15 and 20 percent of Florida homeowners now carry no insurance at all. In Kiefer's Bonita Springs community, more than 400 homes are still waiting for tie-downs. Across Southwest Florida, 41,000 manufactured homes sit on that waitlist. Uninsured, unanchored, on land they don't own.
And then there's the heat.
A manufactured home built before 1976 has walls framed with 2-by-2-inch studs. Two inches of wall between you and a Florida August afternoon. Single-pane windows. Roofing that absorbs heat like a skillet. One housing expert described these homes as "little ovens or little freezers" during extreme weather. Literally. Manufactured homes built before 1980 consume 53% more energy per square foot than other housing types. Half of all manufactured housing residents are energy burdened. A quarter spend more than 10% of income just on energy. During Oregon's 2021 heat dome, which killed more than 100 people, 20% of the dead lived in mobile home parks.
Florida doesn't break out heat mortality by housing type. Nobody does, really. In Pima County, Arizona, one expert estimated that for every heat death, "there are probably hundreds of other hospital visits or people suffering in silence in the private space of their home."
A retiree on $1,020 a month in Social Security runs the air conditioner to stay alive, and every hour it's on she's calculating what she won't eat that week. The White House's 2026 budget proposes eliminating LIHEAP, the program that helps low-income households pay for cooling.
Back to Craig. Three years in a carport.
"If I lost my home and I had to go, on my income, I'd be on the streets. I couldn't even rent a hotel room for a month from what I get from Social Security."
Moving a manufactured home costs $3,500 to $18,000. There is no cap on what the lot under her will cost next year. There may be no insurer willing to write her a policy. The summers keep getting longer.
Florida has more than 800,000 manufactured home residents. The legislature is considering bills that would require park owners to justify rent increases. Neither bill caps rent. They require documentation. Which is a fine thing, documentation. You can read it by flashlight when the power's off.