The Role of Resident Organizing in the Fight for Permanence: A Study of Chapel Hill’s Parqueaderos

This paper examines the dynamics of precarious housing tenure for the manufactured housing community (MHC) residents of Chapel Hill. I use the Spanish translation of MHC, parqueadero, throughout the work to highlight the demographic reality my work is grounded in, where the majority (99%) of residents are Latine immigrants. Across eight (8) resident interviews and six (6) practitioner interviews, I examine issues of precarity on three scales: manufactured precarity, as theorized by Durst and Sullivan, material precarity, as contextualized by public documents, news reports, and market analysis, and real precarity, as documented by the folks who allowed me to interview them. I find that organizing in the face of precarity is not a matter of ability, but, rather, a matter of conditions.