Northcountry Cooperative Development Fund (NCDF) contracted Hispanic Advocacy and Community Empowerment through Research (HACER) to conduct a study to assess the perceptions, experiences and needs of Latino residents of manufactured home parks in rural Minnesota so that they would be able to promote their cooperative ownership program with this community. The five areas of assessment were: 

1. Latino residents notions of what ‘home’ is; 

2. Latino residents perspectives and experiences on manufactured home park living; 

3. Areas for improvement of Latino residents living situation; 

4. Latino residents perspectives on cooperative living and ownership; 

5. Latino residents preferred modes of receiving information. 

Demographic Breakdown 

Four maps were created to help identify three focus group sites. Sites were selected based on the criteria that they were rural manufactured home park communities of 50 units or more that had at least 46% (19 households) or more Latino residents. HACER subcontracted local partners to recruit focus group participants that were Latino adults, current residents of their manufactured home park and had lived there for at least one year. 

• Thirty three (33) residents participated in the focus groups of which 26 were female and 7 were male, ages ranged from 19 to 61 years old with the average age being 39 and the majority were married (76%). 

• Forty three percent (43) reported that Spanish was the primary language spoken at home and the majority (69%) had only completed a 9th grade education. 

• Forty two percent (42) reported having a total household income of less than $19,000. 

• Seventy percent (70) of participants had lived in their residence for less than 3 years and over half (55%) planned on moving from the park in the near future. 

Summary of Findings 

A series of ten questions were posed to participants to gauge their perspectives and experiences on home, their current and previous living conditions and their priorities for improvement, their perspectives on collective ownership, as well as their preferred channels for receiving information.