By Sarah Melotte
The Daily Yonder
This time of year I get into the habit of working all day from my porch underneath the canopy of a Duke blue (gross) umbrella that my partner despises because, according to her, it’s ugly and takes up too much space. But I cherish my porch time. And I’ll do anything to keep myself comfortable enough to stay outside throughout the summer, no matter how distasteful the solution.
But we’re in the middle of a heat dome, a phenomenon that occurs when an area of high pressure in the atmosphere blocks heat from escaping the earth’s surface. And even my tacky sunbrella can’t keep my cold-blooded self comfortable enough to tough it out all day long. So yesterday I sat at the indoor table like an adult human being, trying to remind myself to stay hydrated.
Climate change is making these extreme heat events more frequent and intense. Extreme heat is when temperatures are above 90 degrees for two or more days. A 2024 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that there were 2,300 estimated heat-related deaths in 2023.
Extreme heat has been traditionally framed as an urban problem, but millions of rural Americans are also at risk of suffering from the dangerous consequences of extreme heat, according to a new report from Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research organization based in Montana.
Compared to urban dwellers, rural Americans are twice as likely to have pre-existing health issues like diabetes that exacerbate the dangers of extreme heat, according to the Headwaters Economics report. And when rural Americans do face heat-related illnesses, they are also more likely to be uninsured and acquire medical debt in the process. But some of the most vulnerable rural Americans are those who have outdoor jobs in industries like agriculture or construction.
(Note that the Headwaters Economics dataset defines rural at the ZIP code level, which is quite different from our county-level definition. You can read more about their definition of rural at the bottom of the report.)
In this edition of the Rural Index, I’m looking at the share of occupied housing units in rural America that are manufactured or mobile homes. The Headwaters Economics report highlights these structures as especially vulnerable to extreme heat due to poor insulation. Rural residents in manufactured and mobile homes spend 75% more on energy bills compared to their urban counterparts.
In nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties, mobile homes make up 13% of the total occupied housing units, compared to 4% in metropolitan counties.
I’ll be using the terms manufactured and mobile homes interchangeably throughout this analysis, as they are grouped together in the dataset. However, there are technical differences between the two: mobile home typically refers to units built before 1976, while manufactured home refers to those built after 1976, when federal regulations established construction and safety standards for these types of affordable housing.
According to my analysis of American Community Survey data, 34% of occupied housing units are mobile homes in Florida’s rural counties, the highest rural percentage compared to other states. Fifty-five percent of occupied housing units in Dixie County in Florida’s rural panhandle region are mobile homes, for example.
South Carolina follows Florida, with mobile homes making up 27% of occupied housing units in its rural counties. Counties in South Carolina’s rural Pee Dee region in the northeast corner of the state have a particularly high share of mobile homes. In Dillon County, South Carolina, 37% of occupied housing units are mobile homes. In nearby Williamsburg County, 43% are mobile homes.
According to the Headwaters Economics analysis, Nevada is one of the top ten most heat vulnerable states in the nation. In rural Nevada, 22% of the housing stock are mobile homes. Zooming-in on rural Eureka County, Nevada, that number jumps to 62%.
Headwaters Economics outlines a range of policy solutions to help protect rural residents of manufactured and mobile homes from extreme heat. Existing federal programs – such as the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) – support families by improving energy efficiency and providing financial assistance for cooling costs.
WAP supports 8,500 jobs and has weatherized homes for 7.2 million families, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. LIHEAP, meanwhile, provides financial assistance for energy bills to 6.7 million households.
“Readying rural communities for a future of extreme heat will require tailored policy solutions at the local, state and federal levels,” wrote Kelly Pohl, director of Headwaters Economics.
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