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, <em>parqueadero</em>, 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: <strong>manufactured precarity</strong>, as theorized by Durst and Sullivan, <strong>material precarity</strong>, as contextualized by public documents, news reports, and market analysis, and <strong>real precarity</strong>, 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.