Mobile Home Park on the Prairie: A New Rural Community Form*

Mobile home parks are an increasingly common form of residence for the rural poor. A rural central Illinois mobile home park and its residents seemingly possess features—a distinct territory, a homogeneous population, and a collectively held rural ideology—that foster formation of a sense of community. Other factors, however, some unique to this relatively new rural residential form, present physical and social barriers that challenge park residents' construction of a sense of community. We use ethnographic data to describe daily life in a rural mobile home park and to determine who among its working‐poor residents are most able to construct a sense of community, and thus to gain access to the potentially beneficial community social resources that are crucial to making a difference in the quality of their lives.