Polanco mobile home park

Time period: 1990s to present
Location: Southern California, Inland Empire especially Riverside County

Small trailer parks for farmworkers

Key features
- Allowed in agricultural zones
- Utility connections have been a challenge

Cities get the spotlight in discussions of the housing crisis, but in California, where a million people work on farms, there's also a rural housing crisis. Here is a story of the polancos: farmworker communities named after a California Assemblymember's landmark law. 

California's fruits and vegetables are grown mostly in the San Joaquin Valley, the Imperial Valley, and the Central Coast. Work is seasonal but labor intensive - during harvest, dozens of workers are needed on each farm. However, while there are lots of farm jobs, there isn't much housing in this area. This is especially true in eastern Riverside and Imperial counties, where there are few cities and towns. Rural land did not allow more than one house per farm. Many farmworkers had to live in shacks.

As Latinos won more elected offices in California, the farmworker housing shortage got attention. In 1992, Richard Polanco, an assemblymember from LA, introduced AB3526, the Farm Labor Housing Protection Act. 1992's AB3526, known as the Polanco Bill, allowed employee housing with up to 12 homes to be built on farms.

This law was one of the earliest state laws that overrode local zoning to allow housing. Key parts of the bill included:
- Farmworker housing allowed in any agricultural zone
- Up to 12 homes or 36 beds in group housing 
- At least one member of each household has to be an agricultural employee. 

 
Example of a 12-unit polanco park.  The bill did not require that the homes had to be mobile homes, but they were the most cost effective type of housing available.

Few farmers took advantage of this bill, since they did not want to invest money in housing. However, since the bill allowed farmworkers living on a farm to work on a different farm, entrepreneurs & farmworkers figured out they could use the new law to build small trailer parks, which they called polancos or polanco parks. 

Some polancos were formally permitted, while others were built without government approval. They were an improvement over previous living conditions, but many still had problems such as lack of clean water or enough electricity. Part of the problem was that the 1992 Polanco bill limited each community to 12 homes, which is less than the number of workers on most farms, and also too small to efficiently serve with water and power hookups. Most commercial mobile home parks have dozens to hundreds of homes. Furthermore, as polancos were often located far apart from each other, with farms in between, extending utilities to them is not easy.

After a series of electrocutions & fires, Riverside County tried to shut down the polancos. Residents and activists fought back to save their homes, some were able to convince the government to provide funds to pay for proper water & power connections.  Now, nonprofit organizations have gotten involved in building new up-to-code polancos.

In 2020, California assemblymember Eduardo Garcia introduced AB2778, a bill to formally recognize nonprofit polancos as a type of housing and allow them to have up to 50 homes each. The bill defined "polanco agrihousing" as employee housing that is owned by a nonprofit, and where at least half the funding comes from public sources. While AB2778 was shelved due to COVID-19 response limiting the time the Legislator had remaining to work on other legislation, a modified version of the bill was passed as part of AB107, the budget trailer bill. 

AB107 created a new category, "eligible agricultural employee housing development"
- Allowed in any agricultural zone
- Up to 36 homes
- At least one member of each household has to be an agricultural employee
- Nonprofit or government run
- Rents limited to be affordable to low income residents (less than 80% of area median income)

Data
- Density: 6-12 units/acre
- Typical Lot Size: 1-2 acres
- Typical Zoning: Agriculture
- Construction Type: Mobile Home
- Resident Type: Rental, farmworkers.

Where to build 
- Agricultural zones
- Places with shortage of farmworker housing
- Ideally should be located near existing utility mains

Further Reading

1992's AB3526, codified as part of California's Employee Housing Act. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=HSC&sectionNum=17021.6.

History of polanco parks, including conditions that led to them, issues that popped up within them, and current efforts to improve living conditions http://www.coloniasnm.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/building-a-brighter-future.pdf (start on Page 11)

News on upgrading of a polanco park in the Coachella Valley. https://www.rcac.org/success-stories/coachella-valley-mobile-home-park/

Research on housing in the Coachella Valley https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2019/07/2019-Capstone_Mendez_Housing-in-East-Coachelle-Valley.pdf

Water access issues in Polanco Parks https://escholarship.org/content/qt75g166fw/qt75g166fw_noSplash_0297b919031c89fa3ded01b3853654cc.pdf

2020's AB2778 bill to legalize larger polancos https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB2778

2020's AB107 budget bill https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB107

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