 Hello everyone, can you believe this is actually our last lecture of the spring where did the time go. I want to take this opportunity to thank our program committee for the wonderful lectures the eight lectures they've done a great job on bringing us very informative interesting topics, and I think that's fabulous. Secondly, I want to thank CCTV for without them we couldn't have brought these wonderful lectures to you so thank you everyone. The last thing I wanted to mention is that we will be sending out an email to you this weekend, asking for your feedback on the last four lectures. So please just hit reply type in whatever you want to type and then send it off that email will come to you from Glen Roa. Thank you in advance for your cooperation on that because the program committee really treasures those responses. So having said all that, now I'd like to ask my floor landscape to please introduce today's speaker, Michael. Thanks so much Carol. Today we're very pleased and honored to introduce Kelly Hamshaw. She's a senior lecturer in the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics at the University of Vermont. Ms Hamshaw earned her Bachelor of Science degree in natural resource planning and her Master of Science in Community Development and Applied Economics, both at UVM. She's now nearing completion of her PhD program and natural resources focusing on focusing on climate justice for rural communities. Her research is being carried out in a partnership that includes UVM, as well as McGill and York universities in Canada. For more than 10 years now Kelly has designed and taught undergraduate courses and service learning experiences that are among the most popular at UVM. She has recognized her achievements with a number of prestigious awards, including the Krepsch-Maurice Award for undergraduate teaching and the 2021 Distinguished Senior Lecturer Award. Kelly lives in Bristol, Vermont, and she is a lifelong lover of horses. She recalls as the fifth grader mucking stalls at a neighbor's barn in exchange for a pony ride. Currently, she has a retired racing horse and is learning the principles of classical dressage. The title of today's lecture is Vermont's Mobile Home Parks, the Frontlines of Climate Injustice in the Green Mountain State. And giving a warm, triply welcome to Kelly Hamshaw. Thank you. Thank you Michael so much and thank you Carol and Kevin for bringing this opportunity to share a bit about the work that we do in CDAE. Working with a great variety of partners around the state, working on mobile home park resilience and just thank you so much Michael for those very kind words. I'll go ahead and share my screen. It's great to meet everybody here at the end of your semester of lectures we're still about six weeks away from the end of our semester at UVM so we're looking forward to some warmer days and brighter days ahead as well. So, thank you Michael for sharing the title we're going to be looking at a work piece of work that we've been really underway with for really the past 1011 years now, looking at the resilience of these often invisible communities across our state and many rural communities elsewhere in the country. A bit more about some of the work that I do this is a picture from a class that we taught the first semester of the fall of 2011 the right after trouble storm Irene hit Vermont in August 2011 and we were able to get a class on the books and no shorter than 48 hours to be able to bring UVM undergraduate students out into the field and be part of the relief and response efforts. And our connections with mobile home park communities enabled us to bring students where some of the needs for the greatest on the ground and so I share this example as just something that really allows me to be able to fuse my passion for rural community research, along with service learning and really meeting urgent community needs on the ground so you'll hear a bit more about that work, and used into the research work that that I've been contributing to during my time at UVM so a bit about the presentation spend about the next 35 minutes or so delving into is to get a little bit of background about what we mean by climate justice and vulnerability and resilience. Well then look at what's going on with mobile home parks, both at across the country and both here within the state of Vermont. And then we'll do a deeper dive looking at troubles storm Irene those impacts 10 years ago, and how those communities, some of those communities have actually recovered and changed and what that looks like today. And then as we continue to feel the burden of the housing crisis across the state, what's important for us to consider as we move forward and I'll close with some acknowledgments to some of the research partners that have been engaged in this work on the ground. And then we'll have plenty of time, about 10 to 15 minutes or so at the end for questions and answers so looking forward to that, at the conclusion of this presentation. So starting with thinking about these concepts of vulnerability and climate injustice. As we know climate change is impacting communities all around the world in Vermont. We're seeing in increased extreme participation events, temperature fluctuations, certainly if you're talking to make sugar this week, probably hearing a bit about a bit of lament about our weather patterns right now. When we think about climate change as a global phenomenon. We're seeing from a justice perspective, who's bearing the greatest impacts of those changes. And so we're looking at those at the local level, looking at those impacts on those populations were most vulnerable to to these impacts. And so when we think about natural disasters, particularly those that are exacerbated by climate change, such as trouble storms and hurricanes and other related events. There's a proportionate impact, so more burden being shared being born by communities of color, lower income households individuals with compromised health conditions that were already there. So these existing structural inequities are already on the ground, well before any of these disaster or climate related events impacted them. And so when we're thinking about climate change here in Vermont, and thinking about climate change. The, the impacts of poplestone Irene that was really a major focusing event for seeing these changes from these impacts on these particular of communities of mobile home parks. About 20% of the US population resides in rural communities. So it's not an insignificant percentage of folks that are living in rural communities where mobile homes happen to be an important part of that rural housing stock. So when we're looking at the literature and what other researchers are doing right now. There are pretty significant gaps and understanding climate justice and who's vulnerable in these particular communities. And so there's been some work, looking at income looking at poverty status and other key demographic variables, and particularly looking at occupations role communities, and how those factors can both drive vulnerability and also try to also increase resilience and so some work growing in this area over the past 10 years but there's still much more to understand with these questions. So doing a little bit more of a deeper dive looking at mobile home park communities, we recognize that these parks are really an important part of the unsubsidized affordable housing stock for homeowners all across the United States, often again understudied for a number of reasons in these park communities typically and this holds true, particularly especially here in the state of Vermont. Most people own their own mobile home and yet least the land under on which their home sits. And so the park owner, whether that's a private developer or a nonprofit or resident cooperative. They own the land and are responsible for the infrastructure, like water hookups. Electrical hookups the roads, all those key kind of park wide infrastructure that responsibility lies with the park owner, however the homeowner largely is responsible for everything above the ground. So in this case when we're talking about mobile homes, you can purchase a new one straight off the dealers lot for around $55,000. Of course there are plenty of models that can be more expensive than that. In Vermont, most of our mobile homes are actually bought on the used market so sometimes folks are paying $15,000 $20,000 in order to move into a mobile home within a park that's already cited on a lot. So this is an important piece that we'll come back to you a little bit later in the presentation. We know that about a third of all mobile homes across the country are placed in about 50 to 60,000 parks spread out across the US. The reason why we say 50 to 60,000 is because nobody really knows exactly how many parks we have in the country. Different states have different homes in terms of tracking these communities, some states like Vermont actually have an annual registry. So park owners are required to essentially register their park and provide data about lot rents. There's a number of homes within these parks, but other states have absolutely no data or tracking mechanism for these communities so it's a pretty rough estimate, I would say of those 50 to 60,000 parks. While most parks still in Vermont and across the country are considered to be private land lease communities where there's a private owner who's running as a for-profit park. We do have parks where residents have formed a cooperative and we're actually looking at one of the relatively newer cooperatives on the screen here in Shelburne Lakeview Cooperative which transitioned to cooperative ownership in 2018, seeing a growing number of those sorts of organizations where residents come together in order to purchase their park outright from their previous owner, and thus protecting and managing that park together from other potential redevelopment purposes. We also have, especially here in Vermont, a large number of parks that are owned by nonprofit housing entities and therefore are managing them to be an important piece of our affordable housing stock here in Vermont. The American Planning Association says a major stakeholder in 2001 issued a policy brief, calling mobile home parks an increasing problem. And for two main reasons. I'm pointing to the fact that many of these parks are built in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and as those parks have aged, major infrastructure concerns have become more and more apparent. And so that could look at look like wastewater challenges, drinking water supply issues, roads, certainly electrical hookups within the parks and as those infrastructure elements get older, they're very expensive to readability. And for communities trying to keep their rent affordable, it's very difficult for park owners, even with the best of intentions, to be able to reinvest in those infrastructure challenges and so that's been a main driver of why parks have been closing across the country over the last 20 years, is that when parks get to this point of needing major infrastructure investments, oftentimes the park owner might look to another use of that property and then completely remove that park from the housing stock, leaving people in very vulnerable positions relative to if they could move their home. We often talk about mobile homes being an oxymoron in terms of they're really rather immobile, once they're placed on their lot, contrary to what many people might think of for a mobile home, they're often there for either the rest of their home to withstand or maybe could withstand maybe one or two moves over their entire lifetime. So that leaves homeowners in these situations where they might have to pay $5 to $8,000 if their home is indeed structurally sound to withstand the move, or abandon it all together and lose their home in place in times when parks are facing closure. So we know that these communities face pervasive social stigmas in our socio cultural understanding of how these communities function there's really a lack of, I would say nuanced understanding of how these communities function and that's something that we've been trying to do over the past 10 years or so, is to share a bit about the opportunities, and in addition to the challenges that we know about these communities. So we'll see exclusionary zoning practices, not so much in Vermont because we have legislative legislative protections that prohibit communities from outright keeping parks out of their zoning and planning. But elsewhere in the country, you can certainly see mobile home parks kind of pushed more and more out into the fringes of communities. And that's been well documented elsewhere. And because of the homes being expensive to relocate or structurally unable to be relocated, residents really have very little leverage in that relationship with their landlord or their park owner. And so that leaves them oftentimes in really challenging situations when it comes to addressing maybe community dynamics or advocating for improvements being made to park infrastructure. And finally, maybe the focus perhaps of the majority of the rest of this talk is really looking at the fact that some of these parks, whether we're talking vulnerability to flooding or looking at wildfires a heat exposure some of these parks are many of these parks are located in areas that could be deemed hazardous. And that's what we're going to take a further look at next. Before we get into the details of that, I did want to share a little bit about what the context looks like in Vermont in terms of the number of parks and the number of folks who call these communities home. As I mentioned earlier, we're really fortunate in Vermont to have the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development actually be able to track on an annual basis where our parks are. We have address data we have number of lot rents. You can see here we have right now 235 parks which is actually a decrease over the past 20 years or so so every year or so we tend to lose a few parks here and there for a variety of reasons. But we still have about one more than 7000 lots within the state of Vermont so that's 7000 Vermont households calling these parks home. And we can see that with a 4.8 vacancy rate. There actually is quite a bit of demand for these lots, particularly if you're looking and changing County as in County, Washington County, even lower vacancy rates on those places. Generally speaking, we think of most housing experts will say that a 5% vacancy rate is sort of the ideal metric for healthy housing market, because it gives people enough choice to be able to have options when I'm looking at where to either site their mobile home in this case, or you could apply the same metrics to looking at apartments. So unfortunately, most folks in Chittenden County, especially right now, really would have a difficult time finding a new lot if something should happen in their park. When we look across the state, and this certainly varies again by county just depending on different housing pressures and the housing markets are highly variable across our small state. But on a statewide basis, the monthly lot rent that someone might pay and in most cases people own their homes outright. So a lot rent is only $360 per month, and that will cover their hookup to the water, wastewater, kind of everything else beyond their home. And so many of the folks that we've talked to over the years when we're doing door-to-door survey work out on the ground will often say that they're able to enjoy other pieces of enjoy other aspects of their life because their rent is much more manageable compared to what they might be paying if they were living in an apartment. In addition to other things that they frankly enjoy about living in their mobile home in terms of having control over their own four walls that they don't have to share with a neighbor if they were in a condo or an apartment complex. And so that theme was really strong when we're doing those door-to-door interviews with people and talking about their home. And that's something that often goes, I would say, under-appreciated when we're talking about these communities with a wide range of stakeholders. This graphic is from the ACCD report that they publish every five years. So the last one was published in 2019 looking at kind of the overall snapshot of our parks in the state. And so what this graph is really telling us is that the vast majority of our parks in Vermont are actually relatively small. So having fewer than 10 homes within a park. And that can be really, really a wonderful thing for folks who are living in those parks because they know their neighbors so well they could be a tight knit community. On the other hand, maybe things aren't so pleasant that can be a really isolating piece, but certainly from a viability and resilience lens is these parks, these 81 parks have fewer than 10 lots. They can be really challenging to manage in terms of investment and reinvestment back into these parks. And just the year-to-year upkeep of these because they're not generating oftentimes enough income to be able to take care of some of these major infrastructure challenges. We do have a few parks so about a dozen parks that have 100 lots or more. Many of these are located in Chittenden County, but also down in southern Vermont. And so those parks will actually take a look at one of those a little bit later in the presentation. And even at that point, they're still struggling with some of the financial viability of these communities in the wake of climate change. You may see in the news. This was a clip from seven days just last month that we have been enjoying in Vermont, a number of resident-owned cooperatives transitioning from private ownership into the co-op model. And so most recently two parks up in Colchester actually just converted to resident ownership with the support of the Cooperative Development Institute, which works with parks all across New England and northern New York. And the CDOEO mobile home program that would be the Champlain Office of Economic Opportunity, which serves actually statewide mobile home residents with support from ACCD. So if you're interested in learning more about those parks, Anne Wallace Allen has been doing an amazing job chronicling these most recent developments with mobile homes. So I want to transition now to talking about the impacts of charcoal store IV. I mentioned earlier that was a major focusing event for major, for most Vermonters and thinking about climate change coming home. And really highlighting the vulnerabilities within this unique housing stock and some of our most rural communities. And so for those of you who are here on August 28, 2011, you might remember, particularly if you were more in Addison County or I'm sitting here in Bristol right now, maybe up in Burlington, we had a lot of rain, certainly in a very short time period. The map is showing you if you're elsewhere in the state. You're seeing these white dots are some of the 235 mobile home parks across the state. The red ones are the ones that really took the brunt of the damage from charcoal storm I mean in terms of flooding. We had six storm related fatalities across the state. These were completely isolated in terms of having roads washed out. And there are about 3500 homes, single family homes, rental homes and mobile homes and that number that FEMA tract is being damaged or destroyed. When we looked at the parks themselves and at this time we were actually working on a three year USDA grant, which gave us some about a year or so before I mean, gave us some time to start collecting data to be able to even produce a map like this. At the time, the mobile home program at CBOYO simply had a map of the state of Vermont and it had little push pins on it to represent where all the parks were. And so with this USDA research grant we were able to hire a GS consultant to help us make these maps and actually digitize all of these address records and make that data available to a range of stakeholders across the state. We really had no idea how important and how relevant this work would be, you know, just a year into the project being started. And so quickly, we mobilized on the ground with our community partners to be able to visit some of these parks and help FEMA actually identify where some of these parks were really experienced quite a bit of flooding. And so we worked with case managers to help provide some background on on the unique characteristics of mobile home park communities. And by the end of the FEMA registration period over 225 mobile homes were flooded of those 133 were considered to be completely destroyed. And in this case, folks were completely oftentimes lost, maybe everything that was in their home, maybe below three feet or so with all the water damage. They could have lost their transportation, because oftentimes folks don't have that much notice in order to get out of their communities and so they might have lost their cars and really have their lives turned upside down in the middle of this statewide really Another just important note here that I wanted to mention. So going back to the 7000 lots. We know that statewide on any given point over the last five years, about 7% of the state's mobile home or states total housing units, excuse me, our mobile home park units. And so, when we looked at the FEMA data, by the end of that registration period we actually found that mobile homes were represented over represented. And so, coming back to that notion of justice right, we saw that the folks were living in these park communities for a much greater more than double the burden that they should have shared if we're just looking at simply the statistics of what percent we might have expected them, if it was actually equal. And so in that, those probably almost two years really after a trouble storm I mean, we were engaged with supporting case managers, particularly in central Vermont with essential Vermont long term recovery committee, and then also supporting the deconstruction process. And a colleague of mine was really invested in helping figure out how do we help these residents who have just lost all of their, all their belongings their homes, how do you then help them through the process because, as I mentioned earlier, the homeowners are still responsible for their homes, even if the park had flooded. And so in this case, there were a lot of meetings in September and October for residents didn't know what to do. They were still on the hook for paying no law rent since their flooded home was still in the park. And there was, frankly, chaos, I would say. In terms of like who to turn to you for that, for that assistance in terms of the process. And because we didn't have a lot of experience I would say, across the state and dealing with disasters of this extent. And really clear answers in terms of where they should go. So unfortunately we saw particularly some older residents in this community in West End actually fall prey to some predatory folks who were charging people $3,000 to take away their mobile homes. Often what they would do would be to show up. And this is this image here show up in stripper way the most valuable materials and then leave the homeowner after they had just paid a significant portion of their disaster funds. They would still be stuck with what was left behind. And so we saw and documented stories like that over those first three months after Irene hit. But the difficulty and the real pain, frankly, of these of the aftermath of this event, in terms of displacing whole communities. So a number, a few parks actually closed completely and did not rebuild. And then we also saw parks lose individual lots. We'll take a look at a couple of those cases and just a few minutes. The only thing that we saw that was perhaps more challenging, because of the nature of this type of housing in these communities is sometimes you would run into these parks like in West End, where you would see actually whole, some multi generations of the same family be living in the same part community where you might have grandparents taking care of younger grandchildren, while parents are at work. And you might have an aunt or uncle in the case that I'm thinking of, where everyone lost their homes and so that support network that maybe, you know, where others returning to family members and other communities and other housing that might be able to accommodate more folks. In this case, in this particular community that wasn't there for folks because their whole community was was disrupted. So, as intense as Irene was, one of the major questions was, was this just a one time fluke. Is there really something to this question of our mobile home parks, more vulnerable to climate change to flooding events in our state. And so I like to remind people that before Irene hit in 2011 we actually had pretty severe storms that spring. So this image that you see here on the screen is actually from our park called actually named perhaps River Run Manor in Berlin, and over Memorial Day, about 10 homes were flooded in this park, right along the Stevens branch of the Muskie River. And so that really gave us an opportunity to convene different stakeholders from front emergency management from the hazard mitigation office, the mobile home program the agency of commerce and community development to be able to dig further into this question and collect more data, like what you're seeing here on the screen, to actually go and look at how the location of these communities, aligned with the available FEMA data for flood plains and so I will get into the specifics of how we put these layers together but essentially working with some of the one data, where we were able to identify where mobile homes were relative to other types of community, we were able to create maps that look like this for folks who are familiar with Bratiborough, you're actually looking at Glen Park, which was a senior living community, located along the West stone from here that flows down towards downtown Bratiborough. This was also a senior living complex Melvors place which also sustained quite a bit of damage during Irene. So we were actually on the ground here about a week or so after the flooding and talking with folks about their experiences and what they would hope to see further community building back. And it was quite, quite extensive and really hard to picture because on a normal day. This is a fairly, fairly low, low volume brook. And so it was really hard to imagine the velocity of which the water came rushing through this park, putting folks in very vulnerable and dangerous situations. They had the fire department was evacuating people out of this park. Well into the evening hours there. And these homes that were labeled a red here. Those lots are actually permanently closed. So folks weren't able to move back. Again, we're displaced from their community, which is particularly challenging in these housing markets. So the results of our analysis found that yes, we, we do see that mobile home parks are more vulnerable, particularly to this type of flooded hazard. And so, again, looking at mobile homes within parks. We were able to find that about 12% of mobile homes located within parks, have some exposure to a flood hazard area so that could be the floodway, where you're basically guaranteed to experience flooding and events like Irene, the 100 year floodplain or 500 year floodplain. And so that enabled us to be able to share and create more of those maps to share with some of these communities who were found to have a high degree of their lots in these risky areas. So we've gone into those physical vulnerabilities we've also looked at some of the socioeconomic vulnerabilities, and they won't go over everything on this slide because I do want to get into some of the case studies. But here, basically, some of the, some of my most fond memories actually was actually taking our some of our undergraduate students out on weekends. This was back in 2011, and actually having conversations with folks doing door to door interviews. This is what they loved about their community. What was really a positive aspect of their park. In addition to collecting some of this data that a lot of our partners around the state really wanted to get a better sense of who was living in our parks. And so we found that generally, on average, folks were about 55 years old, most folks had a high school diploma that we did interview quite a few folks who had a tech degree or a four year degree as well. The majority of folks really quite positive about their housing situation in that it was stable and affordable for them on the incomes that they're living on. And then we also found folks that certainly were lamenting their high energy costs, also being a challenge related to climate change in terms of being able to keep your homes comfortably cool in the summer, or comfortably warm in the winter. When we asked people if in an evacuation situation, if they would feel comfortable evacuating, we found that over 40% of folks reported having a health condition or disability that would be a concern to them in an emergency situation and that data was particularly of interest to some of our partners at Vermont emergency management. So we were just finding that we had a lot of compelling stories to kind of counter some of those narratives about who lives in park communities in terms of the ones that are like widely, widely out there in our, in our culture. So a real emphasis really on families with at least one household member in the workforce that we really see quite a range of experiences in these parks. It's actually quite eye opening for a lot of my students who would never maybe set foot in one of these communities and so it was really an opportunity to connect with people who have different life experiences, particularly enriching for them. So when we kind of think about how these different vulnerabilities interplay with each other. In terms of the structural integrity of some of these homes this is a home that was actually completely stripped down and rebuilt in Western's mobile home park following the flooding. The social connections. This was a wonderful connection we made in Western's the spring after Irene hit when Diane was able to move into her new home and my students came and we actually replanted a lot of her flower beds, but also confronting the real community, frankly of our of how, how many parks are actually located in hazardous areas from the flooding. And so when we think about how these vulnerabilities kind of interplay with each other gives us a much richer understanding of the complexities on these communities, and being able to share that with other stakeholders and decision makers at the local level at the state level has been an important part of our work. So we're going to see just do a time check here right on time. And we're going to take a little bit of a closer look at three communities that have had really different outcomes and stories following Irene, the first of which, for folks familiar with water very the top photo here was taken a few days after I mean. And this was a park that was located just off the exit 10 ramp to 89 as you're going into water very. This park had 11 mobile homes in a fairly small area, also located within the 100 year floodplain. So it was an area that was known to be potentially challenging in the flood event. All of those homes encountered substantial flooding over Irene. About a year or two later actually that property after they removed the flooded mobile homes was actually purchased for redeveloping into a different type of housing. And so there was a local developer who had this plan for what he calls a pocket neighborhood. And so you can see here in this lower photo examples of the new housing that was built you can see that they're raised on peers to be out of the 100 year floodplain event like that happened. And they were built to have much higher in an energy efficiency standards than the housing that was certainly there before. These are fairly older mobile homes that were pre Irene at and with those raised foundations, much more resilient than the mobile homes that were there formerly. But of course the real challenge here was that where folks are paying less than $300 a month for their housing. These cottages were listed for sale at close to 200,000. And so very different populations right who could afford to be able to move into these homes, even built with the extra flood proofing standards. And so one of the concerns here is what happened on to these folks who I called the whaley's home prior to the storm. And unfortunately we don't have a great way of tracking where folks went after about a very course sustained major damages, all across the community. But for a lot of the folks that we were talking to you at the time, they were moving into hotels moving in with family members, and certainly having a really, had a really challenging time finding their next housing. And I just want to highlight the amazing work that so many case managers who are serving in a volunteer basis to help people put together their next steps towards a new normal after this flooding. So, in this case, a park, a full permanent park closure, and then a conversion into every in back into residential but a very much a very different type of housing situation. We're moving south so back to Brattleboro. We're looking at tri park and so when I mentioned Glenn Park earlier being a senior community. This park actually or this cooperative actually is Glenn Park Mountain Home Park and Black River. So three different parks with combined 333 mobile home lots, which is actually about 10% of the total population of Brattleboro at the time. This park was destroyed 26 homes which then became permanent lot closures so a significant number of folks unable to have the choice to even return to where they had called home. And the park cooperative board actually back in 2008 established an agreement with the town of Brattleboro to remove 42 additional homes from these hazardous areas as part of an infrastructure project. So this park continues today to really struggle with financial challenges related to the loss of these part of these park lots, and the need to really take a closer look at major infrastructure upgrades, water bridges in this case, and wastewater. And they recently actually just completed a master site plan this past fall that is evaluating different options. And the screen is from an ice jam from just two years ago. So flooding is really impacting this park and continues to today and so they're looking at a variety of ways to hopefully be able to maintain the financial viability of this park while getting out of harm's way at the same time. It's going to take how likely some major grant funding or low interest loans in order to make that happen in a way to keep the whole park affordable for the residents who do call it home currently. So this was one of the parks that I worked in most closely with my students. They had 83 mobile homes this was a community that was located just a few minutes from the state house and folks really enjoy their lives and this particular community before the storm. We saw over 70 homes, either damaged or completely destroyed as part of I mean damages on the park owner, private owner was very active and rebuilding the park and helping residents manage during a very turbulent time. They've listed the park for sale in 2017 and working with the CVM mobile home program and the Cooper Development Institute the park residents actually were able to work with the owner in order to purchase the park for $2.3 million. So not an insignificant purchase price. However, it still does not change the fact that the park is still located within a 500 year floodplain. And so now, while they are back to being fully occupied. There are still challenges related to getting financing for infrastructure from some of the major funders because of their floodplain status. However, it has remained affordable. And folks are generally pretty happy with the way that the co-op has been managing on this community. We've done some work following a lot of the recovery work to actually think about how do you plan for these sorts of events in park communities. And so myself and some other folks on our team have been working with Vermont emergency management we actually had two parks participate in a statewide emergency management exercise. And so we've worked with park residents to develop their own park emergency plans and phone trees. We made maps available for every park across the state, along with important data relative to their flood hazard risk. And continuing to improve on on these products for for park communities. And then in terms of just of moving forward, I wish there was an easy way or an easy answer to end this presentation in terms of what do we need to do in order to improve on the resilience and the viability of these important communities. Unfortunately, I think that many of us would like to say that we had kind of a silver bullet of sorts in order to really protect and improve quality of life for our mobile home park neighbors. And so these three strategies are kind of where we're spending our time and focusing our efforts in terms of increasing awareness of where we do have vulnerabilities in this housing stock, seeking opportunities to engage residents and other stakeholders in investing in park communities, looking at different strategies to look at these various dimensions of vulnerability and addressing those, and then working with partners particularly at the state level to look at ways that we can improve and invest in different hazard mitigation strategies for these communities. So hopefully, we're going to be able to talk more about, you know, these answers going forward, as we really are going to be faced with some significant decisions in terms of, you know, do parks, stay an option for for community members, hopefully well in advance of any future climate event. So just some closing thoughts before we hand it over to Michael for the Q&A. I just would like folks to kind of lead this really, perhaps with a new or greater understanding of how important having these park communities as part of a rural housing stock that they really do, they can provide high quality of life with the affordability component particularly. And with that becomes the acknowledgement that as climate change intensifies particularly for the communities that we've identified as being vulnerable. We understand that these communities will also bear a greater burden. So that really calls on all of us to think about how we can invest in these resilience building strategies to really think about taking care of our neighbors, and really, I think putting in the full weight of all the energy and the creativity that we do to support our neighbors, even if maybe our home types are different. And so some just some quick acknowledges I just want to give a shout out to some of my mentors at UVM. My colleagues at the E for a program and then different community members and leaders that I've had the privilege of working with on the ground. Through their different organizations, mainly the CVO mobile home program in a CCD and then a couple of my undergraduate students who've been working with me on some of this work. So Michael I think I'll hand it over to you for the Q&A moderation I think I ended right on time and look forward to the conversation. You did. Thanks so much Kelly and we do have a number of questions that have come in so. I want to share those with you. Would you like me to stop my screen share Michael or you can stay on that's fine. Great. One questioner asks, are most owners of mobile homes required to have flood insurance for a mobile home in a floodplain if they need to borrow money, or is it optional. What would be the estimated cost and does the insurance cost for additional cost of insurance put this perspective owner in a situation where he or she is just not able to to buy a mobile home. Absolutely so the insurance question is a great one. For again for most folks they are not buying new mobile homes and they're not being financed with some of our traditional lenders. For the majority of folks that they're moving into a park maybe for the first time, or already an existing homeowner within a park. There isn't really like a trigger point in that process that would require them to have flood insurance for folks that are buying new and maybe obtaining financing through USDA or some of these other major lenders, they probably would require, or they would require flood insurance. I don't have the current estimates on what that type of policy would be. But by and large when we're interviewing folks about what type of insurance they had. Most folks will say yeah it floods here but it's never bad enough or it's never been bad enough to warrant spending money on a flood insurance policy. And so for most folks even in parks where where there is risk. They, they don't have really the financial means to be able to do so and so they're willing to have so much willing, but they kind of roll the dice with that. And so we saw a lot, a lot of confusion, when people were registering for, for FEMA, a lot of initial kind of rejections, basically because people were looking for or FEMA was looking for evidence of other insurance. And so I'm not sure losses and folks just didn't have that and so having to help people go through that paperwork process was really an intense part of the case management component of that. Thanks. Here's another question. How does Vermont compare with other states in terms of regulations on mobile homes and the support offered to mobile home owners. What are the lessons we could learn from other states and can Vermont serve as a model in some ways for other states. Absolutely. So the first part of your question is Vermont is actually one of the leaders in terms of having protections in state legislation for mobile home owners within parks. So just the fact that we actually know where our parks are we know who owns these parks. We do have some improved habitability rules that were written probably about four years ago now that outlines a process by which residents can bring complaints to their park owner if they go on answered and they can be reported to the state and then they'll be sort of a mediation process there. And so they have they have to report lot rents and so there are rules around having like increases if increases go beyond the consumer price index percentage for that given year it triggers a mediation process for the park owner has to justify why the lot rents have been raised more so to make sure that there isn't like undue burden placed on placed on residents in some most cases. It might be, you know, a new owner comes in and wants to jack up the rents they'll do so just up to that point, because they know that if they go just a little bit further it's going to trigger another process. In other cases sometimes, as in the case of the tripark cooperative if there's a major infrastructure issue that does require a new investment that would be seen as a justified means for raising rent substantially so we do have great. We've often held up as a model I would say the one area where maybe we look to our east to the state of New Hampshire is that New Hampshire has over 140 mobile home resident owned cooperatives now largely because they don't have a nonprofit sector that has been willing to step in when parks come up for sale. And so, in that case, working with an organization called rock USA, which was an offshoot I would say the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, where they saw an opportunity to help residents organize, connect them with financing in order to protect us housing stock and put it in the hands of the residents. And so we've been seeing more of that work here in Vermont. And again, we're going to be limited by the number of large enough parks in order to make that a reality. So, yes, and I would say, thanks. Some years ago there was a sponsored contest to build small houses completely self sufficient with solar panels and so on. Middlebury College sent in an entry and won some prizes. These houses were cheap efficient environmentally sound and the questioner wonders what attempts if any have been made to replace quote mobile homes with really efficient small, but not mobile homes. Yes, that's an excellent question that that I was actually just talking about with my students the other week. So, in Middlebury College Norwich University, they've all they've both been engaged and really successful with some of those design competitions. There, there's a couple different factors at play when we're looking at mobile home parks and some of these alternative and really, I would say, innovative attempts at thinking around. How can we take what works really well about our mobile home units and improve on it, particularly in the context of climate change right and thinking about having homes that are completely weatherized and energy efficient and high quality. And so in this case, following Irene, there were a lot of people that were asking that very same question in terms of, is this an opportunity, now that we have some of the many of these older homes that were located in hazardous areas is that an opportunity to really put a lot of great thinking into re-envisioning what a mobile home could be and still use the kind of the format of our mobile home parks in order to accommodate that housing. There was, and folks can look this up if they'd like, there's a small company called Vermont, so V-E-R-M-O-D. And they partnered with Vermont Housing Conservation Board, the High Nettos Fund, to do some designs of replicating sort of basically the footprint of a standard mobile home because the lots are configured in these parks to accommodate this rectangular box. And so they really went, I would say, put a lot of energy and investment into trying to come up with a unit that would be solar ready, have heat pumps be highly insulated, be very bright inside, and have that come in. The quest was to have it come in as something that's affordable for someone who maybe would have spent $50,000 on a brand new mobile home, but then were paying, you know, suffer $100 a month for electrical heat on top of that. And so they were trying to get it price point down low enough, either with a buy down subsidy of sorts, or also making the argument on the ROI if you bought one of these more efficient units that over time you'd actually be saving money. But what we found is that when we were actually interviewing residents about the Vermont, many folks were like, yes, that looks great, but I don't have the ability to be able to come up with that upfront cash in order to get into that home. Even if I know that it's going to save me energy dollars down the down the road, I'm worried about putting food on the table tonight, tomorrow, and next week. And so a five year payback period was just not going to work for them. And that's not to say that you know those homes again in partnership with some of the our major housing organizations across the state. They have actually been working with some of the nonprofit parks to put those units into parks here in Bristol they're actually quite a few in our mobile home park that's located just adjacent to our high school. And they are working well for folks from what I hear on the ground. There was also a cottage kind of format they called them they were calling my green cottages I don't think they really Africa off the ground in the upper valley but they had a similar concept. And, you know with with the mobile home regulation, a mobile home park is defined as a piece of land that's configured to accommodate three or more mobile homes and so there's this gray area and our protections that if we started accommodating tiny homes or these modular homes that aren't our standard HUD code mobile home built on a steel chassis. If that could actually be a problem down the road and so that's, there are a lot of folks that are thinking about that question today. Okay, thanks. Our time is running a little short and I'll try to get to as many questions as we can. Does the move to co up status, make a park eligible for infrastructure improvement grants. There's a simple answer there. Yes, so moving to co up status does open up other opportunities. Certainly beyond, I think most recently in February, the Milton mobile home co ops that's one of our larger ones. In Milton, a great group of residents there on that board, really very energetic group. They actually, I think Bernie Sanders office and pat ladies office actually just relatively recently announcement your mark that's coming to help them connect their infrastructure, their water infrastructure the Milton town water. So that's an amazing opportunity around $800,000 going to support that project. That's going to increase the result resilience of that park and remove some of that infrastructure burden on the on the park and really expand that capacity there. So, is there any state regulation that a property owner must meet before offering the property for mobile homes for example the properties flood potential their drainage, and so on. That's a really great question because I think it's one that people haven't had to answer because they're just for not developing the parks in Vermont, most of our parks have been in place since the 60s. And so coming at it from a new perspective. Yes, a lot of the funders if you were seeking, you know development funds to support that. So you would have to in the same places where they are now for the most part, actually 50 would prevent you from, from doing that. And, and other, you know, funding constraints in terms of looking at, if you wanted to be eligible for community block grants, or USDA funds, you would have to have a safe piece of property in order to do that. But certainly an interesting question in terms of, why are we not building new parks if the vacancy rate is so low, and that this is such an important piece for folks who are living in these communities. Thank you. There's some interest in your cooperation with Canadian universities. And how did that come about. Are you working jointly with them on projects or research, or is there any, are there any ways in which the Canadian and American ways of approaching mobile home parks and climate justice are different anything you could point to. Yeah, that particular partnership is a PhD program, like program that I'm in. It's led by John Erickson, Josh Farley here at UVM Peter Brown at McGill, and then Ellie Perkins, and Peter Richter at York, Dr. And so the three universities came together to be able to offer a cohort based PhD program where they would convene students who are interested in different themes, my theme being climate justice. And so other students in my cohort, particularly on the Canadian side, looking at climate justice with indigenous communities. So that's a prime focus of some of the students at McGill, and at York, here in Vermont, others looking at food justice. And food systems and our economic systems around that so it's been, I've been the main like housing focus person, I would say, but certainly the programming that has allowed us to share about different contexts in terms of how we're thinking about sustainability and resilience and climate justice has been a really important piece. The programming that has allowed us to share about different contexts in terms of how we're thinking about sustainability and resilience and climate justice has been a really important piece of my academic journey. So I was able to take advantage of a three week climate justice course up in Canada at York University, a few summers before COVID whenever whenever that was, we released four years of summers ago. And so that was a really eye opening experience for me, and working with seeing my colleagues working with indigenous communities. Oh, thank you so much. Kelly, this was very, very, we really appreciate your being here on our last day. And I want to thank all the members for sticking with us through the last eight weeks. I want to wish you a wonderful spring and summer watch for those emails this weekend about our survey for feedback. And we will see you all in the fall. Thank you so much.