MonkeyBoy notes...

"they can easily increase the rent even at parks that are already charging market rates, because there is so much demand for affordable housing and local authorities are very reluctant to grant permission for new parks."

Some of the truest text in the entire article.  Unfortunately, it also undercuts the supposed premise.  It's true: local boards absolutely don't want more parks, so it's not the growth industry they claim. Towns don't like the people that move into the community, don't like the sewage and water burden/dollars received in tax base ratio versus tract housing, the existing landlords hate the competition that a park represents, blah blah.  So good luck to these poor yokels who fly into Buffets seminar and come out thinking they can go speculate on parks even though new ones seldom appear.

Trailer parks are not the only cash cow for fleecing the poor and the taxpayers. Smack in the middle of my adopted town is a beautiful old building that was bought by a slumlord in the late 80s. When the town was falling apart after the cold war industries went downhill.  He refuses to do anything but rent to the troubled and addicts, collecting exorbanant rents to warehouse them. The police had to put a substation in the basement. The public assistance lawyers located in the old lobbies above the fuzz as insulation. The psych social workers across the street. They swept it with warrents last year and arrested  50 individuals and found smack in 22 apartments. They finally closed the adjacent skidrow bar when a lucky knife fight, ineffectual posturing, no real danger, allowed revocation of a 40 year liquor liscence. Now the bar is a hipster craft bar. So it goes in my small post soviet red scare town.

But nothing compares to the industry of fleecing the poor as what I see here on this business trip to Florida. I pointed out that the largest industry in Ft Liquordale appears to be the courts and probation departments. My local colleague laughs and says here everyone knows that crime pays the bills. For everyone involved in the chain of state control. They love fleecing the poor and everyone else here for anything they can enact. Even better if the taxpayer has to pay for it somewhere along the line.

"Are there no prisons?  Are there no workhouses?"