Last Week Tonight host looks into one of America’s foremost affordable housing options – mobile homes – and the investment firms squeezing a profit out of them

John Oliver continued to call out big business greed in seemingly mundane American industries – robocalling, show wrestling – on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight with a look at one of the country’s few affordable housing industries: mobile homes.

According to federal housing surveys, around 20 million Americans – roughly one in 18 – live in mobile homes, in part because they can cost half that of a traditional, site-built home. “But in recent years, some of the biggest investors in America have moved into this industry,” Oliver reported, pointing out how private equity groups such as the Carlyle Group, TPG and Blackstone now own large tracts of mobile home parks.

The park-buying spree means that “the homes of some of the poorest people in America are being snapped up by some of the richest people in America. And luckily, there will be no problems whatsoever,” Oliver panned. “I’m obviously kidding – it’s going terribly.”

Part of the groups’ profit strategy involves predatory or deceptive loan practices, made possible by the unique deprecation of mobile homes – a key difference between mobile and on-site homes put plainly in a clip from finance host Dave Ramsay: “cars go down in value. Mobile homes go down in value. It’s a car you sleep in.”

In other words, “mobile homes may be a terrible investment for people buying them, but they’ve been an incredible investment for Warren Buffett,” said Oliver, who pointed to the billionaire’s Clayton Homes, which generated pre-tax earnings of $911m in 2018.

Those profits are not made through traditional mortgages but through high-interest, shorter-term “chattel loans” – the type often used to buy a car. Oliver noted that Clayton’s lending practices have been on blast for years; a 2015 investigation between Buzzfeed News, the Seattle Times, and the Center for Public Integrity found that “Clayton relies on predatory sales practices,” exorbitant fees and interest rates exceeding 15%, “trapping many buyers in loans they can’t afford”.

Clayton has denied that report, claiming that it was based on “isolated incidents”. Oliver played a clip from one such incident in which a Clayton collections agent encouraged a homeowner to meet her payments by donating her blood plasma.

“I guess one way to get your customers to report ‘high levels of satisfaction’ is to make sure they’re all feeling light-headed after you literally bleed them fucking dry,” Oliver commented.

One of the huge pitfalls of mobile homes, Oliver continued, is that someone can own the land beneath you, then ratchet up the rent on it. He pointed to a documentary clip of a woman not able to make her payments after the Carlyle Group bought her mobile home park and spiked the rent.

“It’s true, that woman may lose her home so the Carlyle Group, an investment firm with $216bn in assets, can make more money for its shareholders,” Oliver said. “If the concept of income inequality came to life, that is the sentence it would scream when it orgasmed.”

Oliver finally turned to what he characterized as the embodiment of mobile-home greed: Frank Rolfe, who controls over 30,000 home sites in 25 states. “Rolfe is completely shameless about the degree to which his business depends on having a captive customer base,” Oliver explained, “positively comparing it to running a Waffle House ‘where everyone is chained to the booths’ – a concept so deeply chilling, that I think it may have just inspired Jordan Peele’s next movie”.

Rolfe has maintained that the Waffle House quote was taken out of context. “So he wasn’t suggesting that he’s a heartless person whose customers are stuck there with him holding all the cards, deciding for himself how high he wants their rent to go. To see him say that, you’d need to enroll in his online mobile home university,” which Oliver’s team did, and found clips in which Rolfe described himself as a heartless person whose guiding principle on rents was “How high do you want to go?”

“Wow, usually when someone is that contemptuous of poor people, they’re immediately visited by the ghost of Christmas Future,” Oliver joked.

The greed is daunting, Oliver acknowledged, but he noted that solutions abound, such as not-for-profit groups helping tenants get financing and state laws that would give residents the right of first refusal.

“But until laws like that are put in place – which they absolutely should be – there are some key things to bear in mind,” Oliver concluded. “If you want to rent a mobile home, that’s fine. If you want to buy one and put it on land that you own, that’s fine. But buying a mobile home, and renting the land underneath it can be financially catastrophic.”