Reddit reduced the title in the URL to "elementary_school_teacher_vs_billionaire_activist". I wondered if it was going to go into left-leaning contributions of the new owner or something.
I agree one problem is neophilia in media. But there are also think tanks and other intermediaries who work on how to draw attention to issues, and those working on these kinds of issues are thin on the ground.
The big policy tool against this kind of thing is more housing, but cultural tools also exist and could be brought to bear - mass opprobrium against the rich people who do it.
There are so many factors that blind journalists to this kind of struggle. For the most part, they are only interested in trailer park residents to the extent that the conform to the stereotype of uneducated Trump supporters. The idea that they might actually have economic grievances that fit the mold of traditional class struggle is not on their radar.
Also, there's so much technophilia in journalism, I can't imagine the angle "online payment portal doesn't actually work for regular people" would play well.
I feel that's a universal experience.
Another piece here is the increasing investmentification of housing - as bigger and bigger investment firms buy up housing, they have more money and more incentive to create portals, streamline eviction processes, etc and even individual property managers (assuming they aren't assholes) have less and less ability to work around the standard, national process.
It's not that smaller landlords (especially smaller trailer park landlords) really regard their tenants as humans first and money sources second, but national investment firms see their tenants as purely fungible sources of income and have absolutely zero ability to treat them as individuals.
It's capital developing new frontiers - buying up all the houses until they can just squeeze everyone dry.
There is somewhat more deference to these problems in California center-and-leftward political culture, resulting in, in my city, trailer parks being the only kind of housing with city-imposed tenant protections, as of yet. (Hopefully the next council is more hospitable to making them broader.)
Amusingly that story originated on r/stupidpol.
1: there was a thing in the Boston Globe about a trailer park in MA on the Cspe that was really interesting. The local owner wanted to sell it to a private equity group, and some of the residents who own their own trailers but lease the land were organizing to buy the land as either a condo or a cooperative. I think there's a right of first refusal or something. Anyway, the private equity group was engaging in a massive disinformation campaign about how rates r we like go up if people owned themselves and they wouldn't be able to invest in the infrastructure. Never mind that rents are likely to skyrocket.
What a way to make a livin'!
There are lots of mobile home parks in Silicon Valley. Not sure how many have been able to avoid the sale/eviction/development cycle but the last trailer park in Palo Alto managed to survive so far and so have a number in San Jose. The Mercury News reports on them occasionally and I think even Tech Crunch ran a big feature on the Palo Alto one when it looked on the way out.