Posted on 04/30/2016 11:56:20 AM PDT by Lorianne
Given that “redneck” and “hillbilly” remain the last acceptable stereotypes among polite society, it isn’t surprising that the stereotypical urban home of poor, recently rural whites remains an object of scorn. The mere mention of a trailer park conjures images of criminals in wifebeaters, moldy mattresses thrown awry, and Confederate flags. As with most social phenomena, there is a much more interesting reality behind this crass cliché. Trailer parks remain one of the last forms of housing in US cities provided by the market explicitly for low-income residents. Better still, they offer a working example of traditional urban design elements and private governance.
Any discussion of trailer parks should start with the fact that most forms of low-income housing have been criminalized in nearly every major US city. Beginning in the 1920s, urban policymakers and planners started banning what they deemed as low-quality housing, including boarding houses, residential hotels, and low-quality apartments. Meanwhile, on the outer edges of many cities, urban policymakers undertook a policy of “mass eviction and demolition” of low-quality housing. Policymakers established bans on suburban shantytowns and self-built housing. In knocking out the bottom rung of urbanization, this ended the natural “filtering up” of cities as they expanded outward, replaced as we now know by static subdivisions of middle-class, single-family houses. The Housing Act of 1937 formalized this war on “slums” at the federal level and by the 1960s much of the emergent low-income urbanism in and around many U.S. cities was eliminated.
In light of the United States’ century-long war on low-income housing, it’s something of a miracle that trailer parks survive. With an aftermarket trailer, trailer payments and park rent combined average around the remarkably low rents of $300 to $500. Even the typical new manufactured home, with combined trailer payments and park rent, costs around $700 to $1,000 a month. Both options offer a decent standard of living at far less than rents for apartments of comparable size in many cities. The savings with manufactured housing are a big part of the story: where the average manufactured house costs $64,000, the average site-built single-family house now costs $324,000. The savings don’t come out of shoddy construction either: manufactured homes are increasingly energy efficient, and their manufacturing process produces less waste than traditional site-built construction. With prosperous cities increasingly turning into playgrounds of the rich due to onerous housing supply restrictions, we shouldn’t take these startlingly affordable rents lightly.
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Yes , but even metropolitan areas shun and forbid such housing
While more affordable , many building codes forbid such economy of space , as if it will result in a lower tax base for municipalities, with the same demand for services.
Many building codes forbid such economy.
Nice!
Well, I live in tornado alley (St. Louis) and trailers don't seem to get hit any more often than other dwellings. They may (or may not) be more dangerous when they do get hit, but for the money they are a good deal. I live in a low-income area and I have considered renting one and decided against it - but not because of tornados.
In my neck of the central FL woods, there are two types of trailer parks, those with retirees that are quite pleasant, and those with people not of retirement age, that are otherwise.
That skirting isn't going to do anything to prevent the structure from being lifted up and flipped in high winds, it's just aesthetic. Should've put it on a masonry foundation. Hope he has substantial tie-downs. Hurricane code requires it in coastal areas here.
During my college years, I had a job at a mountain resort in a very expensive area, and the resort provided employee housing for that reason. Single wide trailers. Nice enough, all things considered, I couldn’t have afforded to work there if I had to commute 30 miles on steep mountain roads, and forget renting anything nearby. I didn’t mind, the employees who lived there were mostly my age, it was sort of fun. But, I can still remember hearing the aluminum siding and roof rippling and crinkling in high wind, and you could feel it moving. If it weren’t for all the trees providing a wind break, I’m sure some of them would have rolled over in the wind. It was unsettling. I’ve never lived in one since. If circumstance meant I had to, I’d want it on a permanent foundation with substantial tie-downs.
Around here where I live you can not build a house less than 720 square feet. It is total crap. So I built my brother a cabin on stilts that is 490 square feet. It has a bathroom kitchen living room and a bedroom that is 10X16. It meets code other than size but does not require a permit because of the stilts.
They just keep adding more and more requirements that run the cost up with little benefit. Like having such a low air flow loss that the house now requires a air exchanger. Never mind that just opening the door ruins the air tightness of the house.
Now trailers being just as good as a stick built house is total BS. I have replaced many roofs on trailers that failed because they had no ice and water shield like code requires on a site built house. Try to tell a owner that you have to replace the roof deck because it is rotten in 7 years. Talk about pissed off. But most by this time know just how cheaply built they are.
I agree. The point is, his tornado shelter is unseen from the outside.
“I think the point of the article is that trailer parks are a free market solution to providing homes for lower income people that actually works a lot better than government provided low income housing. If it were allowed in more places we’d go a lot further toward combatting homelessness etc than anything else that government could do.”
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Not buying it. These guys are simply trying to put a Happy Face on Globalism and its love of cramming the populace into dense urban centers.
The guy at the top of the website is the founder of the “micro apartment” movement. This seems like a way to squeeze bucks out of globalism. See also The Aspen Institute ties.
No thank you.
If the homeless were placed in trailer parks made for them, we’d save billions of dollars, as well as reclaim the title of “civilization.” You can have people face the street in case of a catastrophe, but you can’t do that and still claim civilized status - only Law of the Jungle.
Amazing how many missed the point, huh?
Manufactured homes give the working class of this country (what’s left of it anyway) the ability to live free and be independent. And that’s a great thing!
As a Southern, Christian rural white man, I know people are free to insult and belittle me but guess what? I don’t need anyone to “protect” me, I don’t need a safe place, and go on, make fun of rednecks all day long and I’ll probably laugh if they’re funny!
My house is a solid stick built house. No basement, but we don’t worry about the frost line as there isn’t one. No need to worry about the cellar flooding, either.
I have a lot of friends with trailers and double-wides and some are really nice, and others are just old and ugly, but they keep ‘em out of the rain and for them they’re all home sweet home.
We could play what if games all day. He looked out for his family with a safe space.
All kinds of weird things happen. What happens if someone has a $500k house with a tornado shelter and the entire thing collapses around it and seals them in?
What was the comment that James Carville made: ‘drag a twenty dollar bill through a trailer park’.....
And look what we got for a presidential library....ROFL...
Actually, a lot of them have sturdy log walls.
But they are the size of your average attic. And with all their weight they cost a fortune to move.
Maybe. I don’t think so though. This piece is part of a larger general argument that many of the problems that liberals claim can only be solved by more government spending and regulation are in fact caused in large part by government spending and regulation, and could in fact be greatly ameliorated by less of it. In this case, if government stopped preventing the establishment of trailer parks and other forms of market-provided housing for the poor, they could simultaneously improve the housing prospects for poor people as well as spend less government money supposedly providing it. That doesn’t sound like globalism to me; it sounds like freedom.
I have no problem with mobile homes. Just wish that the size restrictions were lifted. As the articles says they say a cost of $60,000. I can build a nice house for less than that if I could skip some of the code requirement that site built houses have that mobile homes dont have.
And if I could build a one bedroom house and add on later it would allow for it to be paid for as it increased in size. Like as you grew a family. But that is against the law.
I see on television were they allow these tiny apartments so why not tiny houses. Total BS.
And a trailer or modular can be anchored to the ground or a foundation just like a site built house. But you better make sure that it has the structural integrity to with stand the winds pulling the building apart above the anchors. Based on what I have seen most dont because it cost a lot more money.
” lower tax base ...same demand for services. “... no cheap laborers for business and industry.
And with enormous welfare payments it all works...
Good points all. My brother just bought and moved into a manufactured home. After decades of apartment living, he is thrilled not to have to share walls. I toured the place and it’s more tightly constructed than my stick house.
I was really young and it was a party complex. One of the older men had a girlfriend who got so jealous one midnight she sneaked into the parking lot (just below my balcony). I happened to look down just as she walked to his car with a huge chef's knife in her hand, like a crazy movie. She looked up and saw me and then started for the stairs!!!
I ran into my apartment and then realized my new phone wasn't yet installed. I couldn't call for help or go back outside. I just sat there with a chair against the door until I heard the police outside. She was just planning to slash his tires - - so she said.
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