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| BBC - Why Do So Many Americans Live In Mobile Homes? |
The First Trailer Houses
In the 1930's people started living in trailers as permanent dwellings. They were meant for things like vacations and temporary housing, but during the depression people had to make do with what they had.
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| 1935 Trailer Park |
After WWII more people started living in mobile homes, but it didn't really take off until the 1960's and 70's when poverty drove people to seek a cheaper housing alternative. Only trailers manufactured after 1967 qualify as manufactured homes, and chances are that someone is still living in them. I know I saw many mobile homes from the 70's and a few from the 60's.
What's It Like?
Well, not great. I lived in a trailer park in the upper midwest where it gets very cold in the winter. A mobile home is basically a shell made of metal sheeting, some fiberglass insulation and then a layer of wood paneling. The roof is made of metal with a layer of bitumen or some tar painted over it. Underneath is the chassis and usually that's where the wheels get stored in perpetuity because a lot of them never move again once they've found a place for it. Around the bottom there is usually skirting to protect the underside and help keep the trailer warm in winter. It looks nicer without a big gap between the bottom of the trailer and the ground. In the winter because there is so little insulation, the pipes freeze. You learn to leave the tap a little bit open to keep the water flowing through the pipes. You can also buy tape to put on the pipes under the house to keep them from freezing. There is never enough hot water for two showers. If the pipes freeze, you won't even be getting one. In the summer, because it is essentially a metal box, you cook to death.
Trailer parks are where poor people live. As mentioned before they exist on the edges of society, just outside of town. In one park we lived next to the railroad tracks and every time a train passed by the pictures on the wall would shake and the dishes in the cupboard would rattle. The second one we lived in was in the takeoff path of the airport. In some places the trailer park is adjacent to the city dump, or it's located on polluted ground that nobody else wants. The roads inside trailer parks are not usually paved in the midwest, so in spring they turn to mud and in winter it's slush and gravel. Since the people who live there are poor, there are a lot of parties and fights. It a noisy place to live no matter what you do. I've heard of parks full of new double-wide trailers for retirees in Florida, but that's basically the Shangri-La of trailer parks. Most of the people who live in one are doing it because they have no other choice. It's economic segregation at its most obvious.
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| Florida Retirement Community |
Other Low Cost Housing
But before you think that trailer houses are the absolute bottom of the barrel, American low-income housing is a bit of a crap shoot. Prior to living in one I got to sample some of the other housing on offer to people in my income range. Shitty basement apartments with a funny smell and black mold and no windows, old houses where the house is slowly falling apart, and like the cars of the poor, the houses of the poor have a learning curve. My first apartment had a view of a brick wall out of the window. You learn which windows do and do not open, or what the trick is to get the front door to open. One of the houses we lived in didn't have a level floor in the whole place. We brought our desk chairs in and left them just inside the door, and when we came back with another load we saw that they'd rolled to the other end of the room. You learn to live with the squalor.
Then we had an oil boom and suddenly even the shitty housing was in demand. You couldn't find a cheap apartment or a house to rent, let alone a mobile home. At one time you could get housing for around $350 a month. During the oil boom that skyrocketed to three and sometimes four times that much and there were four oil workers sharing the place because there hadn't been a lot of people or a housing shortage before then. Regular people in low wage jobs couldn't compete. In the end we had to move an hour away from where we had been living because it was the nearest place where housing was affordable. We were out of the trailer house, but our situation hadn't improved.
The Future of Mobile Homes
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| Approximately 68% Of People Who Live In Tiny Homes Have No Mortgage |
In the mid-2000's America had a housing boom. New houses were being built and it seemed like everyone was buying a house either to live in or fix up and sell for a profit. Banks were issuing mortgages to people who would never have qualified for one ordinarily. The reason for this was because the banks were speculating heavily on the housing market. Then in 2008 the bottom fell out of the market and some banks went under. People lost their houses because they had to restructure the mortgage and couldn't keep up with the payments. A lot of Americans ended up homeless. Mobile homes carried a stigma, but there was something new on the horizon. "Tiny Homes". These are like mobile homes but smaller and nicer. People could buy a small flat trailer and some plans and build their own tiny house on wheels. Now there are initiatives to fight homelessness using tiny homes as somewhere for homeless people to live with a roof and a door that locks and maybe some modern amenities, unlike the cardboard box or storage unit or car they'd been living in. Poor people who weren't homeless yet downsized into a tiny home. Unfortunately the municipal authorities in America still see them as trailer houses and banish them to the outskirts of town. Still, it's better than nothing in today's economic climate.
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