10 ms·

The case for trailer parks

80 points by RickJWagner 6y ago

sevensor 6y ago
This is one of those positions that's so obvious, I struggle to articulate what the contrary position would even be. And yet, my community continues to squeeze out its trailer parks, even though I live in an area with plenty of land. Usually the former trailer park sits vacant for 3-8 years after the evictions are done.
- brudgers 6y ago
  The contrary position is public housing. If you desire non-market rate housing, it's the only solution. Because by definition, the market will always produce market rate housing.
  - mjevans 6y ago
    Alternately, engineer the conditions of the market to achieve the desired result... rather than engineering the conditions of the market to preserve what's already been built at the cost of future (now current) generations who have no where to call home and establish value or community.
    - DubiousPusher 6y ago
      I mostly agree but I think it's important to have perspective that things like historicity or the quality of a neighborhood can be a public good. And a democratic population might choose to invest in such a public good. Obviously it would be better though if the coat of these public goods were being paid more directly by the public and not externalized onto those living most precariously.
      - imtringued 6y ago
        You can have that to a certain extend. When people are saying you should build more they don't mean modern style 10 story buildings next to a single family home. They mean a duplex or triplex that fits in with the rest of the neighborhood or a 2-3 story apartment with a nice facade that is in the spirit of the neighborhood.
        DubiousPusher 6y ago
        Uh, I think it's both. Have you been to Houston TX? Housing is cheap there for a large city. They also happen to often have 10 story buildings right up next to single family homes.
        dublinben 6y ago
        Houston is only a "cheap" city if you look at housing costs but not transportation costs. The ridiculous sprawl of Houston increases transportation costs so much that it is actually less affordable than "expensive" cities like New York City.[0][1] This doesn't even take into account the externalities of the higher emissions that come from living in a car-dependent place. [0] https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/?lat=29.7604267&lng=-95.3698028&focus=place&gid=25649#fs https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/?lat=29.7604267&lng=-95... [1] https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/?lat=40.7127753&lng=-74.0059728&focus=place&gid=16861#fs https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/?lat=40.7127753&lng=-74...
        DubiousPusher 6y ago
        I'm not making the case that Houston is a good solution to the housing problem. My whole point is that Houston is evidence of what happens when you ignore most preferential factors and just build. I've enjoyed visiting there but the city is aesthetically unappealing, feels vacant of community and yes is a nightmare to traverse.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        > the quality of a neighborhood can be a public good. And a democratic population might choose to invest in such a public good. This manifests as keeping poorer people out by restricting zoning to larger plots of land and detached single family homes, which also has a nice side effect of making cars a necessity. Everyone wants to live around others at or above their own socioeconomic level.
        DubiousPusher 6y ago
        I agree. But the solution is not to throw out all considerations and give developers their way. There must be a way to balance the interests of those who want a neighborhood to remain a nice place to live with open space, gardens and services while also preventing Nimbys from filibustering density.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    The article argues for a public housing model for trailer parks. Because of the pseudo ownership model where you don't own the land but still own a house sitting on the property that is expensive to move, the operator of the trailer park can just increase rates. It's exploitative compared to the rental market. You basically lose your housing investment unless you can find another trailer park and you can afford the moving fees. Renters can just move on to the next apartment.
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      It’s often nastier, because the trailer is often rent to own or mortgaged by the owner. It’s a depreciating asset, so these arrangements are often exploitive, and the more slumlordy types will find ways to get liens on the trailer.
  - imgabe 6y ago
    Public housing has most of the same problems - poorly maintained, high crime rate.
    - throwmxncj 6y ago
      Not if done properly. https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/housing/2019/09/housing-basic-human-right-vienna-model-social-housing https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/housing/2019/09/housi...
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    I'd like to think if funded properly, public housing would improve but I'm not confident. I grew to in a trailer in a trailer park and honestly, it was good for my family. We had 3 loud, boisterous, boys living together and we needed our own four walls. I think it's fair to say subsidizing this kind of private housing might be a bit selfish. After all, why does everyone in a park get a yard when people are just trying to find a studio or a rentable room just to work in the city? But I think that's the wrong question for two reasons. 1) The choice isn't usually between dense urban developments or trailer parks. I don't even think this type of land use comes into conflict all that much. Occasionally a park is shut down to build a shopping center but most parks are at the edge of cities. They are not usually blocking density. 2) It goes beyond market rate housing. Parks are often limited or banned. Perhaps encouraging parks is manipulating the market but so is what is happening now by law.
  - captainmuon 6y ago
    Public housing is one option. Or you have to counter the price hikes. Prices are rising in many parts of the world because people are investing more and more money in housing, as an alternative to stocks or other investments. The expected returns mainly come from the rise in value, and not from the rent income. So the companies holding the houses must get rid of the existing tenants and renovate the appartments to increase their market value. Basically, private investments currently don't create much housing, they destroy affordable housing. So you need to create incentives to maintain and expand the affordable segment.
    - lmm 6y ago
      > The expected returns mainly come from the rise in value, and not from the rent income. So the companies holding the houses must get rid of the existing tenants and renovate the appartments to increase their market value. Nah. Housing rises in value even if you don't touch it. Demand is rising and supply isn't. The solution is to make it easier to build more.
      - brudgers 6y ago
        The market prefers higher priced housing over lower priced. When there is demand for higher price housing the market builds housing. When there is not demand for higher priced housing the market tends to wait out the down cycle. The market has no preference for building unprofitable housing. Bankers don’t have enthusiasm for loaning money to build it either. Finally housing is one of the less profitable real estate development types. That’s why commercial property often sits vacant...the long term ROI from sitting out low demand is better than conversion in the present.
        lmm 6y ago
        > The market prefers higher priced housing over lower priced. When there is demand for higher price housing the market builds housing. When there is not demand for higher priced housing the market tends to wait out the down cycle. It's not the market, developers don't building cheap housing because regulations generally make it illegal. > The market has no preference for building unprofitable housing. Bankers don’t have enthusiasm for loaning money to build it either. Sure, but profitable isn't the same thing as expensive. "Pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap" is a perfectly valid business model that bankers and businesspeople alike are happy to follow. But when the planning rules make it so expensive to build anything at all, building expensive housing is the only way to make a profit.
- gnopgnip 6y ago
  The article doesn't really clarify the difference between trailer parks where the residents own the lot and home, just the home, or the landlord owns everything. The latter is just renting. The middle one here is not really affordable. Owning the land is ideal, but in most of the country you can't do this in a mobile home park, you need to buy a relatively large lot. At that point you have a lot of the same issues with single family homes in developing area, the infrastructure/future maintenance is more expensive than people expect and eventually that will need to be dealt with.
  - cowsandmilk 6y ago
    There is an existing legal framework for multiple owners sharing a lot, condominiums. That isn’t the barrier. Zoning excluding mobile homes is the barrier.
    - gnopgnip 6y ago
      It is both zoning and permitting. Most of the desirable parts of the US have exclusionary zoning and permitting and would not allow a condo HOA of mobile/manufactured homes to form today
- michaelt 6y ago
  > This is one of those positions that's so obvious, I struggle to articulate what the contrary position would even be. The UK has a housing crisis, but it's not due to the cost of constructing the house - it's due to the cost of land with planning permission. If the cost of a conventional home is 75% land, construction costs are almost irrelevant: Nobody's going to buy a £325,000 trailer in preference to a £400,000 conventional home.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  It’s pretty obvious if you look into the issue at all. Trailer parks are modern tenements, and the abusive practices of the owners usually make it a home of last resort. Most of them predate modern zoning or other laws in the jurisdiction as well, so they are usually an environmental nightmare, often with unsafe wells, or off-code sewers that release sewage.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  Ask the HN demographics what "good poors" live like (though you'll have to be more tactful than that to get a real answer) and you'll probably get some answer about a cheap apartment in a city, maybe with roommates, taking public transit, etc. When the smoke and drink they do it inside. Their kids play video games or go to the park. When they want extra money they pick up another job. You get the picture. They're out of sight and out of mind. The trailer park life is pretty much the opposite of that. Poors that have space, even if just the small space of a trailer sized lot, use it efficiently. They have 1.x cars per person because 1 isn't enough redundancy. They hang their laundry on a clothes line. They litter their lawn with "unsightly" stuff they're flipping for extra cash. They sit around drinking beer while burning something in an old washing machine drum. It's the same old superiority complex and desire to tell other people how to live that's plagued humanity for all of history.
andrewfromx 6y ago
this sounds like the startup kibbo https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/20/kibbo-wants-to-remake-the-trailer-park-so-vanlife-can-be-a-life-and-not-a-lifestyle/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/20/kibbo-wants-to-remake-the-...
ncmncm 6y ago
If you have money to invest, you can do some easy good by buying or starting a trailer park, organized so you are selling the lots instead of renting them. Maybe loan residents money for the lot. Get people to move from predatory rental lots, which they can, and will, with a little encouragement. It won't be a great good, but it is better than letting VCs and bankers hold your money, and you will be able to see the people you are helping. Maybe put in a school kids can walk to, and a smallish grocery store. Make sure it's on a good bus route, with a county drug-counseling office and a community college on the same route. People want to improve their lives, and will when they can. But American life lately seems designed to grind them down. Representing a bloc of votes can help get local government on their side, if they can be persuaded to vote for their own benefit.
- dazc 6y ago
  Sounds a great idea, in theory, but the problems begin when you add people; some of whom will not share your ideals or have respect for their neighbours. Soon enough your ideal housing solution will become yet another place where decent people don't want to live.
  - ip26 6y ago
    I don't think you can build paradise this way. There will always be bad tenants. But you could still make life better for many people.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  Virtually no municipalities in America are approving new trailer parks.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    A very great deal of US land is adjacent to municipalities, close enough in to benefit residents without requiring municipal approval for projects. One deals with the county, then. That makes it difficult to get town political representation unless someone hungers enough for the voting bloc to expand the municipal boundary to encompass the development.
chrisco255 6y ago
As someone who has been living full time in a travel trailer in the past year, I would go even further than pushing for mobile home communities and push for blended mobile home / tiny house / RV communities. I'm currently in one in Austin and it's a blend of tiny houses, motorhomes, travel trailers, and mini hotels. It's a dynamic inventory of housing. It's a very flexible use of space, and each lot is less than 0.1 acres, but you still have access to common apartment amenities like pool, clubhouse, etc. I could imagine more of allowing property owners to subdivide down to that scale would go far to solve affordability. Quality of construction in travel trailers, tiny houses, and mobile homes has improved compared to what they were 50-60 years ago when the trailer park trope was coined. At any rate, I enjoy the flexibility of being able to hitch up my travel trailer and move locations in no time flat. It's been great during the pandemic to go visit national parks and get outdoors. I just see it as a no brainer. It shouldn't cost a quarter million minimum to lock in a nice location for yourself. You should be able to scoop up a 0.12 acre lot for a few thousand bucks and put a modular or travel trailer on it.
- datavirtue 6y ago
  All of the most ideal places to do this have already outright banned any mention of it. I have property in an area (township) that is quasi-suburban (country but 30 min from "civilization") but has a zoning code that is so thoroughly constructed and exclusive that it would make your mouth drop. Nevermind putting a trailer on your own property, that ain't happening, you can barely build a house.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  Zoning pretty much dooms this where I live and many other places. One recent recommendation to allow tiny homes in Atlanta had the caveat, no mobile homes. They wanted housing that could not move. The Atlanta proposal was to permit them on lots that already have a home but not elsewhere. Issues of utilities along with school load come to mind but those occur with any other dense housing. So why wouldn't apartments be better? To make it easier on residents with bad credit and such the utilities could be baked in to the rent and the state or city could offer to subsidize. However what doomed many existing communities near me were property taxes. The land is more valuable for actual homes or in some cases businesses. With tiny/mobile homes as you propose your location may require local governments reducing the tax load to make the location affordable.
sneak 6y ago
There's a much, much better case for apartment buildings, but those increasingly can't be built in places people want to live, so I guess the US is going to have to figure out how to make the cheapest possible low-density detached housing. Trailers and RVs and other manner of tiny-house shantytowns fit that bill. Shame there can't be population density growth in cities.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  Livable population density requires public services and common spaces like low cost transit, mixed use diversity (especially local shopping), green spaces, etc. The US, in its current form, may be incapable of building anything that would be considered a common good.
habosa 6y ago
This is some lazy math: > A trailer park at 5 homes per acre and 2.5 people per household works out to 8,000 people per square mile, or more than twice as dense as Phoenix. Well yes but a trailer park is just housing. What about streets, businesses, and open space? Nobody wants to live in an infinite trailer park even if it's an infinite luxury trailer park. I actually think there's amazing potential for mixed-use commercial/residential space in a trailer park because the cost of starting a new business would be so low and you could even relocate your business over time. But until the non-housing aspects are addressed a trailer park is just a cheap suburb, which isn't really inspiring.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  This is my real objection to trailer parks ... it's still a suburb, just cheaper. We shouldn't be building sprawling, energy inefficient, land destroying, isolating suburbs. Grass is the largest irrigated "crop" in the US ... https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-biggest-crop-is-grass-2016-2?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-biggest-crop-is-gra...
  - lai-yin 6y ago
    Every alternative to suburbs has its own serious problems. People like living in suburbs. I like living in them. And maybe if we rebrand trailer parks as tiny home communities it will change attitudes about cheap, affordable homes.
    - culopatin 6y ago
      I think allowing a mix of commercial with suburb would solve some of the issues we are having. I’m not from the US and I miss walking down to the store to get some staples (not a corner store, a real food store with more than milk and lottery). Having a vegetable shop, a butcher, a hair salon, small town way is the way to go. You socialize with your neighbor while you wait, hear some gossip, get acquainted with your veggie guy so next time he picks up those dragon fruits you like, etc. I currently have to drive 3 miles to get to a supermarket. All the “food stores” near me are in a somewhat industrial area across the train tracks and are ghetto. They only sell beer, maybe bread and lottery tickets, and are secured like a bank. Not the feeling you want. My fancy neighborhood doesn’t have a single store. Not even a gas station. I’m forced to drive out. Not great.
leoedin 6y ago
Trailer parks feel like a symptom of zoning laws rather than the solution. They're a loophole in the rules which mandate low density large housing. Allow higher density prefabricated (but not "mobile") construction and trailer parks would become less attractive. There's nothing fundamentally nicer about living in a very thin walled low quality "mobile" home rather than a more solid nicer "prefabricated" home on the same plot.
- fredgrott 6y ago
  it's an equity trap as one does not own the land the 'house' is on and you own any right to live in the house through land ownership and thus can be forced out at anytime
  - robert_foss 6y ago
    Additionally mobile homes are not actually all that mobile after 20years. Relatedly they tend to lose value over time as opposed to permanent buildings.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Permanent buildings also lose value over time, and you have to spend money to repair various portions of it at some point.
      - kube-system 6y ago
        Permanent buildings typically only lose value if not maintained. The issue with many mobile homes is that they’re often designed in a way that is not easily maintainable.
        lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Newer buildings come with updated building codes and benefit from technological advances. Unless there is reason to believe the newer building was built with subpar quality materials or workmanship compared to an older building, the older building will be worth less. https://www.trulia.com/research/new-or-existing-home/ https://www.trulia.com/research/new-or-existing-home/ > We found that that new homes (those built in 2013 or 2014) are typically priced 20% higher than older homes with similar attributes (e.g., square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, etc.) and in the same zip code. Another example is the higher tier hotel brands won’t sell you their branding to convert older buildings, you have to build new (unless you have a very desirable location, but that’s beside the point). Also, the IRS lets you depreciate buildings, but not land: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-regs/depreciation_faqs_v2.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-regs/depreciation_faqs_v2.pdf I do not think the IRS would let people do that if they thought buildings maintained their value.
yellowapple 6y ago
> Mobile homes are made cheaply at present because they are aimed at the bottom of the housing market, but there's no reason they couldn't be made as high-quality as you like. See also: "tiny homes". But yeah, prefabricated housing definitely gets a bad rap. I'm pretty gung-ho about the idea of more buildings built from TEU-sized or FEU-sized building blocks - i.e. not necessarily converted intermodal containers (though container homes are cool, too), but blocks built to those dimensions and designed to be pieced together side-by-side or stacked together. Modular construction is one of the three "legs", I think, of driving down housing costs (the others being zoning reform - i.e. getting rid of artificial constraints against housing density or residential/commercial/industrial colocation - and the use of a land value tax to penalize land hoarding/speculation and incentivize denser development).
mobilene 6y ago
My grandparents retired from a giant house to a mobile home, in the early 1970s. They parked it on a small lake and Grandpa fished every day. They lived there for almost 20 years and it was a totally acceptable home.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Similar story with my grandparents. They put a pretty nice double-wide mobile home on about 3 acres and built a HUGE shop right next door. The mobile was more than enough living space for them, and the shop had everything my grandparents needed to tinker.
gcanyon 6y ago
“But there is nothing inherently bad about the humble trailer park.” Apart from the attributes cited and discounted because mobile homes don’t technically have to be built that way, mobile homes are inherently not dense (alluded to by the article’s pivot to apartment buildings) and energy inefficient. I’ve lived in apartment buildings in Bangkok, Seattle and New York — the power bills are disproportionately small compared to houses or mobile homes, and access to groceries, stores, and transit is far superior to any house or mobile-home-based development could support.
goatcode 6y ago
> supposedly full of disgusting poor people and criminals, and run by slumlords who skimp on maintenance. Interestingly, back when housing was more affordable, they were, for that reason (using the lingo, of course not judging people). The people who were disadvantaged enough to not be able to enter into the "normal" housing market would have had rough enough lives that it would have manifested in the ways that might have caused others to label them as "disgusting, poor people," and because they would have had few other options, those that operated the parks could easily take advantage of them. Now, however, the image is perhaps what perpetuates the culture of trailer parks in some areas. People who have a choice go elsewhere, instead of bringing their advantages and positive influences into certain places, do so even it's not overall optimal to their lives, because of an old heuristic. It might be a good financial decision (which I myself have taken advantage of) for people who are less able to afford typical housing, but they may avoid it because of the stigma, and the cycle continues. This is a neat article, and I believe an important one. When we get together with people whose lives and circumstances differ, we all can potentially benefit.
yboris 6y ago
I bought a "manufactured home" (aka mobile home) 920 square feet in New Jersey (rich area, 1 hr commute to NYC) for $50,000 with monthly rent (renting the land from the community) at $550/month. 6 years later rent is $600 (it's rent controlled so it stayed relatively low, at least for NJ) and I'm selling the house for about $90,000 (seller's market - got lucky). Most likely prices will drop, it's not typical for manufactured homes to appreciate in value. But even if I lost money on the home, it was a beautiful place to live. All the people were home owners (they took care of their property). Was an excellent stepping stone as I couldn't have afforded anything, and renting would have been more expensive in the long term. I highly recommend a manufactured home community. Just keep in mind the rent on land could go up a lot, unless there's rent-control (or some other arrangement, unsure).
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  This is interesting. Anecdotally, I notice that all of the trailer parks in the Bay Area seem to be 55+ communities.
yboris 6y ago
New York Times did a "Rent or Buy" calculator. With the prices of manufactured (mobile) homes so low, it's usually a no-brainer to do that instead of renting: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
- kube-system 6y ago
  That calculator doesn't reflect the reality of ownership for a mobile home, though. You can't mortgage them, and they're not attached to land. You either need to rent land (in which case you're back to square one, where you're really renting), or purchase land that allows it, which often means a longer commute.
  - yboris 6y ago
    Incorrect - you can mortgage them. You just need lenders that do it. Our community recommends 4 lenders that all do mortgages on these properties. The APR is higher than conventional, but it can still be worth it.
citizenpaul 6y ago
They might as well argue the case for people to not act badly. Trailer parks are bad because they are the lowest cost lowest effort housing widely available. By definition the worst of people are going to flock there. Which of course means anyone decent is going to seek a better place even at a cost of more work and money to themselves.

80 points by RickJWagner 6y ago

This is one of those positions that's so obvious, I struggle to articulate what the contrary position would even be. And yet, my community continues to squeeze out its trailer parks, even though I live in an area with plenty of land. Usually the former trailer park sits vacant for 3-8 years after the evictions are done.

brudgers 6y ago
The contrary position is public housing. If you desire non-market rate housing, it's the only solution. Because by definition, the market will always produce market rate housing.
- mjevans 6y ago
  Alternately, engineer the conditions of the market to achieve the desired result... rather than engineering the conditions of the market to preserve what's already been built at the cost of future (now current) generations who have no where to call home and establish value or community.
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    I mostly agree but I think it's important to have perspective that things like historicity or the quality of a neighborhood can be a public good. And a democratic population might choose to invest in such a public good. Obviously it would be better though if the coat of these public goods were being paid more directly by the public and not externalized onto those living most precariously.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      You can have that to a certain extend. When people are saying you should build more they don't mean modern style 10 story buildings next to a single family home. They mean a duplex or triplex that fits in with the rest of the neighborhood or a 2-3 story apartment with a nice facade that is in the spirit of the neighborhood.
      - DubiousPusher 6y ago
        Uh, I think it's both. Have you been to Houston TX? Housing is cheap there for a large city. They also happen to often have 10 story buildings right up next to single family homes.
        dublinben 6y ago
        Houston is only a "cheap" city if you look at housing costs but not transportation costs. The ridiculous sprawl of Houston increases transportation costs so much that it is actually less affordable than "expensive" cities like New York City.[0][1] This doesn't even take into account the externalities of the higher emissions that come from living in a car-dependent place. [0] https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/?lat=29.7604267&lng=-95.3698028&focus=place&gid=25649#fs https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/?lat=29.7604267&lng=-95... [1] https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/?lat=40.7127753&lng=-74.0059728&focus=place&gid=16861#fs https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/?lat=40.7127753&lng=-74...
        DubiousPusher 6y ago
        I'm not making the case that Houston is a good solution to the housing problem. My whole point is that Houston is evidence of what happens when you ignore most preferential factors and just build. I've enjoyed visiting there but the city is aesthetically unappealing, feels vacant of community and yes is a nightmare to traverse.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      > the quality of a neighborhood can be a public good. And a democratic population might choose to invest in such a public good. This manifests as keeping poorer people out by restricting zoning to larger plots of land and detached single family homes, which also has a nice side effect of making cars a necessity. Everyone wants to live around others at or above their own socioeconomic level.
      - DubiousPusher 6y ago
        I agree. But the solution is not to throw out all considerations and give developers their way. There must be a way to balance the interests of those who want a neighborhood to remain a nice place to live with open space, gardens and services while also preventing Nimbys from filibustering density.
- imtringued 6y ago
  The article argues for a public housing model for trailer parks. Because of the pseudo ownership model where you don't own the land but still own a house sitting on the property that is expensive to move, the operator of the trailer park can just increase rates. It's exploitative compared to the rental market. You basically lose your housing investment unless you can find another trailer park and you can afford the moving fees. Renters can just move on to the next apartment.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    It’s often nastier, because the trailer is often rent to own or mortgaged by the owner. It’s a depreciating asset, so these arrangements are often exploitive, and the more slumlordy types will find ways to get liens on the trailer.
- imgabe 6y ago
  Public housing has most of the same problems - poorly maintained, high crime rate.
  - throwmxncj 6y ago
    Not if done properly. https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/housing/2019/09/housing-basic-human-right-vienna-model-social-housing https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/housing/2019/09/housi...
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  I'd like to think if funded properly, public housing would improve but I'm not confident. I grew to in a trailer in a trailer park and honestly, it was good for my family. We had 3 loud, boisterous, boys living together and we needed our own four walls. I think it's fair to say subsidizing this kind of private housing might be a bit selfish. After all, why does everyone in a park get a yard when people are just trying to find a studio or a rentable room just to work in the city? But I think that's the wrong question for two reasons. 1) The choice isn't usually between dense urban developments or trailer parks. I don't even think this type of land use comes into conflict all that much. Occasionally a park is shut down to build a shopping center but most parks are at the edge of cities. They are not usually blocking density. 2) It goes beyond market rate housing. Parks are often limited or banned. Perhaps encouraging parks is manipulating the market but so is what is happening now by law.
- captainmuon 6y ago
  Public housing is one option. Or you have to counter the price hikes. Prices are rising in many parts of the world because people are investing more and more money in housing, as an alternative to stocks or other investments. The expected returns mainly come from the rise in value, and not from the rent income. So the companies holding the houses must get rid of the existing tenants and renovate the appartments to increase their market value. Basically, private investments currently don't create much housing, they destroy affordable housing. So you need to create incentives to maintain and expand the affordable segment.
  - lmm 6y ago
    > The expected returns mainly come from the rise in value, and not from the rent income. So the companies holding the houses must get rid of the existing tenants and renovate the appartments to increase their market value. Nah. Housing rises in value even if you don't touch it. Demand is rising and supply isn't. The solution is to make it easier to build more.
    - brudgers 6y ago
      The market prefers higher priced housing over lower priced. When there is demand for higher price housing the market builds housing. When there is not demand for higher priced housing the market tends to wait out the down cycle. The market has no preference for building unprofitable housing. Bankers don’t have enthusiasm for loaning money to build it either. Finally housing is one of the less profitable real estate development types. That’s why commercial property often sits vacant...the long term ROI from sitting out low demand is better than conversion in the present.
      - lmm 6y ago
        > The market prefers higher priced housing over lower priced. When there is demand for higher price housing the market builds housing. When there is not demand for higher priced housing the market tends to wait out the down cycle. It's not the market, developers don't building cheap housing because regulations generally make it illegal. > The market has no preference for building unprofitable housing. Bankers don’t have enthusiasm for loaning money to build it either. Sure, but profitable isn't the same thing as expensive. "Pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap" is a perfectly valid business model that bankers and businesspeople alike are happy to follow. But when the planning rules make it so expensive to build anything at all, building expensive housing is the only way to make a profit.
gnopgnip 6y ago
The article doesn't really clarify the difference between trailer parks where the residents own the lot and home, just the home, or the landlord owns everything. The latter is just renting. The middle one here is not really affordable. Owning the land is ideal, but in most of the country you can't do this in a mobile home park, you need to buy a relatively large lot. At that point you have a lot of the same issues with single family homes in developing area, the infrastructure/future maintenance is more expensive than people expect and eventually that will need to be dealt with.
- cowsandmilk 6y ago
  There is an existing legal framework for multiple owners sharing a lot, condominiums. That isn’t the barrier. Zoning excluding mobile homes is the barrier.
  - gnopgnip 6y ago
    It is both zoning and permitting. Most of the desirable parts of the US have exclusionary zoning and permitting and would not allow a condo HOA of mobile/manufactured homes to form today
michaelt 6y ago
> This is one of those positions that's so obvious, I struggle to articulate what the contrary position would even be. The UK has a housing crisis, but it's not due to the cost of constructing the house - it's due to the cost of land with planning permission. If the cost of a conventional home is 75% land, construction costs are almost irrelevant: Nobody's going to buy a £325,000 trailer in preference to a £400,000 conventional home.
Spooky23 6y ago
It’s pretty obvious if you look into the issue at all. Trailer parks are modern tenements, and the abusive practices of the owners usually make it a home of last resort. Most of them predate modern zoning or other laws in the jurisdiction as well, so they are usually an environmental nightmare, often with unsafe wells, or off-code sewers that release sewage.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
Ask the HN demographics what "good poors" live like (though you'll have to be more tactful than that to get a real answer) and you'll probably get some answer about a cheap apartment in a city, maybe with roommates, taking public transit, etc. When the smoke and drink they do it inside. Their kids play video games or go to the park. When they want extra money they pick up another job. You get the picture. They're out of sight and out of mind. The trailer park life is pretty much the opposite of that. Poors that have space, even if just the small space of a trailer sized lot, use it efficiently. They have 1.x cars per person because 1 isn't enough redundancy. They hang their laundry on a clothes line. They litter their lawn with "unsightly" stuff they're flipping for extra cash. They sit around drinking beer while burning something in an old washing machine drum. It's the same old superiority complex and desire to tell other people how to live that's plagued humanity for all of history.

andrewfromx 6y ago

this sounds like the startup kibbo https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/20/kibbo-wants-to-remake-the-trailer-park-so-vanlife-can-be-a-life-and-not-a-lifestyle/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/20/kibbo-wants-to-remake-the-...

ncmncm 6y ago

If you have money to invest, you can do some easy good by buying or starting a trailer park, organized so you are selling the lots instead of renting them. Maybe loan residents money for the lot. Get people to move from predatory rental lots, which they can, and will, with a little encouragement. It won't be a great good, but it is better than letting VCs and bankers hold your money, and you will be able to see the people you are helping. Maybe put in a school kids can walk to, and a smallish grocery store. Make sure it's on a good bus route, with a county drug-counseling office and a community college on the same route. People want to improve their lives, and will when they can. But American life lately seems designed to grind them down. Representing a bloc of votes can help get local government on their side, if they can be persuaded to vote for their own benefit.

dazc 6y ago
Sounds a great idea, in theory, but the problems begin when you add people; some of whom will not share your ideals or have respect for their neighbours. Soon enough your ideal housing solution will become yet another place where decent people don't want to live.
- ip26 6y ago
  I don't think you can build paradise this way. There will always be bad tenants. But you could still make life better for many people.
dcolkitt 6y ago
Virtually no municipalities in America are approving new trailer parks.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  A very great deal of US land is adjacent to municipalities, close enough in to benefit residents without requiring municipal approval for projects. One deals with the county, then. That makes it difficult to get town political representation unless someone hungers enough for the voting bloc to expand the municipal boundary to encompass the development.

chrisco255 6y ago

As someone who has been living full time in a travel trailer in the past year, I would go even further than pushing for mobile home communities and push for blended mobile home / tiny house / RV communities. I'm currently in one in Austin and it's a blend of tiny houses, motorhomes, travel trailers, and mini hotels. It's a dynamic inventory of housing. It's a very flexible use of space, and each lot is less than 0.1 acres, but you still have access to common apartment amenities like pool, clubhouse, etc. I could imagine more of allowing property owners to subdivide down to that scale would go far to solve affordability. Quality of construction in travel trailers, tiny houses, and mobile homes has improved compared to what they were 50-60 years ago when the trailer park trope was coined. At any rate, I enjoy the flexibility of being able to hitch up my travel trailer and move locations in no time flat. It's been great during the pandemic to go visit national parks and get outdoors. I just see it as a no brainer. It shouldn't cost a quarter million minimum to lock in a nice location for yourself. You should be able to scoop up a 0.12 acre lot for a few thousand bucks and put a modular or travel trailer on it.

datavirtue 6y ago
All of the most ideal places to do this have already outright banned any mention of it. I have property in an area (township) that is quasi-suburban (country but 30 min from "civilization") but has a zoning code that is so thoroughly constructed and exclusive that it would make your mouth drop. Nevermind putting a trailer on your own property, that ain't happening, you can barely build a house.
Shivetya 6y ago
Zoning pretty much dooms this where I live and many other places. One recent recommendation to allow tiny homes in Atlanta had the caveat, no mobile homes. They wanted housing that could not move. The Atlanta proposal was to permit them on lots that already have a home but not elsewhere. Issues of utilities along with school load come to mind but those occur with any other dense housing. So why wouldn't apartments be better? To make it easier on residents with bad credit and such the utilities could be baked in to the rent and the state or city could offer to subsidize. However what doomed many existing communities near me were property taxes. The land is more valuable for actual homes or in some cases businesses. With tiny/mobile homes as you propose your location may require local governments reducing the tax load to make the location affordable.

sneak 6y ago

There's a much, much better case for apartment buildings, but those increasingly can't be built in places people want to live, so I guess the US is going to have to figure out how to make the cheapest possible low-density detached housing. Trailers and RVs and other manner of tiny-house shantytowns fit that bill. Shame there can't be population density growth in cities.

Ensorceled 6y ago
Livable population density requires public services and common spaces like low cost transit, mixed use diversity (especially local shopping), green spaces, etc. The US, in its current form, may be incapable of building anything that would be considered a common good.

habosa 6y ago

This is some lazy math: > A trailer park at 5 homes per acre and 2.5 people per household works out to 8,000 people per square mile, or more than twice as dense as Phoenix. Well yes but a trailer park is just housing. What about streets, businesses, and open space? Nobody wants to live in an infinite trailer park even if it's an infinite luxury trailer park. I actually think there's amazing potential for mixed-use commercial/residential space in a trailer park because the cost of starting a new business would be so low and you could even relocate your business over time. But until the non-housing aspects are addressed a trailer park is just a cheap suburb, which isn't really inspiring.

Ensorceled 6y ago
This is my real objection to trailer parks ... it's still a suburb, just cheaper. We shouldn't be building sprawling, energy inefficient, land destroying, isolating suburbs. Grass is the largest irrigated "crop" in the US ... https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-biggest-crop-is-grass-2016-2?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-biggest-crop-is-gra...
- lai-yin 6y ago
  Every alternative to suburbs has its own serious problems. People like living in suburbs. I like living in them. And maybe if we rebrand trailer parks as tiny home communities it will change attitudes about cheap, affordable homes.
  - culopatin 6y ago
    I think allowing a mix of commercial with suburb would solve some of the issues we are having. I’m not from the US and I miss walking down to the store to get some staples (not a corner store, a real food store with more than milk and lottery). Having a vegetable shop, a butcher, a hair salon, small town way is the way to go. You socialize with your neighbor while you wait, hear some gossip, get acquainted with your veggie guy so next time he picks up those dragon fruits you like, etc. I currently have to drive 3 miles to get to a supermarket. All the “food stores” near me are in a somewhat industrial area across the train tracks and are ghetto. They only sell beer, maybe bread and lottery tickets, and are secured like a bank. Not the feeling you want. My fancy neighborhood doesn’t have a single store. Not even a gas station. I’m forced to drive out. Not great.

leoedin 6y ago

Trailer parks feel like a symptom of zoning laws rather than the solution. They're a loophole in the rules which mandate low density large housing. Allow higher density prefabricated (but not "mobile") construction and trailer parks would become less attractive. There's nothing fundamentally nicer about living in a very thin walled low quality "mobile" home rather than a more solid nicer "prefabricated" home on the same plot.

fredgrott 6y ago
it's an equity trap as one does not own the land the 'house' is on and you own any right to live in the house through land ownership and thus can be forced out at anytime
- robert_foss 6y ago
  Additionally mobile homes are not actually all that mobile after 20years. Relatedly they tend to lose value over time as opposed to permanent buildings.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Permanent buildings also lose value over time, and you have to spend money to repair various portions of it at some point.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      Permanent buildings typically only lose value if not maintained. The issue with many mobile homes is that they’re often designed in a way that is not easily maintainable.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Newer buildings come with updated building codes and benefit from technological advances. Unless there is reason to believe the newer building was built with subpar quality materials or workmanship compared to an older building, the older building will be worth less. https://www.trulia.com/research/new-or-existing-home/ https://www.trulia.com/research/new-or-existing-home/ > We found that that new homes (those built in 2013 or 2014) are typically priced 20% higher than older homes with similar attributes (e.g., square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, etc.) and in the same zip code. Another example is the higher tier hotel brands won’t sell you their branding to convert older buildings, you have to build new (unless you have a very desirable location, but that’s beside the point). Also, the IRS lets you depreciate buildings, but not land: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-regs/depreciation_faqs_v2.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-regs/depreciation_faqs_v2.pdf I do not think the IRS would let people do that if they thought buildings maintained their value.

yellowapple 6y ago

> Mobile homes are made cheaply at present because they are aimed at the bottom of the housing market, but there's no reason they couldn't be made as high-quality as you like. See also: "tiny homes". But yeah, prefabricated housing definitely gets a bad rap. I'm pretty gung-ho about the idea of more buildings built from TEU-sized or FEU-sized building blocks - i.e. not necessarily converted intermodal containers (though container homes are cool, too), but blocks built to those dimensions and designed to be pieced together side-by-side or stacked together. Modular construction is one of the three "legs", I think, of driving down housing costs (the others being zoning reform - i.e. getting rid of artificial constraints against housing density or residential/commercial/industrial colocation - and the use of a land value tax to penalize land hoarding/speculation and incentivize denser development).

mobilene 6y ago

My grandparents retired from a giant house to a mobile home, in the early 1970s. They parked it on a small lake and Grandpa fished every day. They lived there for almost 20 years and it was a totally acceptable home.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Similar story with my grandparents. They put a pretty nice double-wide mobile home on about 3 acres and built a HUGE shop right next door. The mobile was more than enough living space for them, and the shop had everything my grandparents needed to tinker.

gcanyon 6y ago

“But there is nothing inherently bad about the humble trailer park.” Apart from the attributes cited and discounted because mobile homes don’t technically have to be built that way, mobile homes are inherently not dense (alluded to by the article’s pivot to apartment buildings) and energy inefficient. I’ve lived in apartment buildings in Bangkok, Seattle and New York — the power bills are disproportionately small compared to houses or mobile homes, and access to groceries, stores, and transit is far superior to any house or mobile-home-based development could support.

goatcode 6y ago

> supposedly full of disgusting poor people and criminals, and run by slumlords who skimp on maintenance. Interestingly, back when housing was more affordable, they were, for that reason (using the lingo, of course not judging people). The people who were disadvantaged enough to not be able to enter into the "normal" housing market would have had rough enough lives that it would have manifested in the ways that might have caused others to label them as "disgusting, poor people," and because they would have had few other options, those that operated the parks could easily take advantage of them. Now, however, the image is perhaps what perpetuates the culture of trailer parks in some areas. People who have a choice go elsewhere, instead of bringing their advantages and positive influences into certain places, do so even it's not overall optimal to their lives, because of an old heuristic. It might be a good financial decision (which I myself have taken advantage of) for people who are less able to afford typical housing, but they may avoid it because of the stigma, and the cycle continues. This is a neat article, and I believe an important one. When we get together with people whose lives and circumstances differ, we all can potentially benefit.

yboris 6y ago

I bought a "manufactured home" (aka mobile home) 920 square feet in New Jersey (rich area, 1 hr commute to NYC) for $50,000 with monthly rent (renting the land from the community) at $550/month. 6 years later rent is $600 (it's rent controlled so it stayed relatively low, at least for NJ) and I'm selling the house for about $90,000 (seller's market - got lucky). Most likely prices will drop, it's not typical for manufactured homes to appreciate in value. But even if I lost money on the home, it was a beautiful place to live. All the people were home owners (they took care of their property). Was an excellent stepping stone as I couldn't have afforded anything, and renting would have been more expensive in the long term. I highly recommend a manufactured home community. Just keep in mind the rent on land could go up a lot, unless there's rent-control (or some other arrangement, unsure).

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
This is interesting. Anecdotally, I notice that all of the trailer parks in the Bay Area seem to be 55+ communities.

yboris 6y ago

New York Times did a "Rent or Buy" calculator. With the prices of manufactured (mobile) homes so low, it's usually a no-brainer to do that instead of renting: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

kube-system 6y ago
That calculator doesn't reflect the reality of ownership for a mobile home, though. You can't mortgage them, and they're not attached to land. You either need to rent land (in which case you're back to square one, where you're really renting), or purchase land that allows it, which often means a longer commute.
- yboris 6y ago
  Incorrect - you can mortgage them. You just need lenders that do it. Our community recommends 4 lenders that all do mortgages on these properties. The APR is higher than conventional, but it can still be worth it.

citizenpaul 6y ago

They might as well argue the case for people to not act badly. Trailer parks are bad because they are the lowest cost lowest effort housing widely available. By definition the worst of people are going to flock there. Which of course means anyone decent is going to seek a better place even at a cost of more work and money to themselves.