Mobile home parks, how they got here: Part 2, Neither homes nor mobile
[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
In Part 1 we followed John Grissim’s Guide to Mobile Homes through the mobile home’s invention as the automobile’s stepchild through the end of World War II, and the surprising emergence of an unlikely champion, the mobile home manufacturers:
The industry’s well-intentioned effort was generally successful, but in the post-war years the old bugaboo of “trailer-camp-slums” re-emerged.
Production success led to yet another localized backlash, thus one with a particularly Machiavellian twist:
This time some municipalities tried a new tactic: classifying mobile homes as buildings, then outlawing them because they failed to meet local building codes that had been quietly changed to render compliance impossible.
Nothing in that central triangle
Today such a stratagem would call forth a whirlwind of consumer and mobile home owner outrage, but back then, the mobile home owners did not realize they were a constituency. So the manufacturers — the only affordability champion — adopted a jiu jitsu move that preserved their business, even as it unwittingly crippled the home owners’:
In many cases, the ploy withstood court challenges, but on other occasions the courts sided with the industry’s claim that because a mobile home had a chassis (frame) and wheels, it was legally a vehicle, not a building.
You thought you were real estate, but you’re mobile!
Hence, not a zoning violation.
Other communities were more direct and blunt — even if no more sympathetic to mobile home owners:
Many municipalities skirted the building-versus-vehicle issue by “snob-zoning,” declaring trailer parks commercial businesses and relegating them to nonresidential zones, i.e. on the other side of the tracks, in industrial areas, and alongside highway corridors outside of town.
Would you like to live next to commercial and industrial uses? Such a move prevented judicial eviction but condemned the mobile home neighborhoods to a different exclusion, first by poverty concentration:
Needless to explain, trailer parks in seedy neighborhoods inevitably tended to take on like characteristics.
Then second, by extradition, moving beyond the reach of zoning:
In response, many developers chose less restrictive unincorporated areas to build their parks.
In the forest, we can lay out our own streets
Having been declared chattel — a movable asset — the industry was compelled to act as if it believed its own euphemism:
Manufacturers also continued to turn out lines of recreational travel trailers in the same factories that made mobile homes because the width of each was the industry standard eight feet, the maximum allowed to be legally towed as a trailer.
Mature single-wide
If you’ve ever seen a very old single-wide, you can appreciate that eight feet is too narrow for any extended occupancy. For one thing, it is impossible to create a corridor or its equivalent; to enter an end room you must pass through a middle one.
But all that changed in 1954 when a
Isn’t it American to have an inventor named Elmer Frye?
No longer a trailer but rather an oversize load, Frye’s “ten-wides” would be towed by commercial trucks on the nation’s highways, with special transport permits, just like other oversize freight.
As
In the mid-1960s, mobile home production really began to take off. Manufacturers were early adopters of new technologies such as pneumatic-powered hand tools for nailing, stapling and cutting; automated machinery for manufacturing windows, doors and drawers; new and stronger adhesives, and panel construction machines. These advances greatly reduced the hand labor involved in the construction process and drove down the costs, making mobile homes better and more affordable.
Ever since 1935, when Robert A. Heinlein first speculated on it, home builders have sought the Philosopher’s Stone — the manufactured house whose post-construction appeal matches a site-built home — and they kept trying:
During this time, the first two-section homes (double-wides) came onto the market, offering floor plans akin to conventional homes, but their significantly higher cost initially slowed their acceptance. Meanwhile, the sections themselves kept getting wider-from 10 feet to 12, then 14, for the first time making possible a hallway down the length of one side, eliminating the need to go through one room to get to another.
Affordability means increased demand:
Vintage 1978, 12-foot single-wide
The result was dramatic, sustained growth. In 1965, just under 300,000 mobile home units were shipped. By 1972, the industry shipped an astonishing 575,000 units, amounting to one-third of all new single family housing constructed that year in the
At one point, mobile homes were producing one out of every four new homes. In that year 1972, HUD’s affordable housing reached its absolute high-water mark, with about 250,000 apartments a year of Section 236 production. Mobile homes were doing more than double the Federal production.
Poor physical quality plagues many mobile homes today.
[Continued tomorrow in Part 3.]
