Affordable Housing Institute : US

London that April was endlessly blanketed in fog thick as treacle, dampening my mood. My old Afghan war wound ached, the more so because my friend Sherlock Holmes, whose housing-finance deductive expositions I have periodically chronicled, was off in hot pursuit of what he mutteringly called the Adventure of the Nine Guaranteed Keys, leaving […]

The financial burdens of homeownership aren’t just about the mortgage, there are other direct burdens, such as property insurance and real estate taxes, that have to be paid.  Yet such is our fixation with the monthly loan nut that we overlook or actively resent the escrows:
 

Gotta make it every day
 
Yet the escrows are a shock […]

[Continued from the previous Part 1, Part 2,and Part 3.]
 
The preceding three parts have brought us from the mobile home’s accidental invention as an acromegalic growth from the unassuming trailer into a full-fledged industry to build, produce, and market a unique form of affordable housing.  One leg, however, remained weak:
 
The industry, despite wonderful advances in […]

[Continued from the previous Part 1 and Part 2.]

So far we’ve witnessed the mobile home’s invention, and its impressive post-WW2 demand boom that led at its peak to the mobile home industry producing twice as much affordable housing annually as the Federal government. What was such living like? For a do-it-yourself snapshot, there’s […]

[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 […]