The Unknown World of the Mobile Home

PART FIVE: CONCLUSION & EPILOGUE

127 PA R T F I V E C O N C L U S I O N & E P I L O G U E Conclusion Mobile home living has evolved into a common, necessary, and increasingly acceptable way of life in the six decades since the first crude camper trailer was birthed. Modern mobile homes bear scant resemblance to their camper trailer forebears, or even to their rectangular antecedents of only a few decades back, and most have been considerably modified by their owners. They are permanent additions to our national stock of a√ordable housing. They alleviate critical shortages in areas where housing is in short supply, serve as permanent seasonal residences in retirement areas, replace dilapidated structures , and provide permanent homes for people rural and urban throughout the nation. The first ‘‘mobile homes’’ were camper trailers, often homemade, that were towed behind the family car as a better vacation home than a tent. They were unpartitioned wooden boxes without plumbing, and they had to find trailer parks with washing and toilet facilities for overnight stays. Many small towns and individual businesses near major highways developed rudimentary trailer parks to attract tourists. During the Depression years low-income people of limited skills and limited education began to live in trailer parks permanently because they could a√ord no better housing. They gave trailer parks their unsavory reputation , which the media have gleefully perpetuated, as unhealthy dens of sex and violence. Many towns and cities now deem trailers and trailer parks so undesirable that they have used zoning ordinances and building codes to banish them to concealed sites on the urban fringe and beyond, where they will not o√end aesthetic sensibilities. 128 The Unknown World of the Mobile Home Housing shortages near military centers during World War II forced many people to live in trailers year-round, and after the war some military, construction, mining, and other mobile families came to accept trailer living as a regular way of life. Trailers also came to be seen as inexpensive starter homes for young couples with lower levels of education, skill, and income. After World War II, trailer manufacturers began to build wider units, which o√ered greater internal privacy but could not be towed safely by a family car. These larger and more livable units accelerated the transformation of the trailer from a vehicle for travel into a permanently sited residence, and the industry encouraged everyone to call them mobile homes rather than trailers. In the 1960s manufacturers started to make multisectional units, colloquially known as double-wides, two halves that could be towed separately and assembled on site. Mobile home manufacturers have continued to make larger and betterequipped models. A modern double-wide mobile home has more floor space than the famous tract houses that were built at Levittown on Long Island in the early 1950s. Traditional single-wides are long, narrow ‘‘shoeboxes.’’ They are short on space and storage room, and their life and contents often spill over untidily into the areas around them. Double-wides are more like conventional stick-built houses, but they are more expensive to buy and move than single-wides. The 1974 Mobile Home Construction and Safety Standards Act directed the Department of Housing and Urban Development to create a national building code (the HUD Code) that would make mobile homes safer by reducing their vulnerability to high winds and fire. The 1980 Housing Act changed the o≈cial legal name of mobile homes to manufactured housing, but this new name is so confusing that it has not yet caught on in popular usage. Mobile homes may be placed on lots that are owned or rented, in parks or on single sites. At the local level the distribution of single-sited mobile homes often seems random, but it can usually be explained by the convergence of three controlling factors: an owner who needs a place to put a mobile home, land that is available for the owner to buy or rent, and permissive public regulations. In urban areas single-sited mobile homes may be used to infill vacant lots. In rural areas a homeowner may let a child or relative put a C O N C L U S I O N & E P I L O G U E 129 mobile home in the side yard, or may sell or rent a piece of property to the owner of a mobile home...