The Unknown World of the Mobile Home (review)

First things first: The Unknown World of the Mobile Home is not a history monograph, although it begins with a historical overview of the mobile home industry. The authors are geographers, and their work reflects that training: place matters in this book; it is one of the primary prisms the authors use to shed light on the heterogeneity of life in America's mobile homes. John Hart, Michelle Rhodes, and John Morgan explore the "world" of the mobile home by using maps, statistics, and oral interviews. The authors attempt both to capture the range and diversity of the experiences of mobile home dwellers and to give an overview of the state of the mobile home world. They argue that, although mobile homes have been vilified and discriminated against as housing because of their roots as travel trailers, they fulfill a complex set of housing needs, in part because the types of homes that fall into the category "mobile home" are so diverse. Throughout the book, the authors provide short community case studies to highlight the varied backgrounds, income levels, and experiences of people who live in mobile homes.

In the first part of the book, "Background," the authors briefly describe the evolution of the mobile home industry. The modern manufactured housing industry can trace its roots to the 1930s travel trailer business, when people used travel trailers as permanent residences, much to the chagrin of the manufacturers. The authors detail the wartime use of trailers as homes for workers and outline the industry's decision to embrace making homes for the general populace in the postwar years. They take the story through the 1975 industry decision (and the 1980 government-sanctioned affirmation of that decision) to rename mobile homes "manufactured housing." It also describes the way mobile homes themselves have changed. Although singlewides and doublewides are easily recognizable, many newer manufactured houses are indistinguishable from a conventionally built residence. This section of the book may be most interesting to historians, but it is the least original. Without footnotes, it is impossible to check sources, but the chapter draws heavily on the existing literature, particularly Allan Wallis's Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes (1991).

The second part, "Single Sited," looks at the roughly 50 percent of the country's mobile homes that are situated on individually owned plots of land. After exploring the broad contours of the geography of mobile homes, showing that there are proportionally more in rural areas, and that there are more mobile homes in the West and South, the authors focus on single-sited mobile homes. They stress the diversity of the inhabitants: though poverty is sometimes related to the use of mobile homes, the authors show that the homes are also used in recreation and retirement areas.

In the third section, "Side By Side," they examine the proliferation of mobile homes in towns in the West. Using a case study from Montana, where only 12 percent of mobile homes are in parks, they explore mobile homes as part of the street's landscape, arguing that the homes are a normal and respectable form of housing. In the final segment, "Parks," the authors look at the variety of communities that fall under the rubric of trailer parks or mobile home parks, ranging from the run-down old park with small lots that the landowner often wants to sell to real estate developers to "upscale" parks. The authors use examples from Kansas, where meatpacking workers rent mobile homes in utilitarian parks, as well as examples that highlight life in more upscale parks laid out like residential suburbs.

Taken as a whole, this book provides the reader with a complex, nuanced, and sympathetic look at the world of the mobile home dweller. There are no "trailer trash" in this book, just decent, hardworking...