The Case for Trailer Parks

[Kriegsspiel]

The Case For Trailer Parks

You’ve seen it before: a house, on a truck, on a highway, slowing down traffic with its yellow “OVERSIZED LOAD” sign, its tan vinyl siding nearly screaming “Trailer Park!”

The snobs among us may judge these pre-fab homes as shoddily built, cheap eyesores in a country that’s increasingly eschewing the suburbs for walkable urban areas.

But pre-fabricated homes just might be part of the solution to America's affordable housing crisis.

Home prices are continuing to rise, even as incomes on the lower-end of the scale remain flat, putting home ownership out of reach for many Americans. In some cities, that’s led to renters flooding the markets, which in turns drives rental prices up. Homeownership in the U.S. was 65 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, down from 69 percent in 2005, according to the Census Bureau.

Families who can't afford homes often find that the apartments available to them are tiny, expensive, and old. Manufactured homes, affordable-housing advocates say, are spacious in comparison.

“The manufactured home is probably the most cost-effective way to provide quality affordable housing,” said Donna M. Blaze, the CEO of the Affordable Housing Alliance, which helped provide manufactured homes for Sandy refugees. “Most of our new units are light years ahead of the apartments for rent in today’s market.”

New Hampshire residents Wanita Ordway and her husband Kevin are once such working-class family: Kevin is a carpenter, Wanita is retired. They were looking at rentals, and then stumbled across a manufactured house last year that cost just $87,500 for the structure and the two acres of land it's on.

It’s spacious, Ordway said, with three bedrooms, two baths, a fireplace, a family room, and a breakfast nook with an island in the kitchen. The kitchen is cheerily wallpapered with images of fruits, and the bathroom has ivy wallpaper. When Wanita asked the utility company to audit the house to see how much energy it used over the cold winter, she discovered it was too energy efficient to even qualify for an audit.

“It’s just a wonderful option for people who cannot get a conventional home,” she said. “If you get past the stereotype of a mobile home, these are just as well-constructed as a stick home.”

[PAO]

Why do you suppose we don't see more trailer park options, especially with the popularity of Tiny Houses?  It seems to me that you could have a very nice, inexpensive but decked out community with shared areas like a club house and laundry facility surrounded by a well-landscaped community of tiny houses that have utility hookups. 

[innkeeper77]

My wife and I considered moving into one because of our tiny and expensive apartment. I knew from where I grew up (Illinois) that trailer parks could be very nice for a small amount of money- and I had seen some nice pieces of land with nice houses like the one mentioned, so we were interested in a cheap but nice living option. Sadly, we found out that in our area it makes no sense. We couldn't find land with a home, or where we could put a home, without a LONG (hour+) drive from work, and trailer parks here are extremely expensive. We figured out that after energy costs a mortgage for a stick built house would be about the same price. The space rents alone are around $900 per month. - plus it would be a depreciating asset! If we could find land it would be one thing, but not with only renting a space.

For reference we are in northern Colorado, but close to Denver. The flood of people that has raised rent and housing prices has also raised space rents..... it sure feels like a bubble to me, but we bought a cheap house anyway. Oh well.. at least we got a great deal on it! (Major fixer upper)

[Johnez]

I'm kind of tempted by the prefab house idea.  Unfortunately around here mobile home parks seem to fall under a few categories-Senior Living places or ghetto parks with kids running through every passageway.  Maybe planting one in the middle of a cheap plot of land would be nice though.

[RFAAOATB]

Why do you suppose we don't see more trailer park options, especially with the popularity of Tiny Houses?  It seems to me that you could have a very nice, inexpensive but decked out community with shared areas like a club house and laundry facility surrounded by a well-landscaped community of tiny houses that have utility hookups. 

How do you keep the housing area very nice and inexpensive?  The very niceness of the housing area would disappear as the undesirables move in to take advantage of the inexpensiveness.  The go to solution is to make housing area expensive pricing out the undesirables.  That leaves the frugal among us to deal with undesirables as neighbors or paying much more for housing than needed to keep the undesirables away.  I'm in an inexpensive condo, but some of the neighbors are making me wish I spent a lot more on housing than I was comfortable with.

[gimp]

I will echo what these people said, and add one thing.

I was curious to see what kind of cheap housing exists in the bay area. Yeah, I can go out and buy a mobile home for $80k or so, which sounds like a great idea compared to paying $1700 rent. The problems:

- Land rent. There are basically no prefab houses on their own land, they all pay land rent to a mobile home park. That can be $500/month - more than the mortgage.
- Shitty. Make no bones about it, most of the mobile homes are in various states of disrepair. Falling apart, infested with bugs and rodents.
- Never gonna get laid. See above point.
- Far away. After all is said and done, I'd have a very stressful commute that "pays" around $15 an hour.

Nah. There are nice places to have mobile homes, but I don't think mobile home parks are it. Imagine the worst HOA you can possibly have, and fill it with a bunch of people who can't afford anything more than a mobile home, and put it in a place cops don't really want to visit. Add a touch of meth and a lot of mice. Voila.

[Northerly]

Why do you suppose we don't see more trailer park options, especially with the popularity of Tiny Houses?  It seems to me that you could have a very nice, inexpensive but decked out community with shared areas like a club house and laundry facility surrounded by a well-landscaped community of tiny houses that have utility hookups. 

Where I live in Interior Alaska, we have some "rental cabin communities" along these lines. Keeping them nice is a class problem. If you're close to the university here, you can rent to an undergrad couple or grad students who are only temporarily poor. These cabin communities seem to stay nice.

The ones 5 or more miles from the university go to hell in short order. You can't price the cabin rental high enough to weed out low income tenants and profitably rent to the affluent (no takers); and the low income tenants aren't just in college, they're soaked in the vicious cycle of poverty/barely employed/laid off/addiction/baby daddy drama, rinse, lather, repeat. These outlying cabin communities exist, but they are just slums.

[resy]

Honestly, I wouldnt have any problem living in a manufactured home (perfect even for our small family of 3). I have gone as far as considering in the past but the deal breaker for me? The neighborhoods/communities they are in.
All the ones I know of in my city have fit pretty much the stereotypical "trailer park" theme.

[Sid Hoffman]

Nah. There are nice places to have mobile homes, but I don't think mobile home parks are it. Imagine the worst HOA you can possibly have, and fill it with a bunch of people who can't afford anything more than a mobile home, and put it in a place cops don't really want to visit. Add a touch of meth and a lot of mice. Voila.

Yeah... yeah pretty much.

As was pointed out in an earlier post, retirement-only communities tend to be an exception, but most of them require a minimum age of 55.  I've had two family members who lived in them and both were astonishingly quiet and had no kids running around.  Conversely, I recently made a craigslist purchase from a guy living in a regular in-town mobile home park and it was pretty much as described by gimp above.  100% reversal from the retirement-only ones.

I think another reason mobile homes can only gain a certain amount of attraction is the cost of the real estate itself.  With foundation homes, you can build up instead of building out.  It's common out here to see condos and even a few standalone (no shared walls) homes that are 2 or even 3 stories, such as a garage and storage room at the ground level, entertaining and kitchen on the second level, then bedrooms on the third level.  You can build much higher density by building up instead of out.

The best use I have seen for mobile homes was in central coast California.  Somebody had what was apparently a tiny housing lot because at the end of a bunch of traditional foundation homes that sat on the ridge that overlooked the ocean was a mobile home.  If you can pick up a basic single-wide for $40,000 and just replace it every 25 years, your annual cost is only $1600.  Being that it probably sat on a $400,000 piece of land, the issue of bad neighbors was not a factor.  Beach homes take a lot of wear due to the weather, but aluminum is pretty resistant to corrosion and if you only have to make it last 25 years, it seems like a good deal.  I love the idea of living by the ocean, but with the small cost exposure of a trailer.  Heck, a hurricane could destroy it and you're still only out $40k or whatever.

[SnackDog]

My aunt and uncle retired into a beautiful double-wide in southern California about 15 years ago.  It is in a spotlessly clean and quiet retirement community of only about 30 trailers.  It is fabulously low cost and a great option.

[VirginiaBob]

My brother owns 2 trailers, one is his primary home, the 2nd is his weekend home.  He got both for dirt cheap.  With the one that is his primary home, it must have been a drug dealer's trailer, but not what you would think of a steroetypical drug dealer.  He gets these old ladies coming up to his door asking for prescription painkillers and such. 

I wouldn't recommend it for families, but if I were single or even married without children, and if you can find one close to work, why not? 

[Kriegsspiel]

Honestly, what I was thinking about when I read this was, buying cheap vacant land that you could put a manufactured home on; boom, very cheap housing. Or buying/creating a trailer park as an investment.

[gimp]

Or buying/creating a trailer park as an investment.

That's where the money is. But you'd have to deal with trailer park tenants. Hence expensive land rent. With the exception of retirement communities, as one said.

I have nothing against prefab - a tiny prefab on a beautiful piece of land, especially in a hard-to-reach place, is a great idea; it can be a lot easier to truck in a house than to truck in people and supplies to build one. But the trailer parks...

[OSUBearCub]

Or buying/creating a trailer park as an investment.

That's where the money is. But you'd have to deal with trailer park tenants. Hence expensive land rent. With the exception of retirement communities, as one said.

I have nothing against prefab - a tiny prefab on a beautiful piece of land, especially in a hard-to-reach place, is a great idea; it can be a lot easier to truck in a house than to truck in people and supplies to build one. But the trailer parks...

My unsolicited two cents - setting up a mobile home community sounds like a pain in the ass for zoning ordinances.  It's hard enough most places work out all the permits to build a single house, let alone a community, let alone a community with as much stigma as trailer parks have.

[needmyfi]

Trailers keep poor people poor.  Period.  More than half of all Americans have little or no wealth outside of their home equity.

Why buy a depreciating asset when an appreciating asset can also serve as adequate shelter?  Interest rates are crazy high on trailers and have short terms for a reason.  The best interest rate you will get on a trailer -even with good credit- is 8%  Some people pay upward of 10 or 11% -all the way up to 18% on a trailer.  In the example given, an 80,000 loan on that trailer would cost the same per month as a payment on a $102,000 loan on a house over 15 years-IF your credit is excellent..  Thirty years down the road the trailer have little or no value. And even if you take great care of it you will have a hard time selling it because it is virtually impossible to finance a 30 year old trailer.

It is symptomatic of our consumerist culture that poor people buy 2000 sf doublewides with all new everything to end up with nothing, when for almost the same monthly payment they could often find a small beat up foreclosure house, work on it by and by, and have something of value in the future.   Poor people might as well buy a huge monster truck or clown car for 50k-it won't be worth much in 20 years either.

I live in a 1200 sf house that is over 100 years old and minus the land value (5 acres) it was valued at around $30,000 when purchased in 2006.  My neighbor lived in our house in the 1940's when she was a child.  Sometime in the 1970's her father thought our house was in "too bad a shape"  and bought a trailer.  By the mid 90's that first trailer was in "too bad a shape", and he bought another fancy, state of the art trailer (at the time at least).  The first trailer had to be torn down and the second doublewide is now approaching a point where the cost of needed repairs exceeds market value.  Meanwhile my husband and I have put $5000 to $7000, and a lot of sweat equity of course, and it is now worth probably $50,000.

That said, my mother sold her three bedroom house with pool in Florida and bought a 20+ year old trailer in a 55+ park.  The park was really nice, very safe, and she had lots of companionship with folks her own age.  She also had a crapload of money from the sale of the house that she used to travel and visit her kids.

If there is no chance that you will outlive the trailer it is probably no worse than renting.  If you are under the age of 70 stay away.  Buy land and move an old Airstream trailer from the 1960's on it.  It will not only outlive you, it will be worth more than you bought it for if you need to sell.

[kendallf]

First I start a thread on riding the bus, and now I'm posting on a thread about trailers...  anyway. 

We lived in a trailer for about two years when I moved to Florida in 1993.  If I'd stayed in it, I'd be a multi-millionaire now.  I'm serious.  Well, I would've needed to avoid many other stupidities, but I would've had the cheap housing thing down.

As somebody mentioned above, they're depreciating assets.  Buy an old one if you buy one.  I found an old one that needed some minor repair; it had leaking windows and needed some floor replacement under them.  I did this, found some cheap replacement carpet, washed and painted the exterior.  I paid $3k for it and sold it for $3500.  Lot rent at the time was something like $150/mo with water, sewer, and garbage. 

Again as people have mentioned above, the park environment is the thing to be selective about.  There are plenty of meth/Johnny Walker/jacked 4x4 parks around here, but a few that are well maintained with good amenities.  Lot rent is reasonable here but would still be a negative factor long term, as well as paying yearly registration tax like a vehicle.  You can homestead one on a piece of property and then it gets assessed like a house; probably a better deal if you're going to live in one for a while.

For somebody looking for a mid-term option I think there's a case to be made in my area for trailers over both renting or buying a house.  Buy and sell it like a car on Craigslist, no realtor needed.  :-)

[needmyfi]

Agree kendallf about a $3000 trailer with $150 a month lot rent making some financial sense.  In my area a trailer over 20 years old can't be moved however.  The article talking about how a $80,000 deal making sense?  Not so much

[kendallf]

Agree kendallf about a $3000 trailer with $150 a month lot rent making some financial sense.  In my area a trailer over 20 years old can't be moved however.  The article talking about how a $80,000 deal making sense?  Not so much

Good point about the move.  I don't think there are specific age restrictions on moving here, but moving and setting one up is a significant cost, and if you find an old one like I did, many parks will be unwilling to let you move it in.  Mine was in a nice small park owned by a little Danish lady and her husband.  They were squared away.. grounds beautifully maintained, they would warn and/or boot anyone who consistently trashed their lot or failed to maintain their trailer.  They had to be persuaded that I would fix it up; initially they told me that I could only get a one year lease and that I'd have to move it out after that. 

After I fixed it up and bought a house, I sold it to a single guy who worked at the base.  They agreed to leave the trailer in the park and give him a lease as well; otherwise the trailer would've been essentially worthless.

[VirginiaBob]

I think the $80,000 house wasn't really a trailer, but was a manufactured home.

[gillstone]

Finding a good trailer for park while under 55 is difficult.  The biggest factor is whether or not the owner is present in the park or at least the community.  Absentee landlords, especially those who own strings of parks across multiple states are usually why you see parks falling into disrepair.  If you want to find a community try looking for a Resident Owned Community which is kind of like a condo board for trailer parks. http://www.rocusa.org/

[needmyfi]

I think the $80,000 house wasn't really a trailer, but was a manufactured home.

Yep It was an 80,000  manufactured home.   Trailers, mobile homes,manufactured homes- all the same, only the terminology has changed over the years.  Chassis built. Made out of particle board and chewing gum.

 Modular homes are somewhat different, not built on a metal chassis, put on a permanent foundation hold value somewhat and a well made one will typically cost in the same range as stick built. 

[gimp]

Those are all excellent and effective ideas, serpentstooth. I could certainly live in a place with such rules.

I wonder if one could have a rule that mortgages weren't allowed; meaning everyone who wanted to live there has to be able to pay cash for the home? That would also be supremely effective (perhaps too effective...)

[MoneyCat]

My grandparents moved into a trailer park in Florida when they retired and I was pretty shocked by what I saw when I came to visit them on vacation.  The place was really rundown and inhabited by Florida stereotypes (including multiple copies of internet superhero "Florida Man").  I'm surprised that they never were burglarized, but then again I suppose nobody thought they had anything worthwhile since they were living in a trailer park. 

Until Millennials come up with the concept of a hipster trailer park with artisanal trailers with locally sourced vinyl siding and free trade plastic pink flamingos (and maybe some organic meth labs), it's just not going to be a good choice for living.

[OSUBearCub]

Until Millennials come up with the concept of a hipster trailer park with artisanal trailers with locally sourced vinyl siding and free trade plastic pink flamingos (and maybe some organic meth labs), it's just not going to be a good choice for living.

Two thoughts:

1. It's been done and it's not nearly as glamorous as you might think http://bedfordandbowery.com/2013/12/the-bushwick-trailer-park-lives-on-sort-of/

2. Get off our balls!  Millennials have enough on our to-do list of bigger sh*t to fix without the expectation that everything we touch will carry a hand-crafted, artisanal stamp of approval.  LOL

[taekvideo]

All the trailer parks in my area have lot fees higher than the rent at many apartments you could get. 
Just doesn't make any sense to buy one under those circumstances