The Mobile-Home Trap (2015)
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
"your home that you own depreciates like a car and you merely rent the land under it and we can raise the rent whenever we want" is a crock, and needs to end.
Resident cooperative ownership of the land is superior in every way, and Buffett should honestly be ashamed of himself for playing this game.
"this is my land, you're tresspassing, get that "mobile structure" off in 24 hours or you'll be arrested" is not something you can do to a renter with quite the same level of cruelty.
I agree the organizational structure of it all can lead to some very bad outcomes, but it's not some grand design that a mobile home depreciates. It's a material good, it wears out. The only reason e.g. a SFH appreciates is because the land is appreciating faster than the structure is depreciating.
Newer mobile homes are treated like custom homes. Including being cemented to the floor, permanently. They cost more, mortgages are larger, so banks treat those homes as permanent. Going so far as making sure the undercarriage is completely dismantled and removed. If the owner defaults bank employees have shown up to take possession only to find an empty lot!
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/a-l...
[2] https://www.omaha.com/clayton-homes-statement-on-mobile-home...
The TL;DR is owning a mobile home but leasing the land (lot) underneath it is a very bad idea and will most likely harm you financially.
More detail: Large funds are buying up mobile home parks and increasing the monthly rent for the lot. Since a mobile home is not really mobile (watch the video) the person living there is trapped. The fund wins even if the resident leaves because they can take ownership of the home and lease it to someone else.
This gets a lot blurrier when you're talking about things that are closer to a travel trailer than a mobile home. Those can be packed up and moved in less than a day. You're basically renting a parking space with water/electrical/sewer hook ups at that point. If you need a wide load permit to move it you should definitely own the land.
If a landlord evicts you, any sane law would require them to disburse any value from possessions you leave onsite, minus reasonable disposal or administration costs.
To Fight it, we must make more land available and remove all zoning. Look cities without zoning like Houstan (places people can actually afford to live), they end up far more prosperous, and far fewer of their citizens ever have a need to move into mobile homes.
This has been happening in the industry for at least a couple of decades. Zoning laws are increasingly restrictive and force folks to rely on mobile home parks.
Source: My family has been in the mobile/modular home business since the 60's.
Funnily enough, there's a city nearby that's quite expensive to live in (even for California), because it's beach-side. And of course in every expensive city there's an even more expensive neighborhood. Except, for some bizarre reason, this wealthy neighborhood has a similar arrangement where the residents own their homes, but rent the land. Except all the homes are your typical McMansions and permanent; they aren't mobile homes. I was a bit baffled by the whole thing. It's like an HOA but worse.
Perhaps those living there believe that because they are wealthy they aren't worried about any of the consequences normally associated with the mobile-home trap.
Almost every time it ends up being a rental park where the tenants paid dramatically more into it and can be held partially liable when they leave for huge sums of money they get no value out of. Its externalized costs of constructing apartments if anything.
I am working on a startup to change this. Although the cost to move is extremely expensive, a knowledgeable tenant may find the competing park down the street will cover the cost of the move. I know this does not change their situation of being in a mobile home park but it gives tenants options and forces mobile home parks to compete.
>A mobile home (also trailer, trailer home, house trailer, static caravan, residential caravan) is a prefabricated structure, built in a factory on a permanently attached chassis before being transported to site (either by being towed or on a trailer).
This arbitrary and dangerous thinking.
But if you really feel like it by all means start looking closely at as many billionaires as you can identify and prove that each of their gains were ill-gotten.
Just please avoid the generalization.
There are over 2000 billionaires in the world, and rich people often pay extra for privacy. Learning about all of them isn't a small feat. It's good and proper to have public discussion about such questions before entering research.
What if someone wins the lottery (after many roll overs)?
At what point do they become criminal sociopaths? When they cross the billion threshold? USD or local currency?
Have any children inherited that level of wealth?
Even if, hypothetically, no crime were to occur, with enough customers and employees, at least a few will be disgruntled, and willing to lie, exaggerate, delude themselves, or misunderstand what's happening.
The result is that expose hit pieces are easy enough to craft against anyone powerful enough. The key question is always about how common improper behavior is, who knows about it, under what cultural standards it is considered improper, etc.
I'm not trying to undermine the underlying point: Most people who got very rich engaged in at least some corruption to do it. But a key word there is 'most.' Virtually all are possible to publicly discredit, and it's important to read such pieces carefully.
Some of those are illegal, and some merely unethical. In some cases, that aligns with corporate interests (more sales!). In some cases, it undermines corporate interests (bad reputation). In some cases, the person on the top quietly supports bad behavior, and in some cases, they have just a hard time stopping it.
It's often quite hard to tell all of those apart. But we haven't really found a way to avoid at least some of those happening in any organization above, say, a few hundred people. Even at a hundred people, it's tough.
One of the underemphasized advantages startups can have over big companies is pretty good alignment and protection against this sort of stuff. Everyone knows each other, and works as a genuine team.