The case for trailer parks
theweek.com
theweek.com
I could imagine more of allowing property owners to subdivide down to that scale would go far to solve affordability. Quality of construction in travel trailers, tiny houses, and mobile homes has improved compared to what they were 50-60 years ago when the trailer park trope was coined.
At any rate, I enjoy the flexibility of being able to hitch up my travel trailer and move locations in no time flat. It's been great during the pandemic to go visit national parks and get outdoors. I just see it as a no brainer. It shouldn't cost a quarter million minimum to lock in a nice location for yourself. You should be able to scoop up a 0.12 acre lot for a few thousand bucks and put a modular or travel trailer on it.
Nevermind putting a trailer on your own property, that ain't happening, you can barely build a house.
Issues of utilities along with school load come to mind but those occur with any other dense housing. So why wouldn't apartments be better? To make it easier on residents with bad credit and such the utilities could be baked in to the rent and the state or city could offer to subsidize.
However what doomed many existing communities near me were property taxes. The land is more valuable for actual homes or in some cases businesses. With tiny/mobile homes as you propose your location may require local governments reducing the tax load to make the location affordable.
Taxes exist to provide services. Finding ways to structure housing to minimize local taxes is just squeezing a balloon.
b. My concern over school funding was if you cram more households into a given amount of tax, which was an explicit part of the strategy above, you create a school funding issue that wasn't there before. (I admit I was not explicit about that point and should have used another dozen words to make that clear.)
LVT itself addresses the school funding issue, since schools increase land value and therefore increase the tax revenues on that land value.
Brookhaven worked with developers to provide low income housing. They also provide legislation that doesn’t completely gentrify Brookhaven.
I live in DC and there was a flurry of activity, with neighbors forming housing cooperatives, getting together to build up. It's possible. At least, it used to be. You talk about upzoning as if it's sensible & straightforward, & tiny home or additional separate dwelling units are weird, but they're what's in reach for a lot of people.
I'd love to see a resurgence of coop housing developments. There's so many older row houses around here, way under-developed, and I think of how much value those folks are sitting on, if only they could work with each other, & find funding & trustworthy developers to do the job. In addition to construction costs, everyone's got to go find somewhere to live for a year while the place gets redeveloped, which is costly & disruptive. Another advantage to tiny houses &c.
they implemented something similar here in southern california. the reason for this is to get homeowners on board, by giving them all the control and potential income from a proposal that nominally increases housing (giving politicians a 'win' without changing much).
the problem with this kind of policy is many-fold, but most egregiously it serves to intentionally lock out non-homeowners from both homebuying (by raising prices further) and homebuilding (by keeping buildable land off the market). it's literally designed to suppress class mobility and exclude the lower classes from homeownership. it also exacerbates homelessness, misallocates capital, and ultimately stagnates an economy.
instead, we need to overhaul zoning regulations, building codes/permitting processes, and tax policy (perhaps by land value principally) to encourage subdivision and construction.
Meanwhile, out here in California people have outright banned parking of RVs or have made it so the parks are cast away from "desirable" areas. Especially around the Google campus in Mountain View people are particularly picky.
While I understand some of the common criticisms of RVs, I don't think people understand very well that I will probably never earn enough money to buy a California home but I do want a California salary. The delta between my home states compensation for software workers and what the Bay Area pays is extremely beyond cost of living, and lets me make up for years of not being able to save.
There's nothing fundamentally nicer about living in a very thin walled low quality "mobile" home rather than a more solid nicer "prefabricated" home on the same plot.
https://www.trulia.com/research/new-or-existing-home/
> We found that that new homes (those built in 2013 or 2014) are typically priced 20% higher than older homes with similar attributes (e.g., square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, etc.) and in the same zip code.
Another example is the higher tier hotel brands won’t sell you their branding to convert older buildings, you have to build new (unless you have a very desirable location, but that’s beside the point).
Also, the IRS lets you depreciate buildings, but not land:
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-regs/depreciation_faqs_v2.pdf
I do not think the IRS would let people do that if they thought buildings maintained their value.
Lol. The "updated code and technical advances" are part of what keeps the value of existing structures from losing value.
Between ever increasing setback rules and asinine code changes that preclude features people actually want (like electrical outlets that are easy to use) and waste ever increasing space (look at the code for stairways and doorway sizes over the years).
For everyone getting suckered into a modern spec home there's someone else buying something because you can't build whatever that something is anymore. This is even more true with commercial operations where you can buy a facility but you couldn't get a new facility through the permitting process.
That is not evidenced by transaction data. There’s a few, mostly urban areas where older builds are valued due to not having to conform to modern codes, but certainly not representative of all existing structures versus new.
The easiest evidence I can offer is the IRS letting you deduct depreciation for buildings. Surely they would only do this if existing structures did lose value.
Older buildings may be deemed worth less on average partially because not all are well maintained and many may trivially hide expensive problems due in part to defects in workmanship and in part due to defective or absent maintenance.
People will pay a premium not to deal with anyone else's problems or even a chance of same.
In practice, people continually put money into permanent homes to update it, because their property as a whole is widely seen as an investment. It’s a package deal.
Mobile homes have none of this. They are not attached to land. The transactions in which they are transferred are not connected to land. They’re usually titled, and often sit on rented land.
Trulia is partially measuring the fact that the set of homes that are 2 years old inherently contain ~zero homes that have fallen into disrepair.
Two houses 20 years apart in manufacture date that are similar in overall quality, rather than superficial MLS data, will not have a significant price differential.
Mobile homes are very different in this regard. A 40 year old traditional home may still have a lot of value, partially because they are sold with the land.
It is not uncommon for mobile homes to depreciate like a car, or worse. Perfectly livable but older mobile homes can sell for 4 or even 3 digit prices.
Of course, mobile homes will depreciate much quicker than non mobile, but wear and tear and technological advances happen to old buildings nonetheless.
Obvious deficiencies, like old mechanicals, are what I’m referring to by a home being “maintained”.
Mobile homes, on the other hand, are often exempt from many building codes and are notorious for their use of proprietary or non-standard parts. They’re throwaway construction.
On the other hand, in many places I've lived, owning or renting a trailer was the closest folks can get to a house or the easiest/cheapest way to get a place with space.
None of this is a secret, either. Every poor person I knew that saw trailers as a better option than renting knew the downsides.
And honestly, it isn't that much upfront. Generally cheaper than a house with monthly payments lower than rent, and that is including lot rent, if you have it. Total rent is generally cheaper than a like sized house if you are just renting. No shared walls. You can often have pets.
When your option is to rent part of a house, especially from a not-so-wonderful landlord, this is a nice option. It literally doesn't matter if you don't get your money back or if it doesn't seem like a good investment.
Few folks are in it for the investment, but honestly, most folks aren't really buying a house for the investment, but rather that they get some freedom and security (the bank won't kick you out for willy-nilly reasons: A landlord can simply decide not to renew your lease, at least in places with poor renter's protections). Quality of life things are important.
He owns the trailer, but the park jacks up the rent. So he's caught behind not being able to afford the cost to move his trailer, and the steadily increasing rent which is slowly driving him further into poverty.
I've tried to help him out of it, but he won't accept any help.
Get people to move from predatory rental lots, which they can, and will, with a little encouragement. It won't be a great good, but it is better than letting VCs and bankers hold your money, and you will be able to see the people you are helping.
Maybe put in a school kids can walk to, and a smallish grocery store. Make sure it's on a good bus route, with a county drug-counseling office and a community college on the same route. People want to improve their lives, and will when they can. But American life lately seems designed to grind them down.
Representing a bloc of votes can help get local government on their side, if they can be persuaded to vote for their own benefit.
Soon enough your ideal housing solution will become yet another place where decent people don't want to live.
Usually they are less than 500/month, that’s less than the property taxes on most home types and it covers amenities that the community has
Also most trailer park residents are not going to qualify for a traditional mortgage so the rental model opens it up to more people
It's allegedly somewhat volatile & the margins aren't amazing, which makes super-conglomerates that much harder to bid against.
> A trailer park at 5 homes per acre and 2.5 people per household works out to 8,000 people per square mile, or more than twice as dense as Phoenix.
Well yes but a trailer park is just housing. What about streets, businesses, and open space? Nobody wants to live in an infinite trailer park even if it's an infinite luxury trailer park.
I actually think there's amazing potential for mixed-use commercial/residential space in a trailer park because the cost of starting a new business would be so low and you could even relocate your business over time.
But until the non-housing aspects are addressed a trailer park is just a cheap suburb, which isn't really inspiring.
We shouldn't be building sprawling, energy inefficient, land destroying, isolating suburbs.
Grass is the largest irrigated "crop" in the US ...
https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-biggest-crop-is-gra...
People like living in suburbs. I like living in them. And maybe if we rebrand trailer parks as tiny home communities it will change attitudes about cheap, affordable homes.
Having a vegetable shop, a butcher, a hair salon, small town way is the way to go. You socialize with your neighbor while you wait, hear some gossip, get acquainted with your veggie guy so next time he picks up those dragon fruits you like, etc.
I currently have to drive 3 miles to get to a supermarket. All the “food stores” near me are in a somewhat industrial area across the train tracks and are ghetto. They only sell beer, maybe bread and lottery tickets, and are secured like a bank. Not the feeling you want.
My fancy neighborhood doesn’t have a single store. Not even a gas station. I’m forced to drive out. Not great.
Apart from the attributes cited and discounted because mobile homes don’t technically have to be built that way, mobile homes are inherently not dense (alluded to by the article’s pivot to apartment buildings) and energy inefficient.
I’ve lived in apartment buildings in Bangkok, Seattle and New York — the power bills are disproportionately small compared to houses or mobile homes, and access to groceries, stores, and transit is far superior to any house or mobile-home-based development could support.
But even if I lost money on the home, it was a beautiful place to live. All the people were home owners (they took care of their property). Was an excellent stepping stone as I couldn't have afforded anything, and renting would have been more expensive in the long term.
I highly recommend a manufactured home community. Just keep in mind the rent on land could go up a lot, unless there's rent-control (or some other arrangement, unsure).
See also: "tiny homes".
But yeah, prefabricated housing definitely gets a bad rap. I'm pretty gung-ho about the idea of more buildings built from TEU-sized or FEU-sized building blocks - i.e. not necessarily converted intermodal containers (though container homes are cool, too), but blocks built to those dimensions and designed to be pieced together side-by-side or stacked together. Modular construction is one of the three "legs", I think, of driving down housing costs (the others being zoning reform - i.e. getting rid of artificial constraints against housing density or residential/commercial/industrial colocation - and the use of a land value tax to penalize land hoarding/speculation and incentivize denser development).
If you desire non-market rate housing, it's the only solution. Because by definition, the market will always produce market rate housing.
[0] https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/?lat=29.7604267&lng=-95...
[1] https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/?lat=40.7127753&lng=-74...
This manifests as keeping poorer people out by restricting zoning to larger plots of land and detached single family homes, which also has a nice side effect of making cars a necessity. Everyone wants to live around others at or above their own socioeconomic level.
But I think that's the wrong question for two reasons.
1) The choice isn't usually between dense urban developments or trailer parks. I don't even think this type of land use comes into conflict all that much. Occasionally a park is shut down to build a shopping center but most parks are at the edge of cities. They are not usually blocking density. 2) It goes beyond market rate housing. Parks are often limited or banned. Perhaps encouraging parks is manipulating the market but so is what is happening now by law.
Basically, private investments currently don't create much housing, they destroy affordable housing. So you need to create incentives to maintain and expand the affordable segment.
Nah. Housing rises in value even if you don't touch it. Demand is rising and supply isn't. The solution is to make it easier to build more.
The market has no preference for building unprofitable housing. Bankers don’t have enthusiasm for loaning money to build it either.
Finally housing is one of the less profitable real estate development types. That’s why commercial property often sits vacant...the long term ROI from sitting out low demand is better than conversion in the present.
It's not the market, developers don't building cheap housing because regulations generally make it illegal.
> The market has no preference for building unprofitable housing. Bankers don’t have enthusiasm for loaning money to build it either.
Sure, but profitable isn't the same thing as expensive. "Pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap" is a perfectly valid business model that bankers and businesspeople alike are happy to follow. But when the planning rules make it so expensive to build anything at all, building expensive housing is the only way to make a profit.
The UK has a housing crisis, but it's not due to the cost of constructing the house - it's due to the cost of land with planning permission.
If the cost of a conventional home is 75% land, construction costs are almost irrelevant: Nobody's going to buy a £325,000 trailer in preference to a £400,000 conventional home.
Most of them predate modern zoning or other laws in the jurisdiction as well, so they are usually an environmental nightmare, often with unsafe wells, or off-code sewers that release sewage.
The trailer park life is pretty much the opposite of that. Poors that have space, even if just the small space of a trailer sized lot, use it efficiently. They have 1.x cars per person because 1 isn't enough redundancy. They hang their laundry on a clothes line. They litter their lawn with "unsightly" stuff they're flipping for extra cash. They sit around drinking beer while burning something in an old washing machine drum.
It's the same old superiority complex and desire to tell other people how to live that's plagued humanity for all of history.
Shame there can't be population density growth in cities.
The US, in its current form, may be incapable of building anything that would be considered a common good.
Interestingly, back when housing was more affordable, they were, for that reason (using the lingo, of course not judging people). The people who were disadvantaged enough to not be able to enter into the "normal" housing market would have had rough enough lives that it would have manifested in the ways that might have caused others to label them as "disgusting, poor people," and because they would have had few other options, those that operated the parks could easily take advantage of them.
Now, however, the image is perhaps what perpetuates the culture of trailer parks in some areas. People who have a choice go elsewhere, instead of bringing their advantages and positive influences into certain places, do so even it's not overall optimal to their lives, because of an old heuristic. It might be a good financial decision (which I myself have taken advantage of) for people who are less able to afford typical housing, but they may avoid it because of the stigma, and the cycle continues.
This is a neat article, and I believe an important one. When we get together with people whose lives and circumstances differ, we all can potentially benefit.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
Trailer parks are bad because they are the lowest cost lowest effort housing widely available. By definition the worst of people are going to flock there. Which of course means anyone decent is going to seek a better place even at a cost of more work and money to themselves.