The potential of mobile housing
sightline.org
sightline.org
The key takeaway is that many/most of the people living in this kind of housing cannot afford the expense of moving it (video gives a price tag of around $5000), especially on short notice. Older mobile homes may not have enough remaining structural integrity to be moved at all. Meanwhile the land their house is on is rented and they can still be evicted from the land at anytime which typically results in the loss of the home that they "own".
This catch 22 means that residents are seen as ripe for rent and fee increases since moving means losing their investment in the home.
I'm sure mobile housing is great for middle class people looking for a nomadic lifestyle where they plan to move their home from time to time. As low-income housing though, it seems mobile homes are in a nasty grey area between renting and owning.
I need a vibrating plate compactor once in 10 years, and Home Depot has a stream of customers who need it all the time. I could buy it and rent it to others when I am not using it, but I have other things I want to do with my time. Therefore, it is profitable for Home Depot to rent it to me, and for me to pay a slight premium to never have to worry about it outside the few hours I needed to use it.
Similarly, I have rented apartments in my 20s in places I had no intention of setting down, and buying would have been a waste of time and effort.
No, you would wake up, as scythe has already pointed out, with a tax lien on your property--which you could of course remove by paying the taxes owed.
If you own your home, you can't be evicted from it the way a renter can. The only way to force you out of your home would be to take away your title to it. I'm not aware of any jurisdictions where this is actually done for non-payment of taxes, though.
A much better case can be made that you don't fully own your home if you have a mortgage on it, since the lender has the right to foreclose, which means they take title to the property, if you don't make your mortgage payments for some period of time. (Ironically, your property taxes if you have a mortgage are being paid out of an escrow account, so your mortgage lender will see the consequences of non-payment well before your municipality will.)
Your basic point is correct. But, consider that a renter is also paying the property tax on behalf of the owner (+ some percentage profit), so you're always better off being the owner instead of paying it for someone else.
Moving is easier when you rent, but you still pay rent at the new place. The rent doesn't stop like in the case of tools or hotel rooms.
I have no doubt there are plenty of people who rent permanently in an area but would rather own. But "most"?
Half of renters are under 40; according to one analysis, half of renters are young folks just looking for what they can afford in a place they're not sure they want to settle into yet: https://www.naahq.org/who-are-todays-renters
Granted all this is in the US, where homeownership rates hover around 65-66%. I sadly (happily?) don't know anything about the rent/own dynamics in places I have not lived.
Any money you saved from renting better go straight into your IRA, because you're still going to be paying rent when you retire. 30 years of mortgage is a lot cheaper than 60 years of rent.
What exactly do you mean by “if it were financially feasible”? Like yeah, if a mortgage were cheaper than rent, of course renters would do the cheaper thing.
I'm kinda surprised that a suitable contract for permanent fractionated ownership of an abstract housing unit which you can live in doesn't exist. Granted it's a complex set of incentives to balance.
Moving every 8 years means paying a lot of taxes if you want to own the property.
The folks that think it’s wise to spend $70k+ on a trailer are often the same folks who think it’s ok to have multiple broken down cars in the yard and/or multiple unfixed and unrestrained dogs running around and/or the worst of all: people who don’t see the irony of waving a Gadsden flag right next to their thin blue line flag.
One of the benefits of living in a rural area/area without HOA is that you can do many things that you wouldn’t be allowed to elsewhere.
One of the dangers is that your neighbors can do the same.
Is there any data/studies that proves that derelict properties actually drag down adjacent property values? My own anecdata and property valuation suggest otherwise, but I hear the property value line often enough that I would like to know if it’s true.
So if you are in a little subdivision and suddenly a yard sprouts cars and weeds, you may find your property prices affected.
But if half the properties are like that (or big enough you can’t see one from the next) probably won’t affect anything except that property itself.
Shaming people because they don't want to live next to a scrap yard isn't helpful or appropriate.
I don’t want to live next to a junkyard property, but I dislike restrictions on my property even less, so I choose to live in an area where I can do what I want, and my neighbors can do what they want.
If you have a dislike of “unsightly” properties, the solution is to live in a place where that is not allowed, not to try to impose your will on others who are living in a place where that is allowed.
As with all housing, there are good neighbourhoods and bad. Hell, my in-law is in a nice millionaires neighbourhood and his immediate next-door neighbour is a swinging cokehead wife abuser who throws ragers every few months. It’s hell, but the properties are all freehold: short of a lawsuit, ain’t nothing to be done.
The park I grew up in had some rules and regulations, but everything goes whenever you buy a plot of land out in the county.
There were more than a few neighbors that fit the very stereotype you imagine, and they were the ones that lived there full time. Most of the direct neighbors were just weekenders (as were we).
But maybe we shouldn't let private companies decide on things like land usage in the first place...
i guess in the sense that we aren’t the only animals to enforce territory. on the other hand we probably are the only animals to have conceived of “rights”.
For many people, their home and their retirement funds are their two biggest assets. If most of your retirement fund is tied up in real estate next door to your home, then the risk profiles are interlocked. That could be worthwhile for other benefits (avoiding bad neighbours), or because you want to chase the rewards of swinging for the fences (concentration also has the chance to win big), but that needs to be weighed up against the financial downside risks of severely concentrating your asset portfolio (a big loss on both the home property asset and retirement assets would be horrid for many people).
Lots of games to be played that you might be unaware of to keep from slowing the growth of that nest egg.
I grew up in a mobile home so I know firsthand what I’m trying to avoid.
I’m not responsible for your emotions. But if me sharing my opinion about living near a mobile home truly does disgust you, perhaps you’ve had enough internet for the day.
You shouldn’t allow me to have that kind of power over your mind. I’m just a stranger after all.
You are actively seeking out legislation that imposes this "power over your mind".
I live in an apartment near Silicon Valley and would love to have a house with a garage for hobbies, but buying a house anywhere near the area in a safe location is prohibitively expensive for me; I'd have to go either deep in the Central Valley (think Fresno County and beyond), the Sierra Foothills, or the Mojave Desert to find affordable places.
I.e. what does zoning say if you pour a concrete slab, drop a mobile home on it, and then bolt the home down (for some definition of bolt)?
1. The structure built on top of the permanent foundation must comply with the building codes of the municipality that the permanent foundation is located in. This requires obtaining permit(s) before bolting the structure onto the foundation.
2. The municipal planning department will have some definition for what would be a legally permissible foundation and what constitutes "bolting down."
There are many companies that specialize in the building of mobile and manufactured homes that are compliant with state- and local-level building codes. But it's very important that people do their proverbial homework, making sure that the mobile/manufactured home does truly comply with the regulations of the intended permanent location.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/eastbay/article/Oakland-legalize...
There should be giant city-buildings with hundreds of thousands of dwelling spaces each with a large outdoor patio. A lot of problems like power distribution from certain powersources get resolved with this as well as many other resources like fresh water and fresh food (land is freed up for agriculture),waste disposal,transportation, medical care,etc...
The urban sprawl made sense in the nuclear era but I believe the technology exists to make highly defensible mega buildings (10s of miles wide,50+ stories high).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project
I suppose on the ocean would be interesting if it were tied with some desalination and generally using the ocean sustainably.
One way to kick that sort of thing off might be individual, modular units which could be brought together to make ever larger complexes.
- Variety of building age/quality, to have rent levels that allow diversity of activities (low rent hole-in-the-wall for an art club; high rent, new construction, ground floor retail for luxury shopping)
- Variety of building use schedules to ensure eyes on the street at all hours and full utilization of infrastructure (including restaurants). A pure residential area or pure office park will fail this and turn into a ghost town at some hours. Hudson Yards might hit 2 schedules but not 3, which is the ideal.
- “a dozen dozen places in a five minute walk” allows niche businesses to survive, since the large effective service radius includes enough people to find some customers. Rockefeller Center’s arcade is actually quite important and covered in the book, since it cuts some too-long blocks into short enough blocks.
I don’t remember the fourth condition, so read the book to find out.
The thing is, there cannot and should not be another new york or manhattan. We need future cities to be energy efficient, sustainable and defensible. A city that would last the next two or three centuries allowing our current culture and history to be passed on is important and I am not sure cities like new york will be pleasant to live in by the end of the century nor are they or will they be cheap. That said, there many millions of people and they can still continue to live in existing cities but we can't just keep building more LAs and NYCs or continue to pretend homelessness, high rent/house prices, the ridiculous infrastructure required to support cars and the ever depletion of agriculture friendly land and sustainable water are not a problem. Now is the time to fix them not when famine and disasters are killing millions.
But to counter your point about mediocrity, vegas is a good example. I have terrific food and entertainment there despite the seemingly endless interconnected structures of hotels and casinos. Perhaps given the proper financial incentive things can be not so mediocre?
The coastal commission of California makes the normal Cali NIMBY suburbanites look like absolute amateurs.
Would that meet any of your needs?
10 minute and 15 minute task turns into 10 + 15 + 10 minute task.
Any longer and you're pretty much talking "I either go there for half a day or it is not worth it".
Like, if there is no other option sure, but else it's major PITA for hobbies, something that's supposed to be fun.
It would be cool if it was for example a bunch of rooms to rent in basement of apartment complex, but even then I can't imagine them being big enough (or with door big enough) to say work on a car.
It really isn't a big deal. I moved to Norway some years ago. I walk to the grocery store. I carry groceries back home. I'll walk for 30-45 minutes to get to a specialty store in the downtown area. I can take a bus for the longer trip, but the grocery stores are just as convenient as the bus stops. I carry more than can fit in a backpack. I do this on snow and ice and in rain and in sun.
And basically, you dress in clothing that is appropriate for the weather and you treat the walk just like any other commute time. Walking 30 minutes to work and driving 30 minutes to work are both 30 minute commutes.
This only works so long as they don't shade each other. Which means you end up with something like the Line from Saudi Arabia or ground level NYC where you're lucky to see the sun at noon.
Is this building very long, but very thin? Is it some fractal that bends in on itself? At that point, I don't understand the benefit of having it be one contiguous structure. It sounds like a normal city but more expensive.
I can see how a massive rectangular building is more space efficient, defensible, etc. But then most of the residents will never see the sun or get fresh air.
My own family will never live in a mobile home. Regardless of the sacrifices required, I will never have them experience that.
In addition to the safety concerns, it’s a poor financial decision.
I replaced two water heaters and a toilet in a mobile home for a realtor about 18 months ago.
I was shocked that the trailer was listed for $90k and sold the next week.
We’ve got to do a better job of teaching financial literacy in this country.
I'm a detached, on-our-own-land double wide with a foundation, and I've no problems with the house at all. It's a higher end manufactured, we have drywall, quartz counters, upgraded electrical, etc, but... most people don't even realize it's a manufactured unless they already know what to look for (strong marriage line, all the water on one half of the house, etc).
I spent many an anxious night as a child in Alabama fearful that I wouldn’t live until the next morning due to inclement weather.
And they are depreciating assets. I come from a single parent violent home where I had to leave before I even finished high school. I somehow managed to become what I am with nothing but a high school education. I worked hard and sacrificed a lot to escape that lifestyle. I don’t want my own child to see me ever make poor financial decisions.
Edit: The above makes me sound like an incredible asshole. So the best answer would be: there are far better ways to spend my money and energy than on a mobile home. Ways that are better at ensuring my family’s safety and financial wellbeing.
If your experience with mobile homes is pre-1980 or so, yes, they were... sketchy. But in the late 70s, the standards changed rather dramatically, so experience with older manufactured homes doesn't really translate. None of the older ones (within a rounding error) meet the newer standards.
I've got 2x6 exterior walls, a concrete foundation with the house quite tied into that, a metal roof, drywall, etc. I've also done a factory tour, and was quite impressed with how everything was put together. They're able to do things like "assemble the roof separately at a safe working height and then tie it to the rest of the house without having to do roof work," so lower insurance rates and such for workers.
It's a bit noisier in high winds than I'd prefer, and the combination of metal roof and vaulted ceilings make the rain sound harder than it actually is, but it doesn't rain that often out here, so... not going to complain too hard about that.
I wish the local tax authorities would agree with you that it's a depreciating asset, though. They certainly like to argue that the value keeps going up (and as I get the property and house tax bills separately, I can see the house-only values climbing rapidly - I didn't do the paperwork to merge them, as I simply don't care).
You're clearly opposed to the concept, which is fine, but I just don't see any of your assertions being true of manufactured homes from the past... oh, 20 years or so. I know an awful lot of people who live in them, though it's not "mobile home parks" - they're just a standard enough style of housing out where I live, usually on foundations. And I consider having spent less money on a perfectly suitable house than having something built onsite to be a very reasonable financial decision.
The accessories and fittings like faucets and toilets and such are often lower than "builder grade" which is perfect for someone like me who makes repairs, but not so good for the home owner.
Is your mobile home on a cinder block perimeter foundation or a slab? I imagine the slab would allow for a great deal more peace of mind, but the cinder block perimeter would not.
You're absolutely correct that I am a bit biased and am opposed to the concept. But I'm also opposed to owning any vehicle that isn't a Honda/Acura or a Toyota/Lexus. Simply because my shop never made any money repairing those just like I never made much money repairing modern traditional homes built by credible and competent builders.
Depending on where you're located in the US, if you're going to raise a family in a mobile home please at least consider having an underground storm shelter installed. That would allow for more peace of mind. I lost a few friends in high school due to storms when they lived in mobile homes. And more recently I lost a handful of clients who perished when storms ripped through Beauregard, AL.
Our major risks are local grass fires, not tornadoes - rural mountain west. If we got one out here, it would be quite the freak event.
Q: What do a tornado and a divorce in Alabama have in common?
A: Someone gonna lose them a trailer
Reducing the complexity of every day finances would be a much better option. We can't keep trying to cram more course work into high school/college to fix society's complexity (and maintain the same time frame). We can't even address teacher quality-of-life and pay for the regular course work.
And also, RVs and mobile homes should not cost near what they do for the shit that they are, and there shouldn't be a rent/own situation with mobile home lots.
Personally, I never had so much as a single class/lesson on any of life's necessities: Taxes, credit cards, banking, and other financial know-how for day-to-day life; cooking; laundry; driving a car; fundamental electric and plumbing know-how; etc.; and I forever detest society for failing/ignoring me.
We demand kids to spend at least a decade and a half of their lives in school. I ask you: Why the fuck are we teaching them worthless things like calculus and programming and world history and wasting their (and our) time?
Their time would be far better served being taught how to crunch and file their annual taxes. How financial debt (read: loans and credit cards) works. How to operate a car so nobody gets runover. How to clean their own clothes and bedsheets. How to fix a leaky faucet or a faulty electrical appliance (Britons were once taught how to wire their electrical gadgets in school).
* fundamental electric and plumbing know-how
I disagree, these two things are dangerous when done incorrectly and are regulated industries in most countries. People with a little knowledge are dangerous. If you want to understand electrical you need to be full time on that for a while. School is for foundational things like can you read and do Maths.
> Why the fuck are we teaching them worthless things like calculus and programming and world history
How are these things "worthless" says a lot about you if you think world history is worthless ...
> Their time would be far better served being taught how to crunch and file their annual taxes
Again this is very much a US centric viewpoint in UK for example you don't need to know this as the government does it for you.
> How to operate a car so nobody gets runover
There is a whole industry that you pay money to do this. Operating a car is a dangerous activity and must be taught correctly. It also requires you actually drive in a car the practicality of teaching a whole school this just isn't there.
> How financial debt (read: loans and credit cards) works
You do get taught this at school I remember going through these types of examples.
> How to clean their own clothes and bedsheets
We had a course that everyone had to attend called "home economics" which taught this sort of thing. I think the name has changed. It also covered basic cooking.
> How to fix a leaky faucet or a faulty electrical appliance
Not sure you've thought that through but an incorrectly repaired electrical appliance can burn your house down and an incorrectly fixed leaky faucet can flood your house.
> Britons were once taught how to wire their electrical gadgets in school
They still are! In Scotland it was called technical studies and taught things like basic woodwork with handtools and how to wire a plug that sort of thing.
It is based off my own experiences and knowledge, which are US and Japan centric. Make of that what you will.
>I disagree, these two things are dangerous when done incorrectly and are regulated industries in most countries. People with a little knowledge are dangerous. If you want to understand electrical you need to be full time on that for a while. School is for foundational things like can you read and do Maths.
Knowing very simple things like how to operate circuit breakers and electrical panels, or how to fix faucets and toilets go a long way towards making life more fulfilling. Hiring a plumber or electrician to do what is practically a $10 job could run you several hundreds instead, and waste time and nerves if you end up with a lousy professional which the vast majority are.
Life is just more enjoyable in general if you can do more things yourself, and/or taught the attitude to become so.
>How are these things "worthless" says a lot about you if you think world history is worthless ...
Fact of the matter is, knowing what Abraham Lincoln said during the Gettysburg Address or what year Queen Victoria was coronated aren't going to help me file taxes or otherwise live a life. Likewise calculus, algebra, etc.
We can teach students such superfluous knowledge after teaching things that are essential to life first. Teach people how to file taxes so nobody has to deal with Quickbooks/Intuit or hire a costly CPA. Teach people how to budget their money so less people become destitute. Teach people how their government works so they can be productive and contribute, rather than uselessly bitch about it.
>There is a whole industry that you pay money to do this. Operating a car is a dangerous activity and must be taught correctly. It also requires you actually drive in a car the practicality of teaching a whole school this just isn't there.
Neither is it practical to tell someone "go and practice on the highway", unless it's absolutely okay to go around hitting and running things over.
Something as fundamental to life as driving a car should be standard and mandatory school curriculum.
>You do get taught this at school I remember going through these types of examples.
I certainly didn't, and my impression is most people haven't either since it's quite common for them to lambast credit cards without knowing how they even work.
> How to clean their own clothes and bedsheets
Personally, my mother taught me it (along with cooking), but not everyone necessarily has that luxury for one reason or another.
Again, life's necessities should be part of school curriculum in lieu of superfluous knowledge with questionable value.
>Not sure you've thought that through but an incorrectly repaired electrical appliance can burn your house down and an incorrectly fixed leaky faucet can flood your house.
It is always better to know how things around you in life work than it is to not know, much less not know while being taught things that will never be relevant to your life.
It is striking how ignorant of the basics a lot of people are, and I blame that in part to schools never bothering to teach them. If someone doesn't know how to calculate wattage from voltage and amperes, for example, something in the education system has failed.
>They still are! In Scotland it was called technical studies and taught things like basic woodwork with handtools and how to wire a plug that sort of thing.
That's actually good to know, and I wish practical classes like that would become more prevalent in schools everywhere.
If you want a society worth paying taxes in, you’ll probably want to offer your future contributors calculus, programming, and history.
>listed for 90k and sold the next week
It probably turned out not to be a such poor financial decision for the seller, in this case. I think the whole "mobile homes don't go up in value" rule is no longer true, if we continue to see the degree of housing price increases / inflation we have seen in the last 3 years.
From https://www.weather.gov/jan/swpw_mhsafety :
> Mobile homes are not a safe shelter when tornadoes threaten. NOAA and FEMA recommend that mobile and manufactured home residents flee their homes for sturdier shelter before storms with tornadoes hit. On average, a total of 72 percent of all tornado-related fatalities are in homes and 54 percent of those fatalities are in mobile homes.
I don't know the percentage of people who live in mobile homes, but I'm sure it's nowhere close to 54%.
(I was thinking of the risk of civic or general quality degradation of the area (unrestrained emergent actors, general emergent pollution), but also climate issues can be important today - some of us tried to spend the current Summer in altitude as much as possible, as the plains were in dire conditions.)
Find an area not currently experiencing some type of disaster and unlikely to for the next x months. Visit until normalcy returns.
I missed basically all of covid by judiciously running away whenever a lockdown or mass infections were about to happen. Looking at people who didn't, man they've gotten weird and mean.
it could well mean that noone survives a tornado in a mobile home
For comparison, driving is something like 0.0117% fatalities/yr
Modern mobile housing, as per the article, is different. It's about large vans or tiny homes built on trailers, not made to permanently sit on ciment blocks. Not necessarily with children in it.
Anyway, where there's a will there's a way. With over 1M people living the vanlife in the US alone, we are not far from future outdoor and/or indoor private communities regrouping migrating short term tenants. A bit like camping grounds, but geared toward vanlifers.
I'm guessing this means that you can designate a part of your property, install suitable hookups (water/sewer/electricity) using RV standards, and then find a tenant who will be bringing their own mobile unit (tiny home/RV).
That's...quite good. Landlords can interview tenants and inspect their rigs to make sure they're in good shape/suitable. The mobility of the unit becomes more important, so the tenant can keep their bargaining power. Landlords get something too -- they don't have to build expensive living space, and there's definitely less involved in ending a lease (the tenant is much more able to move their dwelling, which should stay in the "ready to move state").
HB2001, if I understand it correctly, forces all cities over 25k to allow multiple homes, duplexes and quadplexes, on any plot. But the problem is, you can't add them if you already have something on there, and try finding an empty lot in the Portland metropolitan area under $250k. I certainly did.
Sadly, I'm betting Adam Neumann will win here. Too much money to lobby and align with the tides.
How does this differ from what we used to call the “Displaced Person”?
on the other hand “displaced” usually means that you were pressured into moving. Neuman’s thing is new, so i may have misunderstood exactly how it works, but if i got the intent right then that’s how they differ.
Friends and allies, beach and camping showers, gyms, pirate bath.
I did not cook much, and just ate things like nuts, bread, and cheese. But I had a simple wood stove that runs on little sticks. (Look up rocket can stove.)
Generally speaking, for most things, it was just a matter of "stay calm and improvise".
It helps to have a habit of leaving every place cleaner than you found it.
It sounds like your friend had other options, and you were able to remain friends?
Note though that homeless students can still be required to provide reasonable proof of residency in order to receive an admission preference based on where they are temporarily living.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinney%E2%80%93Vento_Homeles...
I think mindset is still the biggest factor.
For example, there are all sorts of things you can get picked on for at school, and I think the most important bit is teaching them to navigate the process itself.
I don't think vanlife necessarily means a life of roaming the country without a stable location. For example, I spent most of my van living within the same couple of cities, more than half in just one.
The other thing I want to say is that the factory model of education is on its way out, and I personally would not send my child to a public school if I had a choice to home-school. Socializing and making friends is important, and I think there are better ways to socialize and make friends than in a prison-like forced boredom complex.
but if you are staying for a few years in the same place why not rent a house or apartment? i guess it comes down to a cost comparison. but also, in fact, if the point is to have the freedom to move then i feel renting makes me much more free, because everything i own is easy to transport, easier than a trailer even, and so the whole world becomes accessible to me. (as long as i can get a resident visa at least)
I have very little knowledge in this area, so I won't offer advice. CPS is definitely a risk, and you have to navigate that.
Very telling lapsus. Or, I see what you did there.
The "high end" units that are shown in architectural design magazines and the like are really cool, they're modern, stylish, and really just someone's hobby... but the reality of mobile home living is very different.
I've have friends who lived in mobile homes and all I can say is that I'm thankful that I didn't have to.
Next, let’s stack the tiny homes. Kowloon Walled City, here we come!
[1] What? [2] and which at first sight won't be anything less than US$ 50,000-60,000 today
They’re about $5000 a pop. Maybe if you steal everything from a construction site, a tiny home could be built for $10K.
With that said, the greatest challenge is the stigma of a trailer park. The local community NIMBYs fight hard to not permit new communities from being established (speaking as someone who optioned a parcel of land in central Florida for this purpose and had to go plead the case at planning meetings), and existing ones are getting snapped up by private equity and real estate investors to turn the financial screws on people who have nowhere else to go.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/11/1098193173/what-happens-when-...
https://rejournals.com/investors-appetite-for-manufactured-h...
I think this model works as a coop or non profit land trust, where the resident owns the home but the community protects their stake in the lot. Think “A Tiny Home For Good” Tiny Home Park Edition. You need to defend against the Capital vultures.
https://www.atinyhomeforgood.org/
(Tangentially, someone from YC should reach out to the above non profit to have them go through their next non profit accelerator cycle)
"In the last few years, some US cities made a surprising break with the mobile-exclusionary tradition by legalizing residence in RVs or tiny houses on wheels on residential lots. First Fresno, then Los Angeles and San Jose, and various cities & states now allow mobile Accessory Dwelling Units. Portland allowed one movable home per residential lot in the 2021 Shelter to Housing Continuum zoning reforms, and Oakland created a new residential type, “Vehicular Residential Facilities,” which allows multiple vehicle dwellings on sites with sufficient area."
But then I looked at the terms. The trailer park is on a 99 year lease, coming up in about 5 years. The homes are the property of their owners, the land is not. Most of the homes are functionally immobile. A new build is more expensive than buying used, so to get an actually mobile home doubles the cost -- add disposal fees to that.
Trailer park residents are living on the edge, a ticking timebomb where they might get evicted without the ability to move their homes, or if they're lucky, they can move their homes but they'll still be forced out of their neighborhood at a time when all their neighbors are also trying to move under duress to the same closest trailer parks they can find. And if they can't find a place, they lose the home and pay for its disposal.
The stigma is real, but it's not the greatest challenge. The soaring land prices are.
Freehold land prices are up ten-fold. Lease rates? TBD.
Between solar panels, an EV drivetrain which comes with a HUGE battery for running appliances, skateboard design for more space, better acceleration/handling/regen braking, room for a "range extension" ICE generator as backup, and the final killer killer feature:
... stay with me ...
Highway self-driving, even if it's just supervisory.
I'd sell everything I own and live in a mobile home. If it drove me between places at night with better-than-human safety (and maybe a big huge airbag in the bedroom)... my god.
Keep in mind that highway self driving should be much much easier than general self driving. You can get convergent evolution of the infrastructure with embedded sensors and warning broadcasts. You can get highly optimized pre-calculated route "programs" rather than rely entirely on some generally trained AI agent. You'll have a lot more room for sensors. You don't have to travel as fast at night either, so the RV can putter along at 40mph for excellent energy efficiency and better safety, and not offend any daytime drivers.
When it gets to the destination, if you don't wake up there can be huge self-driving parking lots where the RV can park (and recharge) while you wake up.
And the picture in the article says a 1000 words: I really like a design of a house where there is a central courtyard and a bunch of buildings around it. Japanese houses (well, the rich ones in anime and stuff) were designed like this. Your mobile home could simply drive up to part of that courtyard, and become part of your house. Need a new bedroom? buy a new segment and plop it next to the courtyard.
COVID kind of killed a lot of commuting, but the idea of my bedroom driving me to work in the morning is a good one, and if you need to drop a #2 at work you can walk out to the RV and do it there (I'm not a huge fan of crapping in public bathrooms, but that might just be me, the #1 thing I like about WFH is crapping in my bathroom). Heck you'll have a shower and a change of clothes and a place to nap if you need it at work. Supports longer hours if you need it. If the RV has an attached office, and your workers tend to have this, you can simply have a pop-up office where a smaller building has meeting rooms but people work in their RV-offices.
Your RV can drive you home in traffic while you get the last couple hours of work done, so even 100 mile commutes can be tolerable.
Currently the RV industry, as I understand it is based in Indiana mostly, is pretty slow to change. It astonishes me that RVs haven't been hybrid drivetrains for a decade (that relates to my frustration that PHEVs weren't forced in adoption in the 2000s, 10 years after the prius and insight hit the market). I guess the pickup trucks never adopted the drivetrain, but there were hybrid SUVs in droves ten years ago.
I think the Tesla semi and other BEV semis will be what does it. You can take a short range BEV semi and make it longer range with an attached ICE generator for the long haul. I'm hoping that "inside out" rotary or other small engine designs optimized for battery recharging can work here.
With the skyrocketing cost of housing, would you rather have a luxurious mobile home for 500k and spend 300k for a house in the boonies, or have a 1 million dollar crap house closer to the job?
And right now RVs are kind of expensive because they are too bespoke. If demand skyrockets due to all the advantages listed above, we may actually get economies of scale in housing, since the footprints are all shipping container sized essentially. Heck, the skateboard design of an EV may mean that the entire drivetrain is simply an underbody and the top living part is relatively swappable.
Also, some BEV drivetrains (million mile battery) may be far more long term and reliable, a lot of RVs have an issue of ricketly ICE drivetrains that don't age well.
Airbags have about 2 feet of "cushion" to catch the driver. A "Bedroom Airbag is going to have more room and time to inflate. Also, I suppose you could strap yourself in. And RVs have a lot more momentum and are inherently safer in crashes, kind of like how schoolbusses don't have seat belts.
As you alluded, you could have a "safety blanket that is normally loose but tightens on impact.
Finally, typically head on crashes are the danger for RV, and the bed is in the back, so that is a gigantic amount of the vehicle to absorb impact and damage.
If there is highway self driving in the near future for RV’s, I’d expect it to piggyback onto what the commercial trucking industry builds and uses.
Within that narrower scope, pretty much the only way a Z or Millenial young family making good money in our industry but tired of seeing their down payment savings keep getting blown out by rampant dirt real estate asset inflation could reasonably consider going full time RV as an option is to learn a range of maker skills and DIY build their own, or buy a used RV off someone who knows what they are doing like an RV inspector who fixed up design flaws over time to round out the sharp edges.
RV's depreciate with alarming speed so I find the "put your $500K down payment into an RV instead of SV real estate" proposals specious. Probably the only way to blunt that steep depreciation is to build from a Class 7 or 8 chassis that you can resell later to recover much of the cost; even a full-time RV family would not put the kind of load and miles onto that chassis that a normal CDL holder does, so they will hold their value nicely.
But those Heavy Duty Trucks are expensive capex and opex, easily pushing the total build and opex into $1M+ territory in the first 7 years. And most people don't haul around enough mass to justify a Class 7 or 8 chassis, usually a Class 6 is plenty even for a reasonably McMansion'y RV build on a steep mountain climb. I'd only go Class 7 or 8 if I was expecting to haul around my workshop with me, for example.
But like many artifacts in today's world, unless there is a commercial market for it, I find I have to procure what I want by building it myself to satisfy my own quality standards for what are usually my long-term use cases.