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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

> Including ideas that are probably-illegal

Many locales don't require building permits for mobile structures (like cars and trailers).

I've wondered if someone could buy some parking lots and just park nice mobile homes on them and rent them out. It'd be sneaky way of creating housing.

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I was curious about this before, assuming that it must be a far cheaper way to live. Turned out that after lot rental fees and the fact that mobile homes depreciate in value rather than appreciate, the economics just don't seem to work out unless your largest requirement is to be in a physically separate building than your neighbors vs being in an apartment.

Apartment and home owners also collude to exclude renters with bad credit and criminal histories, artificially creating a captive market for those people to rent on the constrained supply of trailer lots. Without such pressures I doubt their rents could be so high.

Taking that a step further, I've been interested recently in the feasibility of moving entire structures/homes to new locations. There's plenty of houses in rural America that are withering away. If there was a way to economically move homes to land in urban areas, it could help to solve the problem. I'm assuming the unit economics and feasibility simply don't work out, or else my million dollar idea would've been taken already.

Older houses in urban areas are typically seen as a negative rather than a positive. If you could sell the land without a house at all, you could save on demolition costs when the buyers of that high value property knock down the old house and build the house they really want.

Houses really do depreciate with age, even if it is less noticeable in the USA than it is in say Japan.

Good luck building a new home to replace many older urban homes in US cities with the same quality of building materials and workmanship. Also, it is typically much cheaper, easier, and quicker to utilize existing structures by expanding or modifying the layout, especially given the high costs and lack of availability of building materials.

A lot of houses get refurbished by going down to the bones and then just redoing the insulation, exterior, interior. That works fine, but you are basically just saving on the foundation and new build permit.

New homes definitely have problems, but they are not going to have the same problems as older homes (e.g. burst pipes because they were never insulated properly).

If you've ever seen El Camino near Stanford, there are people one step ahead of you. It's technically illegal since they're supposed to move their RV's every 72 hours on the street, but as far as I can tell a bunch of them don't.

I've never linked to Google Street View, but I'll try... https://goo.gl/maps/d6DvdC9gmhumQRB17

Of if you look up "860 Betty Meltzer Memorial Hwy, Palo Alto, CA" you'll see what I mean.

Seattle was into organizing a parking lot for derelict RVs to park in. With services, the costs came to about $8k per spot...per month. Not cheap, competitive with a tiny house in a tiny house village.

Zoning makes this illegal in most cities.

Yea, this seems like the right type of solution.

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