Mobile home parks, how they got here: Part 3, the communities mature
[Continued from the previous Part 1 and Part 2.]
So far we’ve witnessed the mobile home’s invention, and its impressive post-WW2 demand boom that led at its peak to the mobile home industry producing twice as much affordable housing annually as the Federal government. What was such living like? For a do-it-yourself snapshot, there’s an old movie:
The most fun you can have in public in 1954
In 1954 Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez, whose I Love Lucy TV show was at the time a huge success, teamed up for the feature movie, The Long, Long Trailer. Story line: the couple buys an incredibly long (40-foot plus) house trailer that they tow across country with their two-door roadster while Arnez, playing his real-life role as a Cuban band leader, is on a road tour. The movie remains a small comic gem, providing a fascinating glimpse at the 50s era of trailer courts and “trailer-ite” communities and convincingly depicts everything that can go wrong when towing a trailer. Still widely available on video, and worth watching.
Laughs aside, the mobile home’s chief value was its affordability, as measured by its cost — and if cost is the decision criterion, quality often suffers:
But the industry’s impressive record was accompanied by a dark side. As the boom developed, dozens of companies jumped into the business. In the absence of any meaningful regulation or standards, many greedy upstart manufacturers [We can allow Mr. Grissim his purple prose — Ed.] began churning out poorly engineered, shoddily constructed mobile homes made of the cheapest possible materials, particularly plastic products that were highly flammable. Many models were dangerously unsafe and full of plumbing, electrical and structural defects.
Because mobile homes are legally classified as chattel — that is, not real estate — they are bought and sold like used cars. Consumer protection was non-existent, nor was there anything resembling a realtors’ or realty market:
There to market them were unscrupulous dealers who used high-pressure sales tactics and practices to push them on unsuspecting consumers.
Like used-car salesmen.
Pressure? You accusing me of using pressure?
Less than reputable finance companies preyed on naive borrowers who could least afford it, snaring them in retail installment contracts at near-extortionate interest rates.
As with payday lending, small loans or those to financially inexperienced borrowers can be exploitive. Nor did consumer vulnerability stop there:
Little attention was given to proper installation and siting of these homes and warranties were either weak, ignored, or nonexistent. Today some state Housing and Urban Development regulators claim they still are.
With bad construction, bad locations, and a bad secondary market, many mobile homes lost their value. The result was poverty concentration, spontaneous slum communities, and local antipathy:
It wasn’t long before mobile home tragedies became a staple of the daily papers and television news. The media was permeated with images of the charred remains of a mobile home in which children or elderly victims had died; stories of electrocutions, gas explosions, plumbing failures; and panoramas of scattered and wrecked mobile homes in the wake of storms.
Trial by anecdote.
Anecdotes are perfectly good evidence
Responding to a growing public outcry for regulation, the Mobile Home Manufacturers Association pointed to a construction standard that it had developed in the 60s and that had been accepted in 43 states. But the standards were voluntary and useless against the worst offenders.
Earlier in this post, I complimented trade associations [Don’t get used to it — Ed.], but here we see one of their fundamental weaknesses — they are only a coalition of the willing, so eventually discipline is imposed from outside:
Instead, the states began laying down their own laws, notably
Unsafe at any speed?
While state regulation brought some order, because the vendors worked across multiple jurisdictions, uniformity (and therefore cost savings) arrived only when the entry of a higher level of government:,
The Magna Carta of manufactured housing
Henceforth, mobile homes will be considered chattel
In 1974, Congress passed watershed legislation, the National Mobile Home Construction and Safety Standards Act, which formally recognized mobile home manufacturing as a major industry, and directed the Department of Housing and Urban Development to develop uniform mobile home building standards and a federal program for their nationwide enforcement.
Striking is that — finally! — mobile homes were identified as a form of affordable housing. (Under Title I, HUD can provide FHA insurance for mobile home loans.)
Two years later, in June 1976, on what some proclaimed Magna Carta Day for manufactured homes, the Federal Manufactured Home Construction and Safety Standards, which quickly became known as the “HUD Code”, became law.
The provisions defined the manufactured home as distinct from all other types of housing, principally owing to the requirement that it be built on a chassis with its own wheels and axles and be towed from the factory of origin.
This differs from the prefab house, manufactured elsewhere and assembled on-site, in the presence of wheels and axles.
Axles make it chattel
The law set mandatory minimum standards for construction (e.g., structural, plumbing, electrical, safety and insulation) and encouraged the states to establish enforcement offices (currently 37 states have such offices). As important, the HUD code pre-empted all state and local building codes, ensuring that manufactured homes were legal in every state, and preventing local governments from adopting their own codes to discriminate against them.
That’s a terrific example of how the three levels of government can work together, and the Federal-state-local boundary issues in action: Federal action brings uniformity, formalization, and homestead-amnesty. It was a start, a bold action, and it fetched the usual industry applause:
Initially the industry grumbled;
Once, just once, I’d like to read a headline, Industry Overjoyed at New Government Action.
We’re so overjoyed we’re hiding our faces
notable complaints were that government inspections and higher construction standards would drive up the product’s cost, which in fact occurred. But the HUD code turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to the industry. For starters, the benefits of better construction, increased safety, and protection from discriminatory building codes soon became clear. The industry was now building homes, not vehicles, and these higher-quality, more durable dwellings were embraced by consumers who, in turn, discovered that lenders, equally impressed, were extending better loan terms at lower interest.
Real estate lending is collateralized lending. As the collateral becomes more durable, better able to hold its value, the cost of lending drops, and affordability rises.
“In the popular mind,” writes
Affordable and accessible?
If a crime happens anywhere else, nothing is said, but when one is committed in a trailer, the media let you know.”
“Their love was as mobile as their home … and just as carefree”
In fairness, that image is outdated and no longer deserved. Unfortunately, one other stigma remains very much alive.
A popular misconception
[Concluded tomorrow in Part 4.]
