Being a proud trailer dweller myself, I must say that I’ve been to […counting…] quite a few other countries and I’ve never seen anything even approximating a mobile home anywhere else. Scratch that. I do recall having seen something resembling a 10X60 single-wide doubling as an office at a construction site in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.
So what gives? Have any other dopers seen mobile homes outside the U.S.? Are these unique to America? Are there trailer parks in Canada, Europe and elsewhere?
In 1977 there were 200,000 mobile homes in Canada and the number was increasing at 37% to 50% annually. See http://www.ccbfc.org/irc/cbd/cbd188e.html I also found mention of something “Mini Homes” in Canada. I couldn’t tell if this was a synonym of “Mobile Home” or a synonym of “modular home” or something else.
The search is complicated by the fact that some people use “mobile home” as a synonym for what we call RVs or motor homes. The site I linked to above uses “mobile home” to mean a kind of “single detached home,” or what we call a mobile home, not what we call an RV.
I have seen pictures of mobile homes from South America. I would actually wonder if there were any mobile homes in Asia, Africa, and Europe since I have never seen any pictured there. Any Euro-dopers want to check in?
HUGS!
Sqrl
WAG: here in Europe (and certainly the UK) you can drive pretty much anywhere in no time (London to Edinburgh in a day is easy). On longer journeys on the continent there are plenty of places to stop in. If you’re going from city to city flying is now so cheap that that’s the main way to travel (no cite), and you can get rail passes valid across the continent too. I think that mobile homes are pretty redundant when most people don’t make long journeys by road, and when they do they can stop regularly anyway.
I think mattk just illustrated the misconception that was being talked about. The American “mobile home” or “trailer” isn’t really “mobile”. It is generally placed in a “trailer park” and rented out or sold to somebody who lives in it at that location. They seldom move. The british “caravan” is what we call an “RV”. The chief virtue of a “trailer” or “tin teepee” is that it is cheap - in many areas, it is about the lowest cost housing available. In the US, there is sometimes a social stigma associated with living in one (the term “trailer trash”, for instance), and a long standing joke is that tornados always seem to be attracted to trailer parks. It is this phenomenon that the OP is asking about.
In the UK, they are called residential caravans. In other countries they have different names, but they do exist.
Expand your horizons - the rest of the world has all sorts of stuff.
Russell
Absolutely we do have them in the UK. My grandparents lived in one for years after they retired. They liked theirs because it was cheap to buy, cheap to run and smelt of old people. Or maybe that was them. 
Charley.
Oh, caravans. Yes, there are plenty of those, as Charley said. I think that it’s less common to see them used as permanent homes, and very common to see them as holiday accommodation. When I was little we always went away to a caravan park in Devon – they were all large caravans, fixed to the site with all the usual utilities.
NO mattk, that is what he is not talking about. Repeat, he is not talking about caravans.
In the US and allegedly Canada and even the UK, there are homes called “mobile homes”, “trailers”, or the more snobbish, “manufactured homes”.
They do not drive around. In fact the wheels are taken off once they are placed in their permanent spot. They are only “mobile” in the since that, if you want to move your entire house, you can do so! But you cannot just drive it off. You have to pay a company to tow it with a huge ass truck and move it to the new location. Then the new permanent water and sewer lines and electricity are connected to it. It does not generate its own power.
They also have “double wides” which is ONE house made from two “trailers”. The two are transported to the new location serperatly and then connected at the site. If the owners decide they want to move the home to the new land they just bought, it will cost about 5,000 bucks (us) to have it moved and reassembled. That is the only thing really mobile about it. Try moving you fixed brick house for that cheap!!
The advantage of these homes is that they are cheap!! You can get a very very nice double wide, with all the luxaries and fireplace and huge jakoozie (sp?) tub and all that for like $35,000. If you bought a normal house for that much money, you would end up with a shak of some sort.
So, now that we have the whole thing cleared up… Does anyone in any other country know a person who lives in one of these??
And if so, do tornadoes rip them to shreds there too?
Bear – yes, I get it. In the UK they’re called caravans whether they’ve been fixed to a site and had the wheels removed or whether they’re still mobile.
mattk, can you link to a site? A quick search of Yahoo just turned up places like this, which does not sell mobile homes in the sense that this thread anticipates.
Q. What does a tornado have in common with an Arkansas divorce?
A. Somebody’s gonna lose a trailer.
I’ve seen pictures of Saudi Arabian oil camps with 12X60 trailers, but I guess that doesn’t really count either. They must get awfully hot.
Following up on what Bear said about “manufactured housing”, for a few more thou you can mount a double-wide on a concrete block foundation. This can lower your insurance premiums.
“Did you hear that the Arkansas Governor’s mansion burned down?” “Yep, pred’ near took out the whole trailer park.”
You MIGHT be redneck if your richest relative buys a new house and asks you to come over and help him take the wheels off … Jeff Foxworthy
There’s no end of this stuff …
In Europe I have seen them used as temporary offices for construction sites and things like that but I have never seen them used as permanent housing as you see in American trailer parks
Just to put the question beyond the Valley of the Shadow of Doubt, here are some examples of “mobile homes”:
http://www.directr.com/mobile/amco/home.jpg
http://www.preferredmobilehomes.com/images/trailer.jpg
http://beach-net.com/hunter/homes/images/mobile16.jpeg
A “double wide”:
http://beach-net.com/hunter/homes/images/mobile9.jpeg
The Arkansas governor’s mansion is being renovated and they are moving into a tripple wide.
manhattan – the best I can do is this: National Caravan Council. They seem to use residential caravan, park home and caravan holiday home interchangeably. I think I may have generalised a bit previously.
To add another data point, I have never seen one in Japan. Transportable offices are common on construction sites, but they don’t have wheels - they are carried on flatbed trucks like shipping containers. They may be used to house construction workers as well, and also used as temporary housing after earthquakes, but I haven’t seen any used as a semi-permanent residence.
I think the reason is that the US is one of the very few industrial nations where land is dirt cheap. Well, some parts of the US, anyway. In third-world countries, it’s cheaper to build a house on the spot than to build it in a factory and carry it. In most other industrial nations, land is so scarce that the cost of the land is higher than the cost of the building. So high-rise apartments are the cheapest form of housing, while single-story buildings are a luxury.
I know some people over here in the UK that have a caravan (wheels removed in a permanent location) in a park that they use as a cheap holiday home.
I’m digging around for some links now.