Are there decent forms of temporary housing for boom/bust towns

In My Humble Opinion
1

Reading up on Williston North Dakota, I remember about 5-10 years ago when people were getting paid $20/hr to work at Walmart, and the city was building a ton of new apartment buildings. People who worked on the oil fields could be making 6 figures.

Williston is a major fracking hub, so the economy grew rapidly about ten years ago, wages shot up and unemployment went down. I think at its peak, rent in Williston was about what it is in Manhattan. I could be remembering wrong, but I think a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment was about 3k or so.

Anyway, the oil boom has busted since there was an oversupply of natural gas and oil. So now there are a bunch of empty apartment buildings.

Which begs the question, if you have a city that is going to have a boom cycle which results in a huge influx of residents, but you don’t expect the boom cycle to be permanent (maybe only 5-10 years), are there housing alternatives to building permanent dwellings? If I were an investor I wouldn’t want to build permanent housing in a city where within 5 years, much of the economic activity would be gone.

I know people can live in campers, but aren’t those 3 season? For a place like Williston, you’d need a 4 season dwelling. Same with tents, they tend to be 3 season dwellings.

Bring a bunch of mobile homes over? That is all I can think of.

Are there homes that can be constructed, then deconstructed and moved when you are done with them? The options I’m seeing for temporary housing, meaning housing for a few years, (tents, campers and mobile homes) tend to not hold up well in temperature extremes.

2

Since when do mobile homes not hold up well in extreme temperatures? And what do you consider ‘extreme’ anyway?

I live in South Dakota and there are plenty of mobile homes around here, including the one my mom lives in, and they seem to be holding up quite well.

3

Shipping container homes? If “decent” is defined purely in terms of protection from the elements, military containerized shelters could do.

like this
https://www.copybook.com/img/ftsv6s18804/mobile-expandable-containers.jpg?v=1509463589 or this http://www.army-technology.com/contractors/field/nordic-shelters/

Since we’re mainly talking about young blue-collar men (same demographic as the military) going to wherever they’re paid the most, many would be willing to put up with living in such conditions.

4

I’ve heard of people in mobile homes spending $500 or more a month on heating and cooling in winter and summer. Seeing how a single wide is only roughly ~1000 square feet, that is a pretty high bill.

I live in an apartment roughly that size, it is not common for my combined electric and gas bill to go over $100. Even when it does (when it is 95F out constantly, or -10 out constantly) it usually peaks at about $120-130 a month combined.

Are there well insulated mobile homes? If so, then I stand corrected. But I was under the impression that mobile homes required high utility bills due to poor insulation.

By ‘decent’ I mean affordable, portable, connected to utilities and insulated well so utility costs are reasonable. My impression is mobile homes hit the first three marks but not the fourth.

5

There are well-built mobile homes. There are also things you can do to a mobile home to make it more energy efficient which is what my brother did to my mom’s. Her energy bill is probably less than the energy bill was for my site-built home the first year I moved in before I started making improvements.

6

That begs the question then, why didn’t people just import a bunch of well insulated mobile homes into Williston and start charging high rent? You could probably have gotten $2000-3000 a month in rent for a single wide mobile home at the oil peak, and if the oil boom wears off you just move the mobile home somewhere else where demand is high.

7

Find out what the costs actually are (borrowing a big chunk of money with little collateral, buying the mobile homes, transporting them to site, leasing land to put them on, hooking up the utilities, managing the properties, depreciation and maintenance) and the risk of the boom going bust too early, no new boom town to move on to, etc and see if it makes financial sense. It may seem like a good idea but until you actually run the numbers it’s not clear if this is a business opportunity.

8

Most RVs are three season simply because few people want to use Rvs in the winter. But RVs designed for winter use exist:

9

To answer the OP in short, not that I’ve seen. Oil companies use regular mobile homes when they need housing in remote locations.

They never have, at least if you mean extreme cold. I can cite my gas bill in one when I was working in the Yukon. My brother in law was heating a full house 10 feet away that was easily twice the size for cheaper than I could. They usually only have 4" thick walls which doesn’t allow for near enough insulation to deal with winter in this country. They are also infamous for having problems with frozen pipes, I’ve had to wrap heating tape around pipes under a trailer in sub-zero temperatures far more times than I’d like.

Now, you can get around most of these problems by getting a mobile with 6" + walls, replacing the windows, and putting it on a foundation. However, once you do that, it’s not really a mobile home anymore.

Where are you putting these homes? Land isn’t free. Especially in boom towns, city zoning regulations tend to frown on single-dwelling home-owners filling their yards with rental units, so those are usually out. Finding the land is hard, because no one wants a trailer park in their backyard due to negative social connotations. Even if you can find and afford to buy the land, you need to service it. People aren’t going to pay that kind of rent without internet, power, sewer and water. Getting that stuff installed isn’t cheap. So between a big plot of land that’s zoned right and getting in utilities, you’ve already spent a bunch, and that is a sunk cost as you can’t move the land when the bust ends. Furthermore, you are bound by rental laws and depending on your location that may mean you might not be able to sell it in the future without a bunch of headaches.

Also, moving a mobile home isn’t cheap. It starts at around $400 / hour for a big enough bed truck with two pilot cars to move one of them, and you can double that rate if it’s a double wide. The units will also get damaged in transport, installed sheetrock doesn’t hold up very well being bounced on a trailer. Pipes and windows might break. Things will certainly fall down. I’ve seen oil companies leave trailers for years on abandoned well sites, because after a few moves their value had degraded so much it was more cost-effective to buy new ones than to haul out the old ones.

I’ll even add the fact that seasonal oil workers are about the worst renters you could probably ask for. My mother worked for a rental company and I heard all sorts of horror stories from her about rig pigs being terrible tenants who would skip town rather than pay rent on an apartment they totaled.

I did look into something similar once, as a friend had access to cheap land and thought it would be a good investment. When I ran the numbers, it really, really wasn’t. He ended up converting the land to a bee farm, of all things, and now he jokes about making sweet bank.

10

How long ago was it that you lived in a mobile home? They have to be built to HUD standards and many exceed those standards. Many times they do have 6" walls. My mother’s is not on a foundation and has never experienced frozen pipes because she was smart enough to get solid, well-insulated skirting installed. Also, my brother removed all the siding and replaced the ‘buffalo board’ insulation with the improved insulation board they have today but, even then, the house was not all that bad to heat before he did that. Comparing the mobile homes manufactured today with those of the past is like comparing a new Ford to a Model T.

11

Cardinal Homes and similar companies — modular prefabs. They go up easier than they move but I’ve known of both to be done with everything from a family home to a complete motel.

12

This would have been in the late aughts, about a decade ago. I did have solid, well insulated skirting, that’s not smart in this country, it’s just flat-out required. Once it gets colder than about -25 C, it starts becoming less effective. Once you’re colder than -40, if you don’t wrap your pipes you’re going to have a bad time, even with the best skirting you can get. Colder than -50 or with nasty windchills, and I needed to add supplementary heat, as the furnace wasn’t enough to keep it warm at that point. So it really depends on where you consider “extreme” cold to begin.

I will absolutely agree that modern mobiles are miles better than those of the past. A day will come where everything I have posted on the subject will be quaint and obsolete. However, we’re not there yet from what I have seen.

The problem with modular prefabs (as I understand them) as compared to traditional mobiles is that they are only designed to be moved once. Once they are transported and setup, they aren’t designed to move after that. Also, unlike a trailer, they need a foundation instead of just pilings. That makes them a poor choice for temporary housing.

13

A few of the logging camps use reefer containers that are already insulated. I don’t think they would stand up to extreme temps though. The companies buying them generally valued the minimalist rugged construction over comfort. They generally had a cook shack container, a bathroom/shower container, and living containers were split into two rooms with separate doors and one window each.

14

Dummy me, I just realized: Canuck = Canadian. So you probably did/do experience much colder temps than I do. :smack: Although, the ‘extreme’ temps do seem to be rising. I remember when I was a kid it was not rare to have a few -30F days and now that is an anomaly and the weather people go ape-shit over it.

I do apologize for trying to sound like a know-it-all in all things cold and mobile home related.

As with most anything, you get what you pay for. The more you spend, the better mobile home you are going to get.

15

I think the actual problem here is actually just a simple market failure.

From the perspective of a temporary worker, they don’t want to spend the money to ship anything in themselves. They might have to move next week, you never know, these type of jobs usually the foreman has the power to sack you instantly, you may get hurt, etc.

So they go look in the advertisements and pick the place that has the cheapest rent, or at least has the cheapest rent and seems livable when they look at it briefly.

They don’t know the energy cost from that inspection. Even 4" walls are fine if it’s high density foam insulation and at least R-20 to R-40. Heat pump heaters are more efficient than anything else down to a certain temperature (these days, around 0 degrees Fahrenheit). Condensing furnaces are another 30% more efficient than regular furnaces. For somewhere like North Dakota, triple pane windows are obviously the way to go.

But the landlord has no incentive to buy more expensive and efficient equipment or to buy trailers with thicker, more expensive foam because they aren’t paying the utility bill! And the renters don’t know what the utility bill is going to be, so they have no incentive to rent a place that is a little more expensive in the rent but way cheaper in the utility cost!

It’s a huge market failure and it basically applies to all rented housing. It kind of peeves me, actually - this is billions of dollars our society is throwing away because the landlords don’t have to honestly communicate what the energy costs are going to be added to the monthly rent.

The government setting and requiring minimum efficiency standards does help. Helps a lot, actually. But there are still many cases where it would be cost effective to do much better than the minimum (the extra annual cost in capital is much less than the savings) but renters have no ability to differentiate.