It seems to me the chief complaint of the OP about apartment living is the rent increase and the lack of equity. Perhaps buying a condominium would be best. You get the benefits of owning with potential increase in equity but the condo association pays for all exterior maintenance and any grounds maintenance. There are even condominiums that are separate structures that do not share walls in some areas.
Just googling, there are some that are pretty large.
Like any other type of rental situation, a lot depends on the owner/manager. We bought a MH, quite a steal actually, in a park where the manager thought she was Queen Shit of Turd Mountain. Seems she didn’t want to run a “mobile home park” as much a manage a “manufactured home community.” Her goal in life was to get rid of every older MH - of which ours was one - and get new ones in. She went after people for the pettiest of “offenses,” real or imagined.
In the three years we lived there, that mobile home park turfed out a third of its three hundred spaces. YMMV, but that seems like a lot.
‘Condo’ actually refers to the form of ownership, not the building style.
The ‘townhouse condo’ is a term sometimes used for free-standing units owned in condo fashion.
All condos have to have some means of maintaining common areas. That is usually a HOA, for better or worse.
A rare form of ownership is the co-op; a group of unrelated people pool money and buy a single property and divvy it up by some means. These have been hard to finance because there is no way for a lender to foreclose on the single asset.
1966 to 1973. 10 X 56 two bed room. In a regular MH Park, not trashy, not glitz. What we could afford and location for work was important.
Worked just fine.
Thanks for the comments. Guess I misunderstood about the mobile home and equity. I do like the idea of a tiny house and hope that movement really takes off. I definitely need to look into these options a little more carefully.
Chiming in to add my vote for condos. The wife and I own ours. I would like a house but despise yard work. Owning the condo unit ourselves, there’s no rent increase. There’s no yard work. I would go with a condo or townhouse.
The reason mobile homes don’t appreciate is that they don’t really last. Every corner has been cut in construction, and everything is integrated. Replacing the roof is an involved and expensive undertaking, assuming it is Even possible. You wont be replacing the siding, or upgrading the windows. All the plumbing fixtures are MH specific cheap assed junk. The plumbing is often exposed under the unit, and freezing problems are common in the winter.
Even the wheels are special limited milage rated junk. Like rated to last 500 miles junk.
I doubt they are still using aluminum wire, but I saw it in new mobile homes long after building codes had forbidden it for conventional homes.
The other reason they don’t appreciate is that they are often purchased by people that are financially unstable and are then dumped at the first layoff or when husband has to go to jail or whatever.
Unless you park it on concrete or sand, buying a trailer isn’t going to get you out of yardwork. Condo living is the way to go. Then you’d only have to worry about association fees and the risk of future petty tyrants. 
Tiny houses, very cool, but not optimal for the elderly or mobility-impaired. They aren’t necessarily a lifelong solution, which is why I’d shy away from it. All the ones I’ve seen have a ladder loft for the bed, composting toilet in lieu of actual plumbing, etc.
I lived in a mobile home the first winter I spent in the Pacific Northwest.
I wouldn’t recommend it.
There are almost no trailer courts around where I live anymore.
One thing to remember is trailers, unlike regular homes, lose there value over time.
Plus it’s been scientifically proven that trailer parks attract tornadoes.
A little bit late to the party, but if you’re looking for equity, I’d avoid on-frame and Pennsylvania-style “sectional ranch” modular houses as well. They’re basically double-wides built to local building code standards, not the national HUD manufactured home code. They’re kind of a loophole around local zoning codes that ban HUD and pre-HUD mobile homes outside a mobile home park, but don’t otherwise have architectural design regulations.
If a house has a rectangular footprint, vinyl siding, window placement that seems odd, and a 2:12 or 3:12 roof pitch, it’s going to say “mobile home” to all who see it – no matter how well it’s built, or how many gratuitous gables are on the facade.
Despite living in a pretty large home, I am obsessed with tiny houses. I have seen some really cool non-loft solutions. Back when I was single I once or twice lived in tiny studios. I could have easily adapted to a tiny home.
I lived in a 10 x60’ for nine years, '84-'92. It was furnished, in a nice park, and between two lakes. Rent was $195 a month, water and lawn service included. The park was more of a camping resort in appearance than a trailer park, and was just what I needed back then. Good luck finding that kind of deal these days. This was in the deep south, however. Heating bills can be extreme in a trailer where there are real winters.
Anyway, the fact that mobile home depreciate terribly can make them good buys used, if you’re lucky. The biggest advantage to them over apartments is that you share no walls with anyone else. Condos? I will never understand why one would want to own part of a building, overseen by fascist HOA busybodies.
How is a divorce like a tornado in East Texas?
Either way, somebody’s going to lose a trailer.
Lenders can most definitely foreclose on a co-op; the lien is placed on the shares issued by the co-op corporation.
Of course, if it’s not properly set up as a cooperative shareholder corporation, then it’s not really a co-op, it’s just a bunch of hippies living in a building.
Don’t pretty much all houses have rectangular footprints? Or do you mean flat out squares or rectangles? I live in a mobile home park, and there are a lot of houses here with extensions, addons, and non-rectangular footprints.
A lot of mobile home parks are run by HOA fascists. We are limited as to what colors we can paint our house, what things ee can have on the lawn, what size of animal (and how many) we can have, etc., etc.