The spouse and I probably have around ten years left until retirement, and we’re trying to decide what we want to do with ourselves. One of the things that’s come up a lot is where we’ll live, and what kind of living situation we want.
Right now, we live in the Bay Area, and we have a house in San Jose that’s appreciated in value enough that we can probably sell it and make enough money to buy a house outright in other, cheaper areas. Our mortgage isn’t high (by Bay Area standards) and we like it here, so one option is just to stay put–but prices are quite high here aside from the mortgage.
Last night, we were discussing two places we both wouldn’t mind living–in or near my original hometown in southern California (Ojai), or in or near our college town on the central coast (San Luis Obispo)–but both of them are expensive. Not as bad as here, but we probably wouldn’t be able to buy something outright in either place unless it was far tinier than we’d want to live in. Our house now isn’t huge (4 BR, 2.5 BA, about 1,600 square feet) but there’s no way we’re downsizing to some 900-square-foot 1-bedroom place. We’d both be miserable.
It occurred to me that a mobile home might be an option. I know there’s a stigma attached to “living in a trailer,” but my grandmother had one when I was growing up and it was pretty nice/spacious. We don’t have any kids and frankly aren’t worried about leaving an inheritance to anyone–I’d rather spend it and enjoy it than hoard it and have it end up with some relative.
For those who live in a mobile home (especially in a senior park), what do you think of it? What are the advantages/disadvantages? Do the new ones seem more like a house and less like a fancy motorhome? Can you have real appliances? Do upscale mobile home parks have security?
I’m thinking of the tradeoff between living in a town that’s pretty and small with good opportunities to go walking/biking/etc., vs. either staying where we are and dealing with the costs, or moving somewhere cheaper that we might potentially not like.
first off if a smaller place is something you dont want the moveable houses that sold these days isn’t going to help that because even in the big luxury ones they sell these days there’s not much space/privacy
if you do find a park make sure its owned/lived in by owners trailers only…that tends to keep out the stereotypical trailer park dwellers
another thing to watch out for is who pays for what…sure you might only be paying 100 a month for space but water, trash ect might be a separate bill for each
The biggest thing also is to get a list of the park rules …some make hoa’s look like democracies …or a total nightmare the owners of the park make the rules but there’s a "resident committee " that enforces it … or you can get a place that doesn’t care what you do as long as they get their monthly check …
Are you planning to do the “tour the country in an RV” thing that medium-budget seniors do?
If so, I will comment on the worst part of those RVs in my experience with them - the waste disposal. The poop dump tube setup is just not as clean and straightforward to use as you would think, there are a lot of ways to screw and and get waste on you…
No. Definitely not. I’m talking about mobile homes–the things that are essentially houses once you set them in their place–not motorhomes, the ones on wheels.
My dad and my grandmother both did the “tour the country” thing, but that doesn’t sound like fun to either of us. We might travel, but not that way.
I remember that poop-dump thing from when I was a kid and we used to take vacations in our motorhome. Not fun!
Mobile homes, Manufactured housing whatever you call them are hard to cool. Other than that they are just like any house. I’m talking about the ones that are set up permanently not an RV.
Certainly here in the Midwest there are problems with “manufactured housing” and severe weather. Out here tornadoes and high winds are the big issues, with cold winters coming in behind them (smart owners get insulation put under the trailer as well as the roof and walls) - what’s your severe weather like in California? That may or may not be an issue for you.
My mom lived for many years in a seniors-only park in Sunnyvale and it was…okay. About as nice as it gets and even the mobile home appreciated so much that she made a solid profit on it when she moved out. The main thing is that the front of the mobile home is almost always RIGHT on the street, there’s very little room between homes so privacy is minimal and the space rent can be pretty high, especially if you’re in a California town of any size. I think Mom was paying about $800/month for space rent by the time she left and sure there were amenities but nothing all that amazing.
The real downcheck of not owning the space your home occupies is that you can be subject to some petty rules martinets that make HOA boards and Nazis look cuddly and sometimes things can happen that can super fuck you over. I lived in a MHP where the lots were all big enough for a doublewide but it mostly only had singlewides so the owners went on a rampage and evicted a whole lot of people. Moving a mobile home is basically impossible once it’s been set down and even if you could it’s hard to move to another park because most of them have rules about how old a home can be moved in and most existing mobile homes won’t qualify. The only way you’re moving a mobile home will be to put it in a markedly worse park than you were in so don’t even consider it an option.
And mobile home parks have a lot of asphalt so if you’re in a place that gets hot in summer it’s gonna be REAL hot all around your house. It can be okay and it can be cheaper than a stick built house but there are inherent issues that you shouldn’t overlook.
Trailers – sorry, “mobile homes” – are built to HUD standards compared to traditional building codes, and those standards are garbage. You might get something that’s superficially nice, but everything under the skin is going to be the cheapest thing they could get away with while meeting HUD. Sure, stick-built will be the cheapest thing they can get away with while meeting building codes, but building codes are high, high quality.
There’s also the whole “trailer trash” stigma. It’s okay, I get to say that, because I was trailer trash for several years as the kid of a single mother. Granted, you’re looking for a “seniors” type of trailer park – sorry, “mobile home community” – so maybe there’s not as much stigma. My widowed aunt winters with her boyfriend in such a community in Florida. She doesn’t hate the trailer, but the community isn’t her cup of tea (she’s more accustomed to the rural lifestyle).
Yeah, we don’t have severe weather in the areas we’re considering. It can get hot in the summer, but it rarely gets below freezing even in the dead of winter, and we don’t have tornadoes, hurricanes, and other nasty weather. Just earthquakes, wildfires, and the occasional flood.
They can be–they go up to triple wides now that can theoretically be 4000 square feet. That’s not the usual in a park but still even an older single wide can push 1000 SF. Doublewides are the most common and you’re looking at up to 2400 SF for those.
And I think that you have the delusion that you know what you are talking about. I spend a lot of time at my cousin’s moble home (from the linked company) and it is bigger than my house. I don’t know if it breaks 2000 sq ft, but it has to be above 1,500.
I lived in a circa 1972 manufactured home for about 4 years. I lived by myself and it worked good for me. I only had 2 issues with the place. The water lines under the place were plastic and would freeze on cold weather. I added heat tape to fix that. The exterior walls were only 3 inches thick so there wasn’t much insulation. It had electric heat and was expensive to keep warm during the winter. It was also in a planned community for manufactured homes so I had to deal with the “trailer park” mentality of some people.
Maximum size for any one piece of a mobile home is 18’ wide by 90’ long with the average being 15x72. Then you can have them carved up into one, two or three chunks and by the time you get to a maximum size triple wide you’re looking at well over 4000 square feet of living area. I doubt there are many parks that can take a triplewide though, those are more likely to be set up on a bit of owned land.
(BTW, my cousin’s is on it’s own land, where her parents’s house used to be. As for appliances, it came with full-size stove, refrigerator and washer and dryer, microwave, dish washer (kitchen pretty normal sized, laundry room kind of small.) Also a 50-ish inch rear-projection TV (bought before LCDs were super cheap) and surround sound in the living room. Also has dining room, 3 bedrooms, 2 full baths (jacuzzi-style tub in master bath) lots of closet space for the bedrooms plus an extra closet-sized storage room. Sliding glass patio door, back deck and front porch all included in the package. It is around 15 years old now, no major problems with it (other than when a tree fell on it a cew years back, and insurance covered all structural and roof repairs.))
My in-laws live a senior mobile home park, so here are my general observations:
Its quiet. Since everyone is retired and most go to bed early it’s pretty much dead after 7pm in the summer and 5pm in the winter (this is in Southern Oregon). We live in a loud neighborhood with lots of white-trash types and I love the near silence whenever we visit my in-laws.
It’s pretty safe for vehicles and pedestrians. Light traffic (like in a cul-de-sac) and a few people walking their dogs is about it.
There are HOA-style rules governing lots of things, including the number of vehicles one can have, the paint color of each mobile home, how much stuff can be visible outside (no junk piles, etc) and so on. The one my in-laws live in isn’t particularly egregious, but one stipulation my FIL doesn’t like is people aren’t allowed to work on their own cars in the driveway. Another is the landscaping: no grass is allowed. My FIL put down barkmulch around his entire space and planted rose bushes, so he wasn’t too bothered.
Each mobile home space has one parking space next to the house and one curbside in front of it. The park itself has a dozen or so guest parking spaces, a couple of tenants have extra vehicles parked there which the owner is ok with. These are daily drivers, not junkers, which probably has something to do with it.
Mobile homes themselves have all the same amenities as a new stick-built home with one exception I’ll get to in a moment. The one my in-laws live in was built in 1996, and has 6" well-insulated walls as well as good insulation in the floor and roof. It has a ducted forced-air electric furnace from the factory. All the appliances are standard. Some of the finishes, like the bathroom faucets, were cheap crap but my FIL changed those out for better ones from Home Depot. But they were all standard fixtures, not RV-type stuff. They bought a heat pump 15 or so years ago and the HVAC guys required nothing special to install it in a mobile home. They’ve had to replace the flooring in the kitchen because the original linoleum was pretty ugly, and the new stuff was installed no differently than it would be in a regular house. 22 years later and they have not had to do anything maintence-wise that they wouldn’t be had to do a stick-built house. They’ve put on a new roof, the aforementioned linoleum replacement, and a new hot water heater. I think that’s it. They’ve had no problem with mold or sagging floors or similar maladies that plagues older mobile homes.
The one main difference: one problem they have had is the fact that mobile homes have to be set up on blocks, which means to enter the home requires 4 or 5 steps up to the front porch. As my MIL in particular gets older she’s having more difficulty with this. A ramp will eventually be needed.
My SIL is in the process of buying a mobile home and to some extent it’s kind of like car shopping: she can order one to her specifications, including the basic floor plan (almost all double-wides are at least three bed, two bath with some storage like linen closets and a pantry), color, and finishes. I think that’s pretty cool.
My FIL hates living in a mobile home park. They moved in in 1997 when the house they were renting was sold and they had to find a place to live pronto. They’ve been there ever since. My FIL’s major gripe is the lack of outdoor space and the close proximity of his neighbors: each mobile home is about 25 or 30 feet apart. With a 12ft wide parking pad, that leaves about ~15 feet of yard between each one, divided between them. There’s about 20 feet in front of each home and less than 10 behind each one. As much as my FIL gripes, I think it’s a pretty convenient way to live if one is ok with neighbors and small yards.
The one big downside is depreciation. Unlike a house on a piece of land, a mobile home in a park will be worth less than the purchase price a couple decades down the road. However, if you plan on living there for the rest of your life and don’t care who inherits it or the value of the home after you pass, it may be a great option.
Do your research on the park, especially if you’re going to be buying the no-longer-mobile home but renting the land underneath it. There have been shady mobile home park operators who lure folks in with good prices, then after the first year jack up the rent and foreclose, and repeat the process with a new buyer.