In colder climates, you have the additional issues of poorer insulation and plumbing that is not buried below the frost line (and hence you have more susceptibility to frozen pipes).
There’s no moral valence to it. It’s just class coding, a shorthand for suggesting someone is poor, and trailer folk are far from the only people to experience this. Lighten up.
While there are some premanufactured homes (henceforth called “trailers” in this post) that are on plots of land that are owned by the resident of the trailer, the vast majority of them are in trailer parks.
Now, the interesting thing about trailer parks is that the usual arrangement is that the resident owns the trailer, but rents the land that it sits on. Now, while a trailer is called a mobile home, it is anything but. Moving one is extremely expensive, and is likely to cause damage.
So, the owner of a trailer is subject to the whims of the land owner. They can increase rent, and unlike a rental property, the resident can’t just leave and find something else in their price range. They are stuck, as they have a substantial investment in the immovable item that sits on the property.
Usually, for the price of rent and mortgage, they could have easily gotten an apartment with the same square footage, but they chose that they wanted to have a simulacrum of a single family home, even if it didn’t make any economic sense for them to do so.
They have made a series of bad financial decisions to get themselves into this position. The idea that someone who owns a trailer in a trailer park may continue to make bad economic decisions is fairly sound. And someone who lives in a double-wide has doubled down on that decision.
As someone who has experience bouts of poverty, I’ve seen quite a number of classist remarks on this board that go without any comment, not even by those choosing to take the position of outrage in this thread. The thing about people living in trailer parks isn’t that they are poor, often they make pretty reasonable money, it’s that they make bad economic decisions.
Someone with a double wide not only has made even worse decisions than their neighbors with their paltry single-wides, they also often feel smugly superior to those neighbors.
TL;DR The comment about trailers isn’t about poverty, it’s about decision making.
LOL Eastern CT - I see the neighbor’s goats or cow wander past eating my weeds on my security camera, I normally just give them about half an hour then I call him to come get them =) If I get really bored, I re-aim it to the street when the line crews or DPW are doing maintenance and watch the guys at work.
A “trailer” or “mobile home” can refer to either style, the one where the entire structure is itself a vehicle (which may or may not even still have its wheels attached), or something that was merely carried on a vehicle before being installed on the site. A “double-wide”, however, is nearly always the latter sort, and then there was also a significant amount of effort to seal the two halves together. The vehicle kind, you might be able to move to a new plot (though you’d still have to hassle with the plumbing and wiring connections and the like, and you’d probably want to remove all the furnishings first), but to even attempt it with a double-wide, you’d need to basically disassemble the house.
And they can be found in trailer parks, or on individual lots. Trailer parks are more common in more urban areas (or at least, on the outskirts of them), where land is more valuable, and individual lots are more common in rural areas.
I think you are wrong on this, especially about “double-wides”. I think there relatively few of them in parks. Parks are where you are going to find singles. Much more efficient use of the limited space available.
Also, once a “double-wide” is put up on a full perimeter foundation, it is no longer considered a ‘trailer’ in any way (at least around here, may vary by location). It is real property, a “house”.
Where I mostly see double-wides sited is on family property or other divided rural lots.
There is nothing at all bigoted about that statement, huh?
Maybe, but “why do they make such bad economic decisions” itself is also class coding.
People of every class make bad economic decisions. All receive some degree of mockery, but none get it as much as the poor. This is because one’s own sense of class entitlement is only secure to the extent that one can believe the lower classes are getting exactly what they deserve.
In my area the homeowner is responsible for the water installation, and thus how weatherproof it is. My cousin who has a double-wide (which was around $900 a month for 20 years) had to have the water line 18 inches deep (with around 500 feet of pipe from the meter on the road to the house).
It’s not all double-wide out there. America has also given us the tiny house
and the shotgun shack
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/HOUSE_IN_THE_FIFTH_WARD_OF_HOUSTON%2C_TEXAS._THIS_IS_ONE_OF_A_SERIES_OF_21_BLACK_AND_WHITE_PHOTOGRAPHS._THEY_DOCUMENT..._-_NARA_-_557633.jpg/459px-HOUSE_IN_THE_FIFTH_WARD_OF_HOUSTON%2C_TEXAS._THIS_IS_ONE_OF_A_SERIES_OF_21_BLACK_AND_WHITE_PHOTOGRAPHS._THEY_DOCUMENT..._-_NARA_-_557633.jpg
not to mention the Dymaxion
and the geodesic dome
I just looked at listings of trailer homes in my area, and most of them list how many “multi sectional” homes they have, and most are between 25-50%. Some of them have lower percents, and some don’t have it listed at all, but that does seem to be the trend.
Now, you may say that 25-50% is “relatively” few, but that’s arguing semantics against a claim I didn’t make.
Not in a trailer park, it’s not.
No, there is not, and I’m not sure you know what that word means, with the way you keep throwing it out like you do.
If someone ends up in debt, and it is said that they have made bad decisions to get there, do you call that bigoted, too? If so, you’d be wrong, but at least you’d be consistent in your wrongness.
Not really. I would say that Elon Musk has made some pretty bad economic decisions as well.
I’m not mocking them to point out the bad situation that they have put themselves in.
Not really. I mean, you may feel that way, but it doesn’t mean that it’s universal.
The point is, is that they have other options, and chose the worst possible one. Many make a whole lot of money, often much more than I do. But they don’t have any money, because it all goes into the money pit that is their trailer home.
I do see a little bit of bigotry here in the assumption that you and others in this thread are making that it’s only the “lower classes” that live in trailer parks. That’s certainly not true, just a stereotype that you are currently perpetuating. That is very classist, and you don’t even recognize it.
Most of these also don’t appreciate either. An ex-bf of mine’s mother lived in a trailer park (just down the street from the Crystal Cathedral). When she passed away, it was a real hassle, because the dang thing was worth less than his parents had paid for it (considerably) and no one wanted to buy it.
Did you… just not read what you were replying to, or was this selective quoting? I’ll refresh your memory.
Wow, you seem really concerned about stereotyping! Let’s see how long it lasts:
This is just plain ignorance and fabrication. I spent my early years growing up in a double-wide trailer that my parents paid $1750 for in 1970. As humble as it was, it was a capital investment that appreciated, and they sold it at a profit some years later, rolling it into a down payment for a small house. Lather, rinse repeat to the present day, in which they have a portfolio of dozens of investment properties. All from that one initial investment on the double-wide trailer. They were poor and low-status then. Now they’re not.
We can say mobile homes are a class marker where generally poor people live, without claiming they’re morons who don’t know how to spend their money. That’s just you showing your own ignorance.
In my previous career doing water damage mitigation, double-wides referred to a specific type of home construction that required a different strategy for drying and restoration of the home.
The quality of construction could vary widely. Many of the trailer homes that I encountered which were built in the 70s and 80s were of far lower quality than “stick-built” homes (those built entirely on-site). Starting in the early 90s the construction quality started improving and many of the newer (<1 year old) double-wides or premanufactured homes I worked on were of a quality very near to that of stick-built homes.
The area I lived in (SW Oregon) had many trailer parks. In general, each park catered to a certain clientele and some had generally poor quality single-wide homes while others had higher quality double-wides with attached garages. There were also many areas where the neighborhood consisted mostly or entirely of double-wide homes. I noticed no distinction between the type of people living in these neighborhoods from those living in traditional stick-build neighborhoods.
In the more rural areas, it was common to see a fairly high-quality double-wide (or even triple-wide) home constructed on a plot of 5+ acres well-developed with a driveway, lots of landscaping, etc. The homes were well cared for and not lacking for quality appliances or furniture, in my general experience.
My understanding is that the value of land appreciates, but the value of the mobile homes themselves usually depreciates.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Sammy Kershaw’s popular hit country song Queen of My Double-Wide Trailer, Sammy Kershaw - Queen Of My Double Wide Trailer (Official Video) - YouTube , which covers a lot of the stereotypes in lyrics and video, but I don’t think is mean-sprited.
I have lots of relatives who lived in such places. In my experience, it’s pretty common to have a prefab home while waiting / saving up for a purpose-built home. My cousin lived in one in an urban area in more or less a trailer park, though none of the homes were actually mobile, and it was a reasonably nice house, just… clearly pre-fab.
A neighbor just down the road from us lived in an old school bus. Never set foot inside it but I’m told it had it fixed up pretty nicely, meaning he had heat, running water, a flush toilet and electricity. He stacked bales of hay around it for insulation. It’s pretty common in a farming community for folks to use bales of hay that way, nobody thinks anything of it.
At some point he lost his driver license for drunk driving to a local bar. Then he got busted for drunk driving his lawnmower to the bar. Then he got busted for borrowing his neighbor’s horse and drunk horsing to the bar.
He was an interesting, quirky, and believe it or not, very intelligent guy. Always enjoyed talking to him, he was up on current events and could discuss damn near anything. I suppose he could be described as “trailer trash”. He had an alcohol problem, lived in an old school bus. But I still think he was pretty cool.
He passed about 10 years ago; apparently froze to death in his bus. Another neighbor is an EMT and had to use the “Jaws of Life” to rip a chunk of wall out of the bus so they could get his frozen body out.
Sorry for the hijack. Now back to your regularly scheduled program.
Yeah, a double-wide is just two normal sized trailers bolted together. You’re not going to tow one down the highway; they’re for permanent living only. I rented one once while awaiting Navy housing, and it wasn’t bad for temporary quarters. But they’re really hard to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer, as the walls are thin and poorly insulated. They also don’t fare well in high winds, tornados and the like.
No, I quoted your whole post, unlike you, who has selectively quoted my post.
It’s not me that needs a refresher here.
Then you have an anecdote that doesn’t apply to the vast majority of mobile home owners. They typically do not appreciate, that’s extremely rare, and your parents were very fortunate. Did they own the land, or did they rent? If they owned the land, then they have nothing to do with this conversation, and not only is your anecdote a cherry picked one, it’s also irrelevant.
If they owned the land, that is what appreciated, not the home on it.
You also seem to be saying that they didn’t have jobs? Is that right? Everything came from that investment? I doubt it.
I think that the problem here is that when I hear “lives in a mobile home” I think of someone who lives in a mobile home. When you hear “lives in a mobile home”, you think of where poor people live.
That’s your preconceptions, not mine.
Is this the home of a poor person?
https://www.cal-am.com/homes-for-sale/28-stonewall-drive/
($180K for the home, plus $610 a month rent, if you don’t want to click the link)
This is just your classism, thinking that only poor people live in mobile homes. That’s your ignorance loud and clear.
Do you actually know anyone who lives in a mobile home? I take it you don’t. You’re just making assumptions based on your preconceived notions.
OTOH, someone who buys an expensive item that has to sit on land they rent has made a bad financial decision. That’s all I said, everything else you whinged about came from your own biased assumptions that I’m talking about poor people.