What does "Double-wide" connote? (Non-American asking)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
44

I don’t think you can determine that absent of context.

But do you seriously think that’s what the original poster was referring to? Someone who makes bad financial decisions? Come on. It was clearly a pejorative for poor people, because of the persistent stereotype that Trump voters are poor and uneducated.

I like my manufactured home a lot, by the way. I wish I could haul it to a big plot of land, build a basement and live in it forever. But we are saving for a house. The thing is, we live in luxury here, so any house we purchase is going to feel like a downgrade in terms of space and amenities. But I think it will be worth it for a basement and a yard. I don’t think we need all this space anyhow.

45

This thread pissed me off!

Without going into a lot of very boring detail, I’ll merely say that Mr VOW and I own property in AZ, 36 acres. When we both retired from The State of Confusion, we wanted to settle on our land. The lots have graded access roads. Period.

We invested in a well, a filtration system, a pressure tank, all the paraphernalia and gizmos for solar electricity, including the panels and a propane generator, a septic system, and a propane tank with the lines to the house and to the generator.

All of the above listed accouterments for living cost a lot of money, and there were permits and inspections and fees.

After much discussion, we settled on a mobile home. Ours is a doublewide. “Mobile home” means the structure has axles, wheels, and a hitch. It CAN be moved from place to place. You don’t need to empty the house. Your possessions need to be packed up, and the furniture and the appliaces need to be placed so the load is balanced.

Since we knew we’d never move the home, we chose an area on the 36 acres, and aligned it to where we wanted it. The transporters took the wheels and removed the hitch.

Finagling with the bank and the County, we applied for an “Affidavit of Affixture.” This legally converts the home from something with wheels that can be moved over roads and highways thus needing license plates and tags, into a part of the real property where it sits.

The Affidavit requires that the Motor Vehicle Department remove the home and its VIN(s) from their database, and thus allows the County Assessor to re-valuate the land to include the home.

One of the major factors of us choosing a mobile home was TIME. We needed a place to live! And we were smart enough to shop wisely. Our home was manufactured in 2000, we bought it as a repo in 2005. The original price on the home, brand-new, was $90,000.00. We got it in 2005 for $45,000.00.

We’ve made improvements over the years, and we have plans to do more. One of the most substantial improvements was putting in a deck that goes completely around the house, varying in width from 8 to 10 feet. Instead of mobile home skirting, we have a concrete block stem wall.

In another three years, we will own everything free and clear. Not too shabby!

~VOW

46

Thank you. I had a question about what I should understand from words that I had not seen before. And how they were used.

Yeah, it’s the Dope and discussion happens. And I wouldn’t want it any other way. But thanks, Spicy.

j

47

Sorry‘bout that. It’s really late here. I’ll try to expand on that later.

j

48

Your home sounds lovely!

This is why I feel, absent context, you can’t just assume someone made a bad financial decision. Underpinning that assumption, for one, is the idea that every person has all the options. Many people cannot afford to buy a house, but they need more space than renting can provide. Many people just need a place to live ASAP and they pay less for a manufactured home than they would renting an apartment. Rent in my area has become astronomical. We are facing a housing crisis. The demand for homes like mine has increased because there really is no viable alternative for people who cannot afford to buy a house. And we’re lucky enough that our home is paid in full, so we pay a paltry sum for lot rent.

We had a bit of a strange situation. We were initially thinking of moving to a major city after finishing graduate school, but the cost of living was prohibitive. My husband’s father lured us here (our home state) by promising a good deal from the family business. There was some back and forth, but eventually we got the best possible deal.

We got the place brand new and so far the most expensive thing we’ve had to do is repaint the deck. We plan to sell it in another 3-4 years and use the money to finish the basement of a new home.

49

I am not the OP. But I am the American guy quoted by the German OP in his opening post asking about US usage. So IMO this is entirely my fault, not his.

I apologize to one and all for semi-starting what has turned into something that just barely fits in MPSIMS on its way to the Pit.

In my US-centric lexicon, “double-wide” beyond its value-neutral description of a type of residential construction connotes lower class, lower income, more rural than suburban. And all those things correlate with a greater propensity to be poorly educated, poorly informed, and socially / politically / religiously conservative in an unsophisticated manner. Which is how it tied into Trump supporters in my post quoted in the the OP.

To be sure, there is a lot of local and regional variation in how and where double-wide housing is actually deployed as well as who lives in that sort of housing.

As many valuable posters here have since pointed out, that’s a bigoted stereotypical concept that might have been commonplace usage 40 years ago, but besides being inaccurate then and now, it’s socially inappropriate in the modern era. It’s merely a slur. Which is not something appropriate for me, or for the SDMB.

I’ll not be using it again. Sorry for the offense I’ve caused.

50

I live in a double wide. It is not cheap ass housing. It’s just a type of mobile home. They are not a trailer with the wheels removed. Your representation is offensive,

51

I live in the middle of a major suburb, hardly rural.

52

Offensive. My parents moved from the Bay Area after the '89 earthquake, sold their house, and used the proceeds to buy this double wide. There were no bad economic decisions, it was just a personal choice.

53

This park is about 50% single wides and 50% double wides. And there are 200 of them here.

54

Not quite correct. Trailer parks won’t be in the middle of the city, of course, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re all in rural areas. They might well be surrounded by suburban neighborhoods or even industrial or commercial strips.

The stereotype is simply one referring to low economic classes, that is, the poor. Not necessarily rural, or even white. Although, poor black people are more likely to be found in the middle of the city rather than at the edges.

And as posts above indicate, the stereotype is not always true.

55

@Gatopescado

In my post upthread, I gave a detailed description of what it takes to turn a mobile home into a house.

A mobile home is registered at the State’s Department of Motor Vehicles. It is issued license plates, it is registered, and the State earns revenue with the plate tags. In Legalese, a mobile home, like a car, motorcycle, or a boat trailer is considered to be “chattel.”

While removing the wheels and the hitch and planting flowers and adding a walkway certainly makes the mobile home look nicer, it is still chattel. It is considered movable property and it is not fixed to the land.

To convert the mobile home to real property, the owner needs to obtain an Affidavit of Affixture, or whatever document required by your State. Two things happen to get this document: the mobile home, the license plate, and the VIN of the home must be removed from the DMV database. Then the owner takes the proof of the DMV action to the County Assessor’s Office, where the home becomes real property, part of the land.

Once the Assessor gives the okie-dokey, the Affidavit of Affixture is issued, and it is then added to the County records.

It’s all a process by the State Government, so naturally it is convoluted. The DMV can no longer obtain revenue through the license tags, but the County can increase the value of your real property, and tax you.

~VOW

56

In Mesa, AZ, the snowbirds and retirees who chose manufactured homes have three styles:

Single wide
double wide
Park model.

The single wide and double wide can be on rented land or owned land.

Some of the older 55+ communities around me, where the home owner owns the land, have a mix of single, double and stick homes. As time goes on, more and more manufactured homes are being replaced with new stick homes. NONE of them are “trailer trash” communities.

Park models cater to snow birds. They are much closer to “tiny homes”. Very small, and on rented “parking spots”, basically. They are packed in like sardines. These are definitely for the poorer snowbirds who have their lives and regular homes back in Iowa and wherever, or those who have almost no stuff and live lives of quiet desperation. :slight_smile: I think NYC apartments are bigger.

Here is a typical 55+ community near me. This immediate area has a mix of older (1960s) singe- and double-wides, and newer stick homes. You can see by crusing around that some are more fixed up than others. Some have entire new facades that make them look more like stick homes. Originally, all had carports, but many have enclosed them into garages.

Notice the golf cart. I picked this one as the anchor because many people get around on golf carts within the 'hood. Some houses have garages for the car, and a separte mini garage for a golf cart. This one does not have a garage - been a carport since it was new. But it has on the other side an enclosed “Arizona room”, which is a fancy screened porch. Very common.

57

Our first home was a trailer. It had the wheels and axels under the skirting and the hitch had been turned into a flower bed. It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. We paid 20G for the trailer and the fenced in lot it was on. It was affixed to the property, no DMV fees for us.

We sold the that place for 60G and paid 80G for a doublewide and property. Again, it was affixed and because of the brick stem wall and front and back decks, not very movable.

We paid cash for our current place. It is a manufactured home with upgraded insulation, triple pane windows, a mobility ramp, a very nice deck and a catio. OP, I sent you a link to the real estate ad from when we bought it so you can see what a double wide looks like today. We only paid 140G for it in 2019, it has appreciated nicely since then so the listing now shows 249G.

I don’t think we made bad financial decisions during the course of our home buying years. We don’t have a mortgage, we don’t have car payments and are happily retired with a comfortable financial cushion.

58

A family friend and his wife owned one. It was, as explained, a two-part house that could be trucked to the site, and assembled on site. And my friends’ was very nice; I had no idea it was a double-wide until they said so.

Theirs was not in a trailer park; it was on a few acres of land they owned in Hastings County, Ontario.

59

Rick_Kitchen, I wasn’t describing their reality, which is clearly, from this thread, quite variable, but the connotation in casual speech.

One of my rancher friends lived in one and frankly you couldn’t tell that’s what it was, from the inside or the outside. It just looked like a house.

60

I mentioned above my cousin’s (and next-door neighbor, a few hundred feet away) double-wide. She had a very large dying oak around 10 feet away from it. She had a few tree people look at it about taking it down but they wouldn’t touch it–too risky a job for them. Then one day I heard a loud crash and guessed immediately what I would see–the tree lying across the entire length of the trailer. The first point I want to make with that was that the trailer wasn’t crushed by a huge tree falling on it–the room nearest the fall had a sudden limb installation through it from above and it needed a new roof, but the structure as a whole was intact. The second point: it was fully insured through the company since she was still paying it off, and I spent some days there keeping watch over the crews replacing the roof and redoing the holed (and later water-damaged) room. When they replaced the broken windows in that room, the worker mentioned to me how the originally double-paned windows would be replaced with triple-paned ones. In the 10 years or so since the construction of the trailer and that point, state regulations had been updated to require triple-paned windows for all manufactured housing.

61

I think the 55+ communities can be very different from the non-age restricted communities in the same area. When i was looking for a winter home a few years ago, we looked at some 55+ communities in Florida and they had all sorts of amenities. There was one company that owned 5 or 6 locations and if you were a resident of one, you could use the amenities at all of them so you could use the boat slip/golf course even if you live at one of the other locations. The lots were larger than the 20x100 lots that houses are built on in my neighborhood. They had single double and triple-wides in addition to concrete block houses. We ended up also looking at a couple of non-age restricted parks which had maybe a pool and community room as far as amenities go. They were all mobile homes, no site-built homes at all. They were very close together. The two types looked very different and I would have lived in the 55+ ones but absolutely not in the non-age restricted ones.

I can understand putting a mobile home on rented land ( or buying one that already is on rented land). Theoretically they can be moved - it’s not going to be easy , but at least in theory you can if the lot owner sells to a developer. You can’t really do that with a house that was built on site , so I don’t understand why a person would buy/build one on rented land rather than either renting a house/apt or building/buying a house on land that they own.

62

That’s true now but when the term/meme was first coined “double-wides” tended to be found in trailer parks and rural areas. Considerable lobbying on the part of the industry resulted in greater acceptance of “manufactured housing” both socially and legally.

That said, even single-wide trailers can be pretty decent living accommodations. The major problems are:

  • Once in place they aren’t really movable. Relocating is largely not possible. Sure, in theory this could be done but in practice not so much and for older units even more problematic. This can be a big problem for those actually in trailer parks where the occupant might own the trailer but not the land it is on. If the park/landlord goes out of business that can result in occupant’s losing their homes

  • Unlike most real estate, historically these residence depreciated, they did not gain in value over time. This no longer applies universally, but it can still be a problem. Won’t bore you with the details.

  • They are absolutely terrible in tornado country - which is a major geographical swath of the US. More and more jurisdictions are requiring storm shelters be built for people in trailer parks, new construction might have integrated safe rooms/shelters, and for those siting these homes on private land putting a basement/storm cellar underneath are possible options.

  • They aren’t always well insulated. This can make keeping them cool in summer a problem, but even more so in the northern regions keeping them warm in winter. There is also the problem of frozen pipes. There are insulating techniques that can ameliorate this, and they’re becoming more common for new units, but older ones can be really frickin’ cold in winter.

  • Getting financing for these things can be a big problem. The mortgage systems for stick-built houses often refuse to finance them. This is not as bad as it used to be, particularly for the higher-end manufactured housing bought from the factory which may help facilitated financing, but historically was an issue.

I’ve seen triple-wides, too, although those are not at all common.

Some modern double-wides are actually really damn fine houses. Although the industry prefers “manufactured housing” due to past stigma.

^ And that is the essence of the term when used as a slur or insult.

Other common related terms are “trailer trash” and “White trash”. Low-status poor people, often with assumptions of poorly educated, loose morals, substance abuse, violence, and other such negative stereotypes.

Again - I have had friends and associates who lived in trailer parks in both single and double-wides. Many of these places, while they do tend to be poor, can be relatively nice little neighborhoods and the units can, if maintained and kept up, be very nice homes. Like many stereotypes there is a grain of truth in it, but it unfairly smears many people who live in such places who are not at all the stereotype.

In my current county we have old-style trailer parks (including one now shut down and removed due to being a cesspit) as well as a number of “manufactured houses” of various sizes and styles placed among stick-built homes in various neighborhoods. If you know what to look for (perhaps you researched purchasing one yourself) you can spot them, but otherwise you can’t easily distinguish them from stick-built. I will say most of the “log-cabin” style homes in my county are actually single and double-wide units.

Unless the person purchased a used trailer outright (they often be had cheaply by someone desperate to move, or from the estate of someone deceased). In which case the occupant(s) might wholly own the trailer and only have the cost of the rent.

In the past this often was a reasonable situation for the poor/working class. Indeed, for many of my trailer-occupying in-laws down south this made fiscal sense. Over the past two decades, though, lot rents starting increasing a great deal, faster than inflation would account for.

And yes, there are other people who made poor financial decisions, but not everyone living in a trailer is there because they’re a screw-up. Next county over from me there are essentially two types of housing: large single-family homes and trailers. There are no multi-unit apartment buildings outside of one small town. The vast majority of working-class people can’t afford the large homes on farm-size lots so they live in trailers as that’s really the only option for the poor and lower middle class. So it’s not unusual for hardworking, fiscally responsible people to spend part or a large part of their lives living in a trailer.

Given how quickly a trailer can go to shit if not kept up you can usually spot the difference fairly easily.

63

In my area trailer parks, outside of a few that were always intended as senior citizen housing/communities, are universally lower class. Anyone middle-middle class or up with a manufactured home have them on private lots. That’s our local reality.

I think upscale trailer parks are more common on the coasts, particularly the west coast. As to whether or not living in such a place makes fiscal sense… it depends on context. Sure, a lot of time it’s not a good decision, but people make bad decisions in regard to buying stick-built houses, too, and condos, and various other living arrangements.

It varies.

Particularly in recent decades.

Probably the best summation is that such housing can and does depreciates, but in certain areas and circumstances it can hold its value or even increase in value. Older units in trailer parks are more likely to depreciate, newer units on private land more likely to increase in value, but there are exceptions in either category.