As my original question has been largely addressed and we’ve moved on to related areas, here’s something related that might be of interest - a monstrous ground rent scam on new home owners in the UK:
It dates back to the early years of this century. From the first ref (I re-ordered the paras for clarity and brevity):
A number of new build house developers began retaining ownership of freeholds at a pace never seen before. These leases were also granted over lesser periods than is normally the case…
…Well-known housing developers incorporated clauses into their lease contracts that obliged owners to pay increasing ground rents.
These charges were not explained clearly when the houses were sold.
Some people have also been unfortunate enough to be subject to ‘hybrid’ clauses. These effectively mean that their ground rents double every 10 years – sometimes over a lesser period.
Improbably, it was actually worse than it sounds, as in many cases the freehold of the land that homes were built on was then sold on to investment groups.
I believe (2nd article) the practice has now largely been stopped. But hell’s teeth, some people have no morals.
My mother lived in a double-wide in a trailer park until the end of her life. She liked it fine, but was totally at the mercy of the trailer park owner, who constantly laid down onerous rules and jacked up the monthly fees so high that no one would move in and the peoole there couldn’t sell. When my mom died we only got $20,000 for her trailer, which she bought for $80,000, because the trailer park fees killed the value of the homes.
But the most common use of mobile homes up here is for rural living and acreages. Land is quite cheap, but building on it terribly expensive in remote areas. You can buy a half acre of land off-grid around here for as low as $10-$20k. Then you can either spend half a million trucking in all the equipment for digging a basement and building a normal house on it with a septic field and all the rest, Or, you can buy a $75,000 mobile home and plonk it down and you have an instant home out in the middle of nowhere for cheap.
There are rural areas here where you can buy a complete home on a lot for $50,000, but it will be a mobile home. In an era where many peoole are homeless and city rents and prices are insane, this is a perfectly viable way to go. Put up a Starlink terminal and you are fully connected to the world and your cost of living is only a few hundred bucks per month. A scratch-built home on an acreage will generally be at least $150,000 for a not-very-nice home, or $250,000 for a decent one…
I can’t link to it, but I just found a single wide trailer on a quarter acre north of Edmonton for $42,000. It has a newish detached garage, a large cedar deck and another outbuilding (shop, storage, not clear) on the property. It’s even on a serviced lot with natural gas, electricity, and water.
Trailers serve a useful purpose. Not just for the poor, but for an inexpensive summer getaway or a home for retired people looking to cut monthly expenses so they can spend their time and money traveling or whatever.
My parents were snowbirds - had the house up north; got a trailer in Arizona. When my father died, it was hell dealing with that. They owned the trailer, but it was more expensive to get out of the lease of the park they were in than the worth of the mobile home.
I live in a trailer. We rent our trailer and the land it sits on. Right now, we can get the whole 2 bed, 2 bathroom house for cheaper than a 2 bed, 1 bathroom apartment, rent wise. There were a lot of reasons for moving into this place when we got it about 6 years ago. We could not afford a down payment to get a house proper is the biggest one. I still owe my soul to the student loan lenders and my husband did too at the time. We also don’t have rich family that could gift us the money. I think a lot of people discount how difficult it can be to rent in this market and still put together a down payment, especially if you have a large amount of debt from getting an engineering degree. Unfortunately, rent continues to go up and we have 2 children, a boy and a girl, and will need a larger place soon. We still don’t have money for a down payment, either (Have you SEEN how expensive homes are now?). I’m not sure what we will do in May when the lease is up.
Just to complete @Treppenwitz’ education in American stereotypes, the other thing with which trailers are memetically associated in our cultural idiom is tornadoes. Since house trailers are usually not as sturdy as traditionally-built homes, they’re vulnerable to bad weather; tornadoes can and often do inflict tremendous damage on trailers and their residents, and shots of destroyed trailers are almost a cliche in news reports after a storm. Which has led to memes about God hating trailer parks, and classist jokes about tornadoes being like Alabama divorces - someone’s going to lose a doublewide.
In addition to my other reasons: I don’t think we qualify for low income, or if we do our options here are NO SMOKING. I mean proof that my husband quit smoking 6 months ago. Also, if they find you smoking on the public street they can evict you. So that was a no go. Right now I can pay my “mortgage” and my lot rent for about half of what I could pay in rent on a house or apartment.
Yes, we have made some poor financial decisions in our lives, but this house is not one of them. We’re not “poor”, but we are older working class. My husband is retired and was disabled before that. I’m going to have to quit working altogether soon to take care of him.
My brother used to work in the bond industry, buying up blocks of mortgages and packaging them as investable bonds. He said the worst block of mortgages he ever bought was on a bunch of mobile homes in a trailer park. They didn’t own the land, and the trailer depreciates, like a car. Essentially all of them were underwater, in the sense that if the mortgage holder walked away and the bank possessed the mobile home, the bank would lose money.
Nonetheless, most people attempt to pay their debts, and the top tranches of the mortgage-based security were pretty decent.
In case anyone else was puzzled by clicking on the link and not hearing anything, I’m posting the following highly relevant link (which may be a duplication for some):
I think this song is very funny, and I think of it when I’m going about my house sometimes. It cracks me up that she’s trying to explain to her partner how great the new guy is. “He’s the Charlie Daniels of the torque wrench.” I love country music for dignifying a lot about the working classes. I also love trucking songs. Yes these are often a bit tongue in cheek, but they don’t feel like punching down.
Though I’m now no longer sure what kind of home we own. Pretty sure it’s a manufactured home. I was told by my father in law that these buildings are no longer the tornado hazard they once were because of changes in how they build the foundation. Also temperature control is… fine? It’s not perfect, but I’ve been to houses with worse heating and cooling problems. It gets cold in the master bathroom and sometimes I use a space heater in the bedroom. That’s about it.
I do remember being surprised how nice this community is because I was well aware of the stereotype and grew up in a few trailers myself. People are mostly friendly, they invest a lot of time and energy in their gardens and landscaping (way more than I do), and kids actually… play outside. It’s also a pretty ethnically diverse neighborhood and according to my FIL (then manager) he got a lot of interest from people of color who felt alienated in their apartment complexes (it’s a very white town). Really not a bad place to live at all.
There are some scary flags in some yards though. Lots of enthusiasm for guns and we had at least one (almost murder) suicide by firearm. Though we also have one trans flag! Who knows what you get in a typical neighborhood these days.
While I would never consider questioning your FIL, I was told that it is because older models weren’t attached to the foundation. Nowadays, in Tornado Alley they usually get strapped to big ol’ hooks that have been poured into the foundation.
We do not have said straps or hooks because we don’t live in tornado or earthquake country so there wasn’t much reason for the original owners to have them installed.
This was told to me by a drunk County building inspector at a Christmas party, so of course there is no question of the veracity of the story!
In Michigan we get occasional tornadoes of mild to moderate severity, however in the seven years I’ve lived in this community we haven’t had one. I don’t know if it’s this area in particular is less prone to tornadoes than the rest of Michigan, or if we’ve just been lucky. But I do know this thing is attached to a foundation, and we have a couple windowless rooms such as the walk-in closet, so I don’t feel unsafe. The only real issue we’ve had so far is frozen pipes. We had one really bad winter in the -20s windchill that froze our pipes and knocked out our power. I think they are more vulnerable than the pipes on a stick-built house because they are outside the house, but I’m not a plumber, so I’m not sure.
Even in the heart of tornado country you’re extremely unlikely to see one, much less have one damage your home. Even the extremely large (and rare) ones have a destruction width of only(!) a mile, and the most common stories are of a tornado destroying one home while the neighbor has only minimal damage.
Of course, if the random numbers come up “hit Spice_Weasel’s house”, none of the above matters.
That’s true. I’ve only seen three, and they were all at once (two were water spouts, one did not touch down thank God! I was stuck outside at a theme park and it was right over top of us). But they are scary. I had nightmares for years.
Out of curiosity, in which part of the country do you live? There are a handful of states that had no recorded tornadoes in 2021, and several more that had three or less during the year.
Central Arizona, wild fires and floods are our big thing. Our home is attached to the foundation, it just doesn’t have those mongo straps and hooks like Spice_Weasel’s home probably does.
I hear of a tunnel cloud or two a year but they don’t do any damage. Micro-bursts are a thing out here too, but I don’t think one could be strong enough to knock an unattached double-wide off the jacks.
Even back when we lived the unattached single-wide, we never had a moments concern about tornadoes or hurricanes. Wildfire is what scares us.
