Tag: mobile homes

Rule 1: own the land under your home

If you’re in the economic bracket that forces you to live in a trailer park, recent news has been alarming, with more than half-a-dozen such parks announcing their imminent closure just within the past week. Yet a growing number of RV parks also are encouraging campers to stay year-round, offering what may seem like a much needed housing alternative—until you realize it’s just another version of the same trap.

Mobile home park closures have been epidemic across the country, driven by aging infrastructure, rising land prices and various one-off circumstances. Officials in Grayling Township, Michigan, for example, have turned off the water to the aging Timberly Village Campground and Mobile Home Park because of its ongoing non-compliance with waterworks regulations: residents are on notice that the entire park will be shut down within a couple of weeks. The city of Flatwoods, Kentucky, meanwhile, has started eminent domain proceedings against a dilapidated trailer court on land it wants to use for a new fire house and city park.

Elsewhere, residents of the Dallas Pike Campground and Mobile Home Park in Triadelphia, West Virginia, received notice that they have 60 days to move out, reportedly because new owners will be using the land for oil and gas industry purposes. In Big Sky, Montana, the George Norman Trailer Court is up for sale after decades of providing affordable housing for local workers, with every expectation that the buyer will find a more profitable use for property located in prime skiing country. And in southwest Nebraska, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is demanding that 110 mobile homes be moved off leased federal land that they’ve occupied for decades to make way for a new campground, glamping tents and cabins, a splash pad and a dog wash.

That’s a whole lot of people learning, all within the space of a week, that they’re about to become homeless. But the reality also can be more complicated. In Louisville, Tennessee, only some of the residents of Country Acre Estates are getting the boot—the ones living in RVs. After more than 30 years, city officials abruptly realized that town ordinances regulating trailer parks restrict tenants to manufactured homes only. The occupants of 11 RVs at Country Acre Estates now have until the end of June to move out, but are complaining there’s nowhere for them to go.

Decades-old “mobile” homes are essentially immoveable, too old to withstand relocation, which means their owners typically are out on the street when the trailer court closes. But while even old RVs may be more mobile than mobile homes, the ones used as permanent shelters have two strikes against them, the first exemplified by the Country Acre Estates situation: barred from mobile home parks, such RVs also run up against park rules or municipal regulations that prohibit stays of more than two weeks at many campgrounds, which are viewed primarily as short-term recreational facilities. Moreover, many private campgrounds ban RVs that are more than ten years old, which would affect virtually all RVs that have been fixed residences. The combination can result in a severe lack of options—or none at all.

The other strike against using RVs for full-time housing is their substandard construction when compared with mobile homes. Although the RV manufacturing industry vigorously asserts that its products are intended purely for recreational purposes and are not suitable as permanent housing, the claim has a wink-wink and nudge-in-the-ribs quality, given the way these things are marketed—but by maintaining the fiction, RV manufacturers don’t have to comply with more stringent federal housing standards, such as using licensed electricians to wire their extraordinarily flammable creations. (For more on this scam, see here, here and here.)

The lower standards applicable to RVs are why Louisville and other municipalities prohibit them—at least on paper—from trailer courts. Yet as the Dallas Pike Campground and Mobile Home Park, and the Timberly Village Campground and Mobile Home Park also underscore, not everyone makes that distinction. Many mobile home parks adopt an ecumenical approach that regulatory agencies typically ignore.

Now, increasingly, RV parks are following the trailer court playbook—and as the pace of trailer park closures picks up, the pressure on RV parks to further accommodate long-timers will increase. The basic economic argument supporting that trend was laid out this week by Frank Rolfe (among others), in his observation that “one of the worst attributes of RV parks is that the customers leave . . . and every time they leave, you have no revenue on that space.” Which is true as far as it goes, although the same can be said of any segment of the hospitality and entertainment industries: whether it’s hotels or amusement parks, restaurants or ball parks, customers come and go. But Rolfe, whose commercial real estate portfolio is dominated by mobile home parks, has yet to see an RV park he wouldn’t prefer to convert into a residential property.

Rolfe’s comments came in yet another of his “RV Park Mastery Podcasts,” a series of more than 80 (and counting) sermons to actual and would-be RV campground owners that relentlessly promote RV parks as just another species of trailer courts. This week’s episode was devoted specifically to the wisdom of RV parks having park models, although in a broader sense it was arguing on behalf of permanent occupancy. For Rolfe, it all comes down to attaining “a more dependable revenue stream,” but also of getting on the right side of changing economic trends, most notably “as housing prices have become impossibly high.”

Deconstruct Rolfe’s approach and you’ll soon figure out that what he’s actually advocating is the transformation of RV campgrounds into cheaper mobile home parks. As he relates, “We have brought in literally over 100 park models into one of these RV parks, and they’ve all been sold and people live in there happily, and we as park owners . . . attain extremely stable income.” But as in mobile home parks, the owners of those park models don’t own the land on which they sit. And while park models theoretically are “mobile,” they are as unwieldy to move as house trailers, as well as being built to RV standards rather than more stringent HUD regulations.

All of which means that when things go south, as they so often do, the park model owner may be just as trapped as his or her mobile home counterpart. But that really isn’t Rolfe’s concern, and as increasing numbers of RV parks get snatched up by institutional investors whose primary interest is return on investment, it won’t be of concern to a growing number of RV park operators, either.

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Just lookin’ for a home . . .

While most people, I suspect, still view RVs as–well, as recreational vehicles–the truth is that a growing proportion of all that rolling stock is being used for permanent housing. Sometimes that’s because RVs are mobile and their owners are seeking a gypsy lifestyle. More and more often, however, it’s because they’re relatively cheap and therefore available as default housing for people one step from homelessness.

One set of clues about this development comes from U.S. census data, another from manufacturing statistics from both the RV and manufactured housing industry associations. What the latter show is that for decades after World War II, low-cost housing in the form of mobile homes was cranked out by the tens of thousands, eventually peaking at nearly 580,000 built in 1973 alone. The average cost for a new house trailer that year was under $9,000–compared with an average $32,500 for a site-built home. No wonder, then, that by 2001 slightly more than 7 million house trailers dotted the American landscape, with roughly one-third of them concentrated in mobile home parks.

But by then, the leading role of house trailers as the cheapest form of housing was already being eclipsed by the RV sector: in 2,000, for the first time in U.S. history, RV production exceeded that of mobile homes, 300,100 to 250,400. And while RVs come in various shapes and sizes and even today are bought more often for recreational purposes than for residential ones, the production gap grew wider every year thereafter. By 2020, only 94,400 house trailers rolled off the production line, compared to 430,400 RVs. This year, more than 600,000 RVs will be produced, and even more are projected for 2022.

With RVs priced, on average, slightly more than half of what it costs to buy an average mobile home–$42,617 vs. $78,500 in 2020–and only a fraction of the median U.S. home price of $374,000, it’s easy to see why people with little money might start looking to RVs as housing alternatives. Indeed, the U.S. Census Bureau, observing a slow but steady decline in mobile homes in its biennial housing surveys, in 2015 made up much of the difference by adding a new housing category labeled simply “other,” defined as “boat, RV, van, etc.” “Other” clocked in at 69,000 in 2015, 75,000 in 2017 and 96,000 in 2019. The 2021 numbers should be out soon, and undoubtedly will notch another increase.

None of this is definitive–yet–but does strongly suggest that more people are turning to RVs for affordable housing. That, in turn, means more demand for RV spaces in campgrounds, as well as on the streets for people who can’t afford campground fees.

There’s one more data point that’s relevant: the growing number of “tiny homes,” which unlike RVs are intended as full-time residences but which usually don’t meet zoning and other requirements for conventional year-round housing. Half beast, half fowl, they often cruise the countryside on their wheeled chassis in a frustrating search for a roosting place. This week the Tumbleweed Tiny House Co. came to their rescue, issuing a nationwide list of “over 250 places to park your tiny house”–the great majority of them, it turns out, being RV campgrounds.