Jonny5
Senior Member
This is a great long read covering the whole history of the mobile home, or the "manufactured home" in the current parlance of their manufacturers, or "trailer home" as they were called originally.
The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home - Part I
(note this part goes through from the 1920's to about 1970. Part II will likely come out next week, but this part itself is a great read)
It covers everything from their historical origins from homemade camping trailers in the 30's, to growing usage during the World War II, to becoming a permanent part of the housing landscape, and all that entailed from government regulations (they are considered vehicles, not houses for regulation purposes) and the well known social stigma of living in a trailer park.
Some excerpts to whet your appetite.
The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home - Part I
(note this part goes through from the 1920's to about 1970. Part II will likely come out next week, but this part itself is a great read)
It covers everything from their historical origins from homemade camping trailers in the 30's, to growing usage during the World War II, to becoming a permanent part of the housing landscape, and all that entailed from government regulations (they are considered vehicles, not houses for regulation purposes) and the well known social stigma of living in a trailer park.
Some excerpts to whet your appetite.
Almost as soon as trailers appeared, they began to be used for year-round living rather than camping trips, typically by traveling salesman or other itinerant workers. In the 1920s and 30s it was estimated that between 10 and 25% of trailers were used for year-round accommodation. And as unemployment soared and housing starts collapsed during the Great Depression, trailer living became more common.
In 1954, Marshfield Homes debuted a mobile home that was 10 ft wide. The brainchild of Elmer Frey, the 10-wide was too wide to be used as a regular vehicle - it could only be transported by acquiring special permits of limited duration (the original 10-wide was permitted as a construction shack, rather than a trailer.) But the added width gave it additional space and provided enough room for a corridor. The 10-wide was an immediate success, and by 1961 98% of new mobile homes were 10-wides.
The relaxation of highway regulations allowing transportation of larger units made mobile homes competitive as a low-cost housing option, and sales of them exploded. Mobile home sales increased from 90,000 in 1960 to nearly 600,000 in 1972, going from 8% to 22% of annual housing units produced. By 1974 mobile homes were produced by over 300 firms in 800 plants across the country, and across the country 9 million people were living in nearly 4 million mobile homes. 41% of those mobile homes were in trailer parks, which now numbered over 24,000.
Despite their increasing use as permanent housing, the stigma against trailers remained. Anthropological studies of trailer parks referred to them as “trailer slums”, and one municipal official was quoted in an article for Survey magazine: "A new kind of slum, the permanent trailer camp, offering all the bad features of the urban “blight area,”, none of the vacation adventures for which trailers were made. Trailer camp slums are a very real, if as yet unrecognized, menace to our American way of life. They should be eradicated now, even in the face of an acute housing shortage, for the creation of even more slums is not the solution to the problem of housing shortage."
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