The Unknown World Of The Mobile Home, by John Fraser Hart, Michelle J. Rhodes, and John T. Morgan

I must admit candidly, as it strongly affects my own view of this book, that the world of the mobile home is not unfamiliar to me. In many ways, my experience is fairly typical for those the authors are writing about, although not necessarily writing to. In this book, I find myself as the subject of observation, but not the intended audience, which is an uncomfortable position to be in. For the first fourteen years of my life I lived in three different mobile homes in two different states in families marked both by poverty as well as an extreme unwillingness to spend more money on housing than necessary [1]. The houses I grew up in were detached trailers on a certain amount of property and were not part of trailer parks. Many of my neighbors were, like me, people from working class backgrounds living in the rural South, of mixed backgrounds between poor whites like myself and Mexican-Americans who lived where they did because the picking was good. At times I visited my future stepfather’s family in the retirement trailer community they lived in, and have visited other such communities while traveling with friends of mine in the ministry in visits to different congregations. Other friends of mine have lived in trailers, even campers, for parts of their lives, and I have never viewed that as a reason to look down on anyone or to accept anyone looking down on me, or even to feel as if my childhood had been deprived because of the manner of residence.

The contents of this book are straightforward, and highly interesting as they represent sound scholarship on an area that few intellectuals pay attention to, and an aspect that is nearly entirely forgotten in discussions of affordable housing [2]. The first part of the book gives the background to how mobile homes came to fill the United States, looking at the development of trailers and early trailer parks, the use of such housing during World War II, the development of the HUD code, and the problems of siting mobile homes given the widespread hostility to such housing on the part of city planners and people interested in property speculation. The second part of the book looks at single-sited trailers in a diverse range of places from Kentucky to northern New Mexico to Mercer County, North Dakota (of the oil boom) to upstate New York, rural Wisconsin, the Spersopolis of the south, and coal fields. Part three looks at side by side trailers in Montana and Southern California, as a sign of the development of the West. The fourth chapter looks at trailer parks in their diversity from the Twin Cities to Southwestern Kansas to the Long Neck of Delaware to Florida and Southern California. The conclusion and epilogue present the trailer as an essential aspect of affordable housing in the United States, and its stigma as a sign of unproductive and lamentable prejudice.

I do not claim to be an unbiased reader of this book, seeing as parts of the book made it a point to look very close to where I grew up, a little too close for comfort (Zephyrhills, to be precise). This is a book that is painful and even a bit awkward to read, as it discusses the loathsome ways in which people in many parts of the country view those who grew up in trailers, and the long-term results of that stigma in a striking absence of affordable housing and in the creation of lengthy drives between areas sufficiently spacious and inexpensive for many people and their jobs. The book is a painful reminder of the external costs of long-held and inaccurate biases, and puts a light on a situation that has not received enough sustained attention in zoning and taxation, where it appears that the interests of cities and the sorts of people who do the work available are at cross-purposes, with little communication or mutual understanding.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/08/27/im-po-but-im-proud/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/double-wide-single-minded/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/06/12/strawberry-blonde/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/the-past-is-another-country/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/on-becoming-a-violist/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/03/04/some-minutes-of-the-vancouver-affordable-housing-community-forum-meeting-part-one/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/03/11/some-minutes-of-the-vancouver-affordable-housing-community-forum-meeting-part-two/