99% Invisible - 307- Immobile Homes

Episode Date: May 16, 2018

"Part of the paradox at the heart of manufactured housing," explains Esther Sullivan, a sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver "is that it's precisely the thing that makes it so affordable that also makes this a highly insecure form of housing." Sullivan says that about a third of mobile homeowners live in parks where they rent a plot of land for their home. She calls this arrangement halfway homeownership, because it’s filled with  uncertainty. The property owners can raise rents, or fail to maintain communal infrastructure, or even sell the park and evict everyone living in it. Often there isn't a lot that residents can do, but now there is a new movement of cooperative ownership of mobile home parks. Immobile Homes

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The state of Utah has about 3 million people, and a third of them live in one valley, surrounded on three sides by 7,000 foot mountains into the northwest, by a great salty lake. The valley is home to the state capital, Salt Lake City, and a bunch of other small cities and towns that over time have grown together into one big mass. One of the towns amid the sprawl is Midvale. Okay, we are in Midvale, Utah. Producer Emmett Fitzgerald recently took a trip to Midvale, Utah to visit a mobile home park.

I am standing outside of the Applewood community. Applewood is a small mobile home community for seniors. You have to be 55 or older to live there. It's about seven acres with 56 lots and it looks a lot like the rest of suburban Midvale except the houses are smaller and closer together. It has its own little road with its own speed limit, 10 miles per hour. It's a very quiet community, except for that weed locker. And the houses are just a few feet apart, but they all look nice. They're in a really good shape. A little garden's out front of each one.

Some daffodils. Let's see, should I use this side entrance or the front entrance? Hello! Hi, I'm here! Thank you. This is Charlene Stoven. She convinced me I needed to come visit Applewood after one phone call. There's something in my voice on the phone that attracts people.

I can get on that phone and I'm not bra breaking but I can get anything I want. I don't know how to do it. Charlene's home is immaculate. She has spotless white carpeting from wall to wall and all this modern furniture that's been carefully color coordinated. And it's really spacious inside. She says that when people first walk in they seem surprised that a mobile home could be so nice. They'll say, this is a home when I'm going, Yeah, it's a manufactured home and it is built stronger and better than 90% of these little track rooms that you find.

But it's hard for people to get past this tunnel vision of trailers and trailer trash. Mobile homes don't get a lot of love in our culture, but they represent a lot of the affordable housing in the United States. Throughout the 90s, mobile homes made up about two- lot of the affordable housing in the United States. Throughout the 90s, Mobile Homes made up about two-thirds of new affordable housing. Charlene bought her Mobile Homes or manufactured home in 1994. She was divorced. Her kids were grown up and out of the house. She wanted to buy her own place, but she couldn't afford a tracked home in the suburbs. When I thought I was just excited to think,

I can actually now have a beautiful home that I can afford. Those track homes I couldn't afford. I had a borrow money and the loan on the borrowing of the money plus the pad fee was less than what I was paying to rent an apartment. But when you buy a manufactured home, the structure itself is only half of the equation. Then you need to find a place to put it. And Charlene found what seemed like the perfect spot, a small, quiet, mobile home park with an empty lot. When I moved here, I moved to your

February of 1994, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I have a little bit of a backyard and I plan a little bit of a garden. My little tomato home, my cucumber, I want just a little bit of a backyard and I plan a little bit of a garden. My little tomato and my cucumber, I want just a little bit of ground and this is just enough, it's perfect. But it wasn't actually perfect. The same dynamic that made this housing situation great for Charlene also made her vulnerable because the mobile home was hers but the land underneath it wasn't. Part of the paradox at the heart of manufactured housing is that it's precisely the thing that makes it so affordable, that also makes this highly insecure form of housing.

This is Esther Sullivan, a sociologist at the University of Colorado, Denver, who studies the relationship between poverty and housing. She says that about a third of mobile homeowners live in parks like Applewood, where they rent a plot of land for their home. She calls this arrangement halfway home ownership because it's filled with all this uncertainty.

Residents in parks basically live at the whim of the property owner, where the property owner has the majority of rights in that community. So they are subject to oftentimes poor and shoddy maintenance, ever-increasing rents, and eventually they can be subject to park closure and redevelopment with very little notice. One day in 2011, Shirley came home and found a letter.

We all received this letter. Your rent is now going up $89 per month and in six months it's going to go up another $89 per month. For decades, the owner of Apple would have taken good care of the park and kept rent slow and affordable, but there were new owners now. And we all went ballistic. Who can afford 89? care of the park and kept rents low and affordable, but there were new owners now. They managed to negotiate the increases down to $70 each, but still in a six month period the rent for each lot went from $320 to $460.

And rumors started swirling that the increases might just be the first step in a plan to force them out. And so Charlene started digging into what was going on. And pretty soon, she discovered that the new landlord had submitted a plan to the city to build the three-story apartment complex. Right on top of Applewood. Then we understood why they were trying to financially evict us. But Chalene wasn't just going to up and leave.

She'd have to figure something out. Owning your own home has long been seen as a cornerstone of middle class stability in this country. Home ownership helps you build wealth, and as long as you're able to pay your mortgage, you don't have to worry about getting evicted. That security is kind of why we buy houses. But that security just isn't there for many mobile home owners, including Charlene Stovan and the rest of the community at Applewood. We're going to get back to their story in a second, but to understand how mobile home owners ended up in the precarious

position of owning a home without land, we have to go back to the early 20th century and the dawn of the automobile age. People had cars for the first time and could go out and explore America by attaching little trailers to the backs of their Model T's or whatever cars they had. This is Andrew Hurley, a history professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. He says that the first trailer owners were wealthy vacationers, known as Tin Can Tourists. But then came the Great Depression, when migrant workers started living in trailers full time as they traveled the country looking for work. And so there were thousands of itinerant individuals and families in search of work that didn't really know if they would be coming back to where they had originated. And so trailer was something that they could attach

to the back of their car and just take their home along with them. And they started to cite these homes together in basically what became the first mobile home parks. These parks were really seen as a major drain on local resources. Writings of the time refer to these as trailer slums. This was the beginning of a kind of classist trailer stigma that is still very much around today. But the event that really solidified the trailer as a viable form of American housing was World War II.

the trailer as a viable form of American housing was World War II. American industry has met the challenge of war. American factories have achieved the impossible. American mass production is delivering the goods. As the war got underway, factories popped up in all these remote parts of the country. But because they had been undeveloped, there was no housing. And there was no capacity to build a new housing because construction materials were prioritized for war production. So the government bought thousands of trailers to house the wartime workforce. But this was always supposed to be a temporary solution. When the war ended, the expectation was that people would give up their trailers and move back into conventional homes. But that didn't happen.

Trailers continued to be an affordable housing option for people who didn't have the money to buy a home in the expanding suburbs. And a lot of these mobile homeowners rented pads in one of the many mobile home parks that were popping up all over the country. Esther Sullivan says these parks continued to spread throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, as the government was investing less and less

in public housing. So just as we've increasingly slashed the budget of HUD and the production of affordable housing. We've seen the incredible rise of manufactured housing and specifically manufactured housing in mobile home parks to fill that gap. Through it all, mobile homes were never really able

to shake off the stigma that began during the Great Depression. People just did not want mobile Home Parks built in their backyard. In fact, cities used all the tools and the urban planning toolkit to render Mobile Home Parks invisible. For the last half of a century, planning and zoning laws have required that Mobile Home that mobile home parks be walled in, fenced off, visually screened, landscaped out of sight, so that the average citizen in a town or city might not ever know that a park was located where it was located. These parks were often built on marginal land on the outskirts of cities, because mobile

homes are legally classified as a form of transportation, rather than housing, they could be built on land that wasn't zoned residential. So separate them from residences and single-family homes, and more often place mobile homes in commercial or industrial zones, as well as in hazarded places like flood plains or substandard land. But as cities develop and expand, mobile home parks become valuable property that can be bought up and redeveloped into something more profitable. A new apartment building, a condo complex, or a Walmart.

Almost any other land use is prioritized over a mobile home park in the decisions of local city councils and in the eyes of developers and the redevelopment of mobile home parks means mass eviction for mobile home park residents. Which brings us back to mid-Vail Utah and that little mobile home park for seniors where over 50 manufactured homes were on the verge of being evicted to make way for an apartment complex. I asked everyone I met at Applewood if they considered the possibility of redevelopment and eviction when they moved in.

I just hadn't thought about that fact. This is Beth Thurphy. She moved into Applewood with her husband Russell a couple of years ago. I didn't think about the fact that I would have to remove my home or leave my home and having to move out. I never thought that that was possible until they told me that it was. A lot of people, including many developers, assume that if you have victimable home park, the residents will just pick up their houses and move them somewhere else.

But the truth is, mobile homes aren't really mobile anymore. In the mid-20th century, the mobile home industry split in two. One branch continued making travel trailers in RVs, while the other started manufacturing houses designed to be lived in full time. These mobile homes started to look less like trailers and more like conventional single-family houses with multiple rooms and always and in-bore bathrooms, and they got harder and harder to move. Today, the term mobile home is more or less a misnomer. A mobile home is not intended to be mobile except when it is first transported from the factory and installed on the site. And if you try to move it again, it requires specialized trucking and hauling at great expense to homeowners. It can cost between $5,000 and $15,000 to move one of these homes.

Moving can also cause serious structural problems. It can damage the homes so severely that it becomes unlivable. And even if residents of Applewood were willing to take that risk and had a spare $15,000 lying around, finding a new place to put their home could be next to impossible. Because there has not been any new manufactured home communities built in Utah for a long, long, long, long time. There's not that many spaces in any of these parks to put 56 homes. This is Charlene Stovan again.

She says that if she got evicted, she would probably have to abandon her home and move in with one of her kids. But some of these people have no family, or their family so far away. Where would they go? Charlene was determined not to let that happen at Applewood, and she talked to some local community organizers who advised her to start a homeowner's association. So our first meeting was at a car park. I can't remember which car park, but one of the car ports here we all met decided this is what we needed to do to save ourselves.

And I of course became president. Of course. Will P and I thought okay, what do, became president. Of course. Will be. And I thought, OK, what do I do now? I'm clueless. But she kept asking people for help. And little by little, they started rallying people to their cause. The residents started a petition to save Applewood

and got over 2,600 signatures. Charlene testified before the mayor and the city council and told them, if we allow this guess what? You're going to have 56 homeowners that will be homeless. And what are you going to do with us? Homelessness is a huge problem in Utah right now. And it's been exacerbated by a housing shortage. And apartment complexes are going up all over the Salt Lake Valley to try and meet a growing demand.

Charlene says that's good. You need the apartment's freight, build them, but don't displace people in order to do it. Charlene and the other residents of Applewood fought for several years to stay in their homes. There were a lot of twists and turns and late nights and a whole lot of emails, but eventually, after a lot of public pressure, the development company gave up on the project and decided to put Applewood up for sale. And when Shirley and her that, she remembered an organization that she thought might be able to help them out.

It was called ROC USA. Yeah, so ROC stands for resident-owned communities, and we help homeowners in mobile home parks by their communities as co-ops. This is Paul Bradley, the president of Rock USA, which is based in New Hampshire. Bradley began organizing mobile home co-ops with the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund back in the 80s. They even got legislation passed in New Hampshire that gives mobile home owners a first option to purchase the land whenever a park goes up for sale. Today, about 27% of the manufactured home communities are Mobile Home Parks and New Hampshire

are resident owned, so that's 127 or so communities. Bradley thinks we need to build more affordable housing, but he also wants to protect the affordable housing we already have. Right now, Mobile Home's represent the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing produced in this country. Bradley says that if we can help Mobile Homes owners buy the land beneath their parks, then the risk of massive action disappears. And so in 2008, Bradley launched Rocky USA in an effort to spread New Hampshire's cooperative ownership model nationwide. So far, they've been really successful.

So we're a national network of just over 220 communities, 14,000 home owners, and we're operating with co-ops in 15 states. When Charlene called Paul, Pratley, things were not looking good for Applewood. The land had already been sold to two new developers for $4.8 million. But Sherleenan Paul approached the new owners and explained the situation. They talked about how difficult it would be to move their homes and asked if the new owners would be willing to sell the park to the residents. And they said, we didn't realize you wanted to purchase the property,

but if you want to and you can do it within the next couple of months, we'll sell it to you. Otherwise, if we're gonna if we're gonna own it, eventually we're gonna close it down. Buying a mobile home park worth at least $4.8 million seemed like a very tall order for the residents of Applewood. Individually, no one in the park could even come close to getting a mortgage for that kind of money. But together as a co-op, the financial picture was different. Rock USA was willing to give the residents a very low interest loan for $3.6 million. They would still need to find some more money, though, and so they went to a low-income housing

for a new talk called the O'Lean Walker Housing Loan Fund. So there I am again. Pleading my case, and Gloria, who is the director said I thought about this the last three months and I've decided we need to help these people we need to give them the money they need so between it all we finally come up with the five million that we needed and our February 9th we signed for we own the land. After four and a half years of fighting for their little piece of ground the land officially belongs to the Applewood Homeowners Cooperative.

To pay off their collective mortgage the residents agreed to pay $60 more a month than they had previously been paying in rent. It's going to be a challenge for some of them but the monthly cost should be stable from here on out, and they'll no longer need to worry about a fiction. We can breathe again. I had to worry about losing our home and everything we had in it. I know we can own our home and feel at ease. This is Russell Durphy, who lives in Applewood with his wife Beth, who you heard from earlier.

He says that at their age, they're just happy to have a secure place to live. We're getting so old and feeble that we don't know how much longer we're going to live, so when we go grocery shopping, we don't even buy a green banana. You can never get enough Joe, get out of here. Charlene is also relieved, but the stress hasn't gone away completely. They own the place now. They've got a co-op to run, and bills to pay. Before, it was fighting to gain the land. Now, it's a whole different set of pressures of just getting this running smoothly.

And the co-op is a different ball game. Because now we're in charge. It's up to us to make it work. Otherwise, we're in deep, deep, do-do. But they aren't on their own. Rock USA is helping them structure the co-op and deal with the finances. And of course, a cooperative Applewood means cooperative living.

There are lots of meetings and elections, committees, more committees. There's the community rules enforcement committee. There's the finance committee. There's the orientation committee. There's the maintenance committee. There's the social committee. These are all committees we're trying to get organized.

Russell Durfy says he's not well enough to participate as much as he would like, but he went to the first general meeting of the co-op and he was really impressed. They asked for volunteers to be president, vice president, so forth, and in every position they had volunteers. They didn't have to coach people, the servos leaders, they just automatically volunteered to do it. Russell says they have lots of different skills

and decades of experience here in Applewood. And they're trying to take advantage of everyone's talents. The head of the Maintenance Committee, for example, is a retired engineer. Our secretary is kind of automatic. She was a secretary for a retired engineer. Our secretary is kind of automatic. She was a secretary for a police department. I ask her how she could possibly list and have a fast get all the notes down and so forth. I did it for many years. The co-op is going to be a

lot of work but at least for now people are glad to be part of it, and to finally own the land under their homes. Together. Esther Sullivan, the sociologist we spoke to for this story, has a new book out later this year. It's called Manufactured Insecurity, mobile home parks and Americans tenuous right to place. Sheddy lived in several mobile home parks that were undergoing eviction and studied the impacts. You can find a link to the book on our website 99pi.org.

The ever evolving design of mobile homes and the concept of mobile home skyscrapers, right after this. When Emmett was reporting this story, he discovered all the different names for these things, and that they were used interchangeably but also had different meanings for different people, terms like trailer, manufactured home, mobile home, and Cole Stead is here to talk about the rise of the term mobile home, and how that design evolved over time. Right, and Emma was telling me that when he was interviewing people

for the story, like everybody was just using a different term for sort of the same thing. And this actual term mobile home, according to Stewart Brand's really excellent book, How Buildings Learn, was actually coined by a man named Elmer Frey. And I haven't been able to verify that independently, but Frey did play a big role in popularizing it, if nothing else. And he's this really interesting character. In the 40s, he started a mobile home manufacturing business in Wisconsin. And he sold a lot of these eight-foot wide homes

But he also lobbied to be able to transport 10 foot wides on public roads and what is the big difference between an eight-foot wide home and a 10-foot wide home Those two feet so if you think about a typical mobile home at the time the real limitation is that horizontal dimension You can make one that's dozens of feet long But it's really hard to fit in, walls and a hallway if it's too thin. So if you add a few feet of width, you can suddenly subdivide space, create rooms, and connect them via a side corridor. So now you can walk past these fully enclosed individual spaces rather than always stepping through one room to get to another. And that means you've got privacy and you can fit a family more comfortably.

Some builders would also make ones that would expand on site to become wider. And then of course you've got your double-wides and your triple-wides designed to be joined together on site. And as you make these leaps, it sounds like my wall home is already coming less and less mobile, actually. Exactly.

As 10 wides and then 12 wides gained popularity, they were increasingly created to just be shipped out, set down and lived in. And for HUD, you know, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, this posed a problem. A lot of these, relatively immobile homes, were not being constructed to the same standards as normal lot built houses. So in the mid 1970s, Congress passed the Mobile Home Construction and Safety Standards Act, which basically was to make sure that new manufactured homes would be more energy efficient and disaster resistant. What did those regulations do to the industry and the mobile home housing stock? Well, the new HUD codes set standards for things like safety and durability, but also heating,

plumbing, ventilation, air conditioning, electrical systems. All those things you normally associate with regional building codes, but that didn't always apply to mobile homes. And from a federal standpoint, this is where that manufactured homes distinction comes in. Predictably, of course, some people in the business of producing prefab homes weren't exactly pleased with the added layer of regulations, I don't say. But, you know, the new rules did lead to better design and stir your construction.

So you mentioned Stuart Brands book, How Building Slurn, which is all about the ways that buildings evolve and adapt over time. But it seems to me that whatever you call these types of homes, they're basically kind of free design self-contained, and they're not really designed to change over time. Yeah, in a way that's true. They don't have to change over time. You know, the factory

builds it, ships it out, sets down, plugs it in, and it's good to go. But brand points out that these initial modules are actually rich with potential too. As he puts it, a smaller unit can become the quote seed around which a larger home grows. So for instance, an owner might build out a shed roof to create a porch, and then eventually enclose that on all sides to create interior space. So for someone who can't afford a house right away, or a big house at least, this kind of base model approach allows owners to build out on their own terms when they have the time and the budget. Of course, this is also tied up in that increasing in mobility of the manufacturer to housing too, right? Once you start expanding this thing.

They're there to stay. Yeah. And so what about Frey, the original mobile home popularizer? Is a builder and seller of these kinds of structures? What was his reaction to the shift from mobile homes to these immobile manufactured houses? So he ended up exploring some pretty extreme ideas in the 1960s and 70s, while HUDs over

here developing standards, Frey is actually proposing skyscrapers for mobile homes. And one of his early plans was to erect these two spiraling towers in Milwaukee, each with hundreds of parking spaces for portable dwellings. And those towers would also have restaurants and shops and community spaces above and below the parking slash living areas. So maybe you stay for a few years, pull up the parking brake, and roll your home to the next mobile skyscraper park in another city where you get a new job. And in each place, you'd be living in a walkable downtown.

And that's reminiscent of Ready Player One where the main character lives and the stacks were these stacks and stacks of mobile houses. Yeah. Which don't really look all that nice exactly. No, I mean, they're really kind of not very appealing. And frankly, the prototypes that Frey made, they were just a couple stories tall, and they basically looked like that. And they weren't that appealing, and they didn't work that well.

But his larger vision of these really tall towers was actually pretty interesting, if you think about it. If it had worked out, his so-called skyscraper terrace could have brought mobile housing right into the heart of cities and combined mobility with urban density in a really unprecedented way. Well, you can see pictures of phrase-proposed skyscraper terrace and other vertical mobile housing designs on our website, it's 99pi.org. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, musicouffman, Taren Masa, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Roe in Beautiful,

Downtown, Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, an independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussion about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI orc, or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you're thinking, I need more 99PI in my life. Well, we have all the old episodes and new articles about design

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