Feature Article: FutureHouse
Image credit: Twentieth Century-Fox (Image of Marie Windsor)
Feature Article: FutureHouse
|
The house of the future is hampered by its past, and by politicians of the present.
How would you like a house that looked like it was designed by Mies van der Rohe? Sound okay? And how would you like it if that house cost far less than the average subdivision house? Sounds fine, doesn’t it? And how would you like it if that house could be erected in a matter of days from the time you decided you wanted it? Nice, huh?
The house is the SU-SI house from Austria’s KFN Systems. Beautifully designed by Austrian architect Oskar Leo Kaufmann, it’s supremely energy-efficient, and of extraordinarily high construction quality. You’d love to have one, but there’s a catch. The award-winning dwelling is not legal in much of the United States, because, you see, it’s a mobile home.
Mobile home. The phrase conjures up tawdry “parks” full of sagging, peeling, down-at-heels structures. Some jokingly call them “candominiums”. Some call them a nuisance. And a growing number of communities are trying to legislate them out of existence, or at least out of town. Why?
Mobile homes were once the housing choice of last resort; the product was flimsily built, with shoddy aluminum wiring that could erupt into flames over one light bulb too many. Walls were thin and the siding of metal; older mobiles were great for those who wanted to hear the pitter-patter of rain on a tin roof, real bad. And all those “tornado magnet” jokes do have some basis in reality; older units were merely parked, not fastened to foundations or tie-down systems. It didn’t even take a tornado to tip a mobile home in the old days; a stout wind worked just fine. TV stations have long doted on the resulting images of capsized housing and ruined lives.
Change began on two fronts. The manufactured housing industry responded to calls for more spacious units with multi-section designs called doublewides; two sections were bolted together to yield a house that was 24 to 28 feet deep. Suddenly, the mobile home shape approximated that of a site-built house, markedly decreasing “otherness”. The effect was bolstered by appropriating newly cost-effective materials from the site-built industry, notably lapped vinyl siding. The marketplace has responded well to this innovation, but the decrease in “otherness” has come at an enormous price.
Since technology can now produce a mobile that has very little “otherness” about it, counties across America are passing legislation requiring that mobile homes conform to this standard. Counties that would not dare to attempt legislating one architectural standard for site-built housing have no qualms about doing so for mobiles. Lapped siding, pitched, shingled roofs, and double-wide units are required for all new installations in many places. Some go further, requiring decks to be erected both in front of and behind the unit, or stipulating minimum lot sizes far larger than required for site-built structures. Someone wishing to build a site-built house in these counties is required only to meet code requirements; whether the completed house is a Williamsburg Colonial or a Pierre Koenig design is beyond the purview of politicos. The shocking part of this discriminatory situation is that mobiles are a Federally-regulated product, like automobiles. By regulating mobiles more stringently than site-built housing, local governments are discriminating against mobiles, acting in a manner akin to passing laws designed to facilitate Mercedes and Lincoln ownership, and to discourage residents from driving lower-prestige vehicles like pickup trucks.
Those laws have had a dramatic effect above and beyond the ones on the product, as well. Localities demanding large minimum lot sizes (often 1 or 2 acres) promote sprawl in counties where mobiles are the last hope of affordable housing. Mobiles are now often sold in these areas as “land-home” packages; what was once a potato field at $1000 an acre is now a “manufactured housing community” at twenty times that price, plus the price of the mobile, at interest rates that would curdle the blood of most site-built mortgagees. Banks are loath to finance mobiles to most buyers, since the product is often not legally considered real estate, no matter where situated or how installed (some localities do define mobiles attached to permanent foundations as real estate). Finance companies - some quite reputable and many not - have stepped in to meet the need. Much financing is done by manufacturers themselves, controlling the buyer’s costs from first “home tour” to last payment. Buyers trying to participate in the American Dream at its most modest level often find themselves committed to a deal no wealthy person would sign.
Worse, there is much to be improved about the product. There has already been a lot of change, mostly as a result of HUD standards enacted in 1976. Those standards got rid of aluminum wiring and mandated stiffer framing to resist winds; pre-HUD-code mobiles were sometimes framed with 1” X 2” studs. There are also HUD-approved tie-down and foundation systems that make dramatic improvements in how well mobiles survive violent weather. Consumer Reports ™ has found that today’s double-wide units, bolted to a foundation, can perform comparably to site-built houses. But manufacturers continue to use shoddy plumbing and fixtures; plastic is the norm for everything from pipes to faucets to bathtubs themselves.
Another problem is subflooring made of particle board, a processed-wood product notorious for swelling and rotting whenever water hits it. Common sense does not necessarily prevail in its use. Not only is particle board used in bathrooms, it’s often covered by cheap wall-to-wall carpet there, an arrangement doomed to early, expensive failure when soaked by water. Better subflooring materials are available as an option, but only one manufacturer makes plywood floors standard, and few mobiles are special-ordered. Price competition demands that showy, feature-laden units be produced at the lowest possible cost to be put on dealer lots as “specials”, so the cheapest of everything gets used. The consumer dazzled by the new house rarely asks what’s under the carpet.
The saddest part of the current situation is the waste of a valuable housing resource - those older single-section mobiles that are now denied entrance to so many communities. Often selling for only a few thousand dollars, many of these units are still quite habitable, or can be rehabbed with DIY techniques. They offer shelter and home to retirees, to the poor, to those recovering from financial trauma. But they are increasingly confined to rural, unregulated areas, putting their occupants far from good jobs, from fire, police and health services, from vibrant communities.
The only viable arrangement that can be found for these older units in most cities are “mobile home parks” - crowded, with little or no play area for children. Their management often cares little for the well-being of residents, and is able to increase lot rents at will (a few states regulate these increases). A lower-income person who might benefit from this extraordinarily cheap housing often cannot find a place to put it. Putting the mobile on a private lot is nearly impossible in most major cities (regardless of how much brownfield and abandoned inner-city land they might have), and parks in unregulated states are not a good bet for people who cannot absorb frequent rent increases. The less fortunate among us are denied the change they most need by laws passed for the benefit of people uneasy with anything beyond the confines of their own middle-class lives. “Otherness” is being quelled, but at enormous cost.
There needs to be change, not just for the benefit of current mobile-home dwellers, and lower-income people, but to help meet everyone’s future housing needs. The costs inherent in site-built housing are rising so rapidly that more and more people are being priced out of the market. Mobiles are a form of housing that could meet their needs quite well, if only politicos and financiers would stop stacking the deck. It will take perceptional, physical, and legal changes, and many of them will require adjustments painful to those who are troubled by “otherness”. Much depends on politicians, who will have to be persuaded to stop protecting the feelings of some of us at the expense of the rest of us.
Laws leveling the playing field for owners of every type of house need to be passed. The highly discriminatory regulations dictating the architecture and siting of mobiles should be the first to change. Architectural and technical innovations should not be stifled by laws that do all but mandate imitation Colonial, pseudo-“country” styling. The product must be improved, with regulatory agencies stipulating an end to shoddy subfloors, among other problems (there will be new, more stringent Federal regulations about tie-downs and foundations soon). And it must become easier for owners of mobiles to obtain fair financing, and to become grounded in their communities, with legal changes making it less difficult for their property to be viewed as real estate, equal to any other sort of housing. Only when these changes are in place will manufactured housing become what it must be for our future good - a mainstream housing choice, rather than a last resort.
What now sits Out There, in the mobile home park built right on the line between Us and Them, may be, through sheer necessity, our shared experience tomorrow. If anyone wants a reminder of how quickly something considered lower-class can become a middle-class need, remember - there was a time, not so very long ago, when few who counted themselves as ladies and gentlemen had ever, ever been inside a four-wheel-drive utility vehicle.
Questions? Comments? E-Mail the author at |
