Mobile Homes: Nifty, Thrifty & Growing Safer. But Climate-Change Safe?

aerial photo of debris in a mobile home park
Hurricane damage at a mobile home park.

For decades and decades, the Rolls Royce of trailer park living has been the mobile home. Single-wides and double-wides1, they have in truth only been ‘mobile’ in the same way that more modern manufactured home modules are mobile, which is on the way from the factory to their final installation place. (Some jurisdictions allow them to be moved only once.)

Their dramatic and infinitely more dangerous form of ‘mobility’ has come from weather events. Local television stations have captured them more or less intact, rotating drunkenly as they float down a raging river on the crest of an unexpected flood. This has been something of an inevitability, given that the cheap bottom land near rivers has long attracted profit-minded trailer park owners.

The sight of a mobile home shattering into thousands of fragments is more frightening, and often more tragic. Videos of fragmentation are less common, as camera persons prudently take cover. The resulting cross-country trails of debris following a tornado are a familiar post-disaster sight.

The economy of rechristened ‘manufactured’ homes has made them an attractive option for people with limited resources who are searching for the security of home ownership. And manufactured home businesses, anxious to capitalize on that interest, have been reassuring potential buyers that the current product is weather-hardened, with better anchored foundations, and other features that make them tough.

Is ‘weather-hardened’ the same thing as ‘climate change resistant?’ Advocates and detractors will no doubt endlessly argue that toss, but the square miles of debris in the wake of Hurricane Ian makes the arguments relatively pointless. Nor should we forget the 1991 North American west coast heat wave that baked trailer park dwellers to death in their ‘tin can’ homes.

In the face of climate change, does ‘manufactured’ housing offer economical housing solutions? In spite of past trials and tribulations, this cheap and cheerful form of housing has successfully served, warts and all, as cherished affordable housing. It may continue to do so . . . maybe. Read more from Slate: Mobile Homes Have a Major Climate Change Problem

Footnotes

  1. These designations are based on road widths. A single-wide is narrow enough be legally towed from factory to its destination without ‘wide load’ flashing lights and escort vehicles. So can the two halves of a double-wide, which arrive as separate tows and are joined together into the finished product on site.