BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE :

The Trailer's Travails : Mobile, charming, everywhere--and still trashed. (STUART FERGUSON, May 24, 2002, Wall Street Journal)

Mobile homes are everywhere, although often subjected to slander and condescension. In Toby Young's recent memoir of Manhattan's club scene ("How to Lose Friends & Alienate People"), he notes that calling someone "trailer park" was a term of abuse during his time on the party circuit. And it isn't just urbanites who feel this way. "In
the popular mind," says John Fraser Hart, "trailers are synonymous with violence and sex. If a crime happens anywhere else, nothing is said. But when one is committed in a trailer, the media let you know."

Mr. Hart, a professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, has written a fascinating book, with Michelle J. Rhodes and John T. Morgan, called "The Unknown World of the Mobile Home," to be published next month by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Will it prompt a radical rethinking on this important subject? We can only hope so.

Mr. Hart and his co-authors visited parks and "single sites" from Delaware to California. They learned that the mobile-home landscape is as varied as humanity itself. "There was one trailer park in Florida I drove into and turned around and drove out of as fast as possible--I got a hunch that two or three rifles were pointed at me," Mr. Hart says in an interview. "But some parks are suitable for millionaires."

Mr. Hart's field of study (if you will) is the geography of rural areas, and he long noticed that mobile homes are ubiquitous. He and his colleagues found that their research and number-crunching support this view. Seven percent of Americans live in a mobile home; in 2000 mobile homes accounted for about 30% of new single-family dwellings sold, and
most of these (about 95%) won't be moved once they are in place. In 1990 it was estimated that 56% of mobile homes were single-sited on the owner's property or on rented land. The rest were in parks.

That's a lot of people luxuriating in the pleasures of mobile-home living. And yet the abuse continues. The 1980 Housing Act stipulated that "the term mobile home be changed to manufactured housing in all federal law and literature." But federal statutes can't change perceptions with the stroke of a pen. The stigma comes from the past.

I feel it safe to assume that I'm one of the few people ever to live in a mobile home while attending law school. I liked it. (The trailer that is--not school.) Posted by Orrin Judd at June 4, 2002 7:24 AM