Mobile Homes

They're small, but they can be hitched to a truck and moved anywhere. The owner of the trailer doesn't have to own the land that the trailer's on. Instead, he/she can just opt to pay rent. The price of the mobile home itself would be about 1/4th the same price of a conventional (and, to be fair, considerably larger) home. According to one source, a mobile home manufactured c. 2014 would have an average lifespan of about 30-55 years, and I will not discount the possibility of construction design improvements in coming decades increasing this figure somewhat. In any case, a person who bought their moved out and bought a mobile home of their own at 18 would find that he'd likely only have to purchase and move into a new house once more in the span of his life, barring damage incurred from close proximity to natural disasters and whatnot.

It would serve to make housing significantly more affordable in America if mobile homes became more popular, and, perhaps equally importantly, it'd allow for greater flexibility in the jobs market: in today's climate, many Americans are reluctant to move into a new house because they're not sure they'll be able to sell the old one, which would straddle them with extreme debt. So they may turn down more lucrative job opportunities elsewhere in the state/country. If all you needed was a moving truck and a new trailer park somewhere, I suspect we'd have a much more dynamic economy.

A big barrier to this is the sordid reputation associated with trailer parks: they're thought of as low-income housing units, where you'd be surrounded by distasteful and even dangerous neighbors. If the image of trailer parks could be rehabilitated so that it was a socially acceptable option for the middle class, that'd solve the problem I think. Also, the government could work with manufacturers of homes to design a model of more "serious" mobile homes which are better insulated, ventilated, and energy-efficient.

Thoughts?

(Yeah, after posting this I ran it all through in my head and realized there's virtually no way to make this workable. So feel free to just ignore this thread altogether.)

One solution is modular homes. You have it driven to your lot in sections and assembled. Basically the same thing as a mobile home but bigger. Very little difference between that and a regular home except they cost less.

Are you talking about RVs, recreational vehicules? I guess they are much cheaper.

Moving a trailer often costs more than the trailer costs itself, especially if it is over 10 years old. It is highly susceptible to falling apart in natural disasters, even mild hurricanes. Nobody should buy a new trailer. If you buy a used one for a few thousand it may save you some money, but buying a new one is stupid, or a used one for more than $5000. If you are single, you can also usually rent a studio apartment for less than what lot rent would be, and it would hinder you less in your quest for pussy as well.

..."Fuller designed several versions of the house at different times — all of them factory manufactured kits, assembled on site, intended to be suitable for any site or environment and to use resources efficiently. A key design consideration of the design was ease of shipment and assembly."...

....The only two prototypes of the round, aluminum house were bought by investor William Graham, together with assorted unused prototyping elements as salvage after the venture failed. In 1948, Graham constructed a hybridized version of the Dymaxion House as his family's home; the Grahams lived there into the 1970s. Graham built the round house on his lake front property, disabling the ventilator and other interior features. It was inhabited for about 30 years, although as an extension to an existing ranch house, rather than a standalone structure as intended by Fuller. In 1990, the Graham family donated this house, and all the component prototyping parts, to The Henry Ford Museum. A painstaking process was used to conserve as many original component parts and systems as possible and restore the rest using original documentation from the Fuller prototyping process. It was installed indoors in the Henry Ford Museum in 2001 with a full exhibit.
Since there was no evidence of the crucial internal rain-gutter system, some elements of the rain collecting system were omitted from the restored exhibit. The roof was designed to wick water inside and drip into the rain-gutter and then to the cistern, rather than have a difficult-to-fit, perfectly waterproof roof."...

Interesting.

True dat.