This is a really informative article from a historical perspective. It also fully demonstrates the incompetence of the U.S. political system which failed to make any advancements on affordable housing in a half-century of talking about it.

The Gunnison Valley Regional Transit Authority did a nice thing here. They are loaning some workforce housing trailers to the residents in the local mobile home park that are being displaced while the park is rebuilt and new mobile homes brought in. I live in a small town and we also do proactive things like that to help people. Big cities could learn from small towns.

Well you’ll soon see every mobile home park in Sonoma go on the market as land to be re-developed. Rent control simply makes park owners adapt to more profitable uses. These parks will no doubt be new apartments in the near future. As Ronald Reagan once said “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government and I’m here to help”. And Reagan lived in California so he really understood this stupidity better than most.

This article is just plain stupid. Stupid #1: it does NOT cost $4,000 per year to insure a mobile home. Stupid #2: Single-wides DO NOT average $86,400 for 1,064 square feet of space, while doubles run about $158,600 for 1,757 square feet.

Does nobody fact-check this stuff anymore?

Can’t wait for AI to replace these writers.

Look at the video. This is a really nice property, right? Then read this quote:

“Residents at Lake Bradford Estates met to share stories of dealing with alleged poor living conditions, rent increases and eviction threats at a Tallahassee mobile home park”

So let’s cut out the B.S. and get straight to the truth. The property is really nice and the “poor living conditions” claim is a lie. The residents simply don’t want to pay market rent, which at $750 is about right. That’s all this story is about, nothing more.

Florida has no rent control. The rent appears to be fair. There is absolutely no story other than people trying to take advantage of a screwed-up media and political system to try to coerce maintaining their rent at below market levels. It’s not going to work long term. Never does.

You gotta love the hypocritical nature of the woke community:

“To develop a commercial RV Park and Glampground, large or small, in an environmentally sensitive area so you can offer an eco-camping experience to explain how “eco-sensitive the Ozello environment is” is confusing, to say the least.”

Of course, you later learn that there was an RV park in that same location decades ago.

This is not a case of “saving the environment” but simply homeowners not wanting an RV park next to their homes but refusing to tell the truth and blaming it on their deep desire to save the planet.

There’s a big correction needed to this sub-headline, shown below in GREEN:

Paradise Cover in Malibu has been dubbed 'America's most glamorous trailer park' and is loved by former A-list celebs including Pamela Anderson, Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Paulson

Have you ever been to Paradise Cove? I have. I’ve driven by it many times. It’s a classic trailer park, built in the 1970s. It looks like any other trailer park with old doublewides shoulder-to-shoulder. It has zero glamour and zero sex-appeal. It’s just a place where you live when you’re down on your luck as a former celebrity but can’t give up the Malibu address when you go to cocktail parties with other celebrities who don’t know you moved out of a real house yet.

I’m all for elevating the industry, but this type of article fools nobody.

What’s missing from this article? Not one mention of the most important element: what did the non-profits pay to buy the park to put it into a “land trust”? 63 households lived in this park, and I’m betting the non-profits paid $10 million for the property so they could live there at lower rents (which have supposedly fallen from $650 to $500 per month). What always blows my mind is that you could move all these people to a less-expensive state and buy and give them a nice brick home and do so much better for them than what they’ve accomplished. This virtue-signaling nonsense is all fine and good, but is anyone actually minding the store financially? Is thrusting the only non-subsidized affordable housing in the U.S. into the same subsidized model as Section 8 apartments really the track you want to be on? I think not. 

This non-profit is spending $60,000 to build an 8’ x 20’ house? That’s $375 per sq. ft. A mobile home costs around $40 per sq. ft. So my first thought is why are they reinventing the wheel when they can just call up any mobile home park dealer and do this for a fraction of the price using a HUD-code home? But the bigger issue is that it’s just plain dumb to think that the key to ending youth homelessness is by sticking them in a 8’ x 20’ hut and getting them on the nation’s welfare dole starting at 18. A better plan would be to take the $60,000, put them into trade schools, and teach them how to make a decent living. Those who want to take advantage of that program would become successful citizens. Those who refuse are going to trash these 8’ x 20’ shacks and run off. I just can’t make any sense of this initiative given the realities of life.

This is the future of housing. Even my small town in Missouri recently passed a “tiny home ordinance”. Give the people what they want for heaven’s sake. Look at the drawings of the homes and you have to admit that they look a lot better than most of the larger homes in town. Who always shows up at the zoning meetings on this topic are stick-built builders who don’t want the competition and try to claim that tiny homes will cause the apocalypse. They won’t. In many applications they make infinite sense. Holding back this type of product is as hopeless as holding back Uber – it’s just going to happen in the end so better get out in front of it. Nice to see that this town is doing so.

This is the part about these type of articles (and they come out all the time) that kills me:

• Her 396-square-foot dwelling at Escape Tampa Bay Village's tiny home community cost her $159,000. 

OK, so $159,000 for around 400 sq. ft. works out to roughly $400 per square foot. You can buy a nice house in the Midwest for $159,000 – brick exterior, 3/2 and 2-car garage. And own the land underneath. So this lady apparently has no idea that there’s a whole universe of better housing options out there. And neither does the writer. And that’s kind of sad.

Hurricane Harvey did $200 billion in damage and only $20 billion was insured. That’s what happens when you have major flooding as few people are insured for it. Mobile homes sit about 3 feet off the ground and actually do better in floods than stick-built dwellings (just ask any park owner who survived Hurricane Harvey).

Wait a minute – is this a typo?

Once the factory is completed in 2024, it can begin producing modular homes. It is expected to produce 12 to 15 homes per year in its first few years of operation, but eventually will ramp up its production to up to 50 homes per year.

The average mobile home park factory produces 7 homes per day. That’s 1,820 per year. And this one is going to produce 12 homes a year initially and then a whopping 50 per year in the future?

I know that marijuana is legalized in Colorado, but these would have to be the slowest assembly line workers in history, right?

Look at the photos. Look at the price. Look at the photos again. Then look at the price again. If you think this is a good deal then you need to immediately check into rehab because you must be out of your mind.

I hope this project makes lots of money because when the city, residents and media go after the owner on such ridiculous technicalities as if the permits were supposed to be filed in “10 days” or “10 business days” you kind of wonder if the project is worth this much hassle.

Back before Zappos founder Tony Hsieh died in a tragic fire his personal assistant gave me a tour of his Airstream Village community in which he lived in downtown Las Vegas. She told me the story of how he originally wanted to make Airstream Village out of shipping containers (it ended up being Airstream RVs and tiny homes) but found them to be unsuitable from a utility cost standpoint (“they were like tiny ovens” she said). So that’s problem #1. But the bigger issue is that I don’t think that anyone will pay $200,000 to live in a shipping container in Indiana – and then pay lot rent on top of that. This is a product that might work on the beach or a mountaintop. But maybe I’m wrong.

“I have lived at the San Roque Mobile park for over 30 years now. I have seen many changes – some good, and far more bad ones. We have big potholes in our streets. Our park has become a trash mesh. Things get started and never get finished. Now they have closed off some of our streets, and the stupid gates are so silly indeed. This is not a nice place anymore for us!”

Translation: “You increased our rents, brought the old park back to life, and installed classy security gates – and we hate you for it!”. For every one of these type of residents there are 100 that are thrilled with the improvements and don’t mind paying higher rent to have a nicer property.

Wow, economics must be hard to grasp in the Bay Area. The owners are trying to save the park by raising the rents to market levels. Otherwise, as they explained to the residents, they will simply close the park and redevelop the land. But any way you cut it there’s no way that folks are going to continue to live in the San Francisco area at 1980s pricing. It’s really up to the residents how this movie ends – and the owners have been more than transparent.

Every time I drive across America I am confronted by those hideous wind turbines that make scenic vistas look like industrial graveyards. And now suddenly people are waking up to the fact that all this wind and solar energy is really, really ugly to look at? I could have told them that 20 years ago.

Sure, the headline is misleading. This quote from the owners is very sensible on an Act of God they had no control over:

Maine Real Estate Management has been working daily to coordinate with experts to resolve the problem and anticipate a new well being installed very soon. In the meantime, we have arranged for regular deliveries of water to fill the holding tanks, as well as supplemental drinking water deliveries,” the company wrote.

So what’s the problem here, other than the considerable expense to the owners until the new well gets drilled? Well, apparently, none of this is good enough for the residents who claim they don’t like the taste of the “imported water” and it messes up their washing machines (which I’m sure is a complete falsehood). If the residents don’t get a better attitude I’m sure there’s a land re-development plan in the making for this tract – and who would blame the owners?

I guess the residents did not read the fine print. But it’s right there in the article:

In years to come, residents, with the help of the land trust, intend to redevelop the park by removing the trailers and transforming the units into homes. The co-op and land trust are currently in the early stages of redeveloping the park, and residents are leading those discussions.”

So all the trailer park folks are going to be going bye-bye and replaced with single-family homes which they will never qualify for or afford. And they voted for it! What would you call this: “political suicide”?

I don’t know anything about this park or its water and sewer problems, but I do know the fundamental laws of economics and I’m sure that the heirs will simply condemn that park and sell the land off at a huge profit. 1,500 individuals will then be left homeless. It would have been much smarter for the government to make the required repairs for the late owner’s estate and then bill the park monthly until repaid in full. But, once again, it exemplifies that the most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help’. In this case the quote would be “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you be homeless”. Does nobody from the government realize that there’s no way the heirs are going to do any of this incredibly costly cap-x work when the land is worth more than the park in all likelihood and they probably just want to settle the estate?

Let’s be honest: these are not celebrities – these are “has-beens”. Nobody is leaving Bel Air for the trailer park if they are doing well in their movie careers. Tom Hanks should not even be on this list as he only used an RV on-set. The others would dump their “tiny” home in one second if they could amass enough cash to buy a decent house in the Hollywood Hills. I know that there is so much media out there today that writers struggle for content, but these type of articles insult our intelligence.

OK, do you spot the scam going on in the media right now:

“It occurred to me that 90% of the questions in this four-page survey were satisfied by my local community, Marin Valley Mobile Home Country Club (MVMCC). It is a close-knit mobile home park of over 400 residents, owned by the city of Novato since 1997, with competent oversight from an elected group of residents. Novato doesn’t provide these healthy living activities, such as yoga or book clubs, as recommended in the survey, but the residents themselves provide them through volunteer commitments.However, the city has provided security and stability by serving as a nonprofit entity-owner, with reasonable, affordable rents. A defined 40% of the lots are reserved for low-income residents.”

There are only around 300 resident-owned mobile home parks in the U.S. out of 44,000 parks. So this is all nonsense and not worthy of this much media time.

So why are there suddenly a ton or articles on how great life is when residents own their own communities? Clearly, this is a big media push that is being promoted by a number of non-profits behind the scenes that are trying to brainwash Americans (and politicians) that this is the greatest idea since sliced bread.

Smart people will spot that this is a scam and not buy it. But unfortunately, idiots will.

I really like this idea. I have long thought that affordable housing (yes, including mobile homes) are not nearly as attractive as they could be. The industry needs some fresh ideas and I have no doubt that a gifted college student may well contribute the idea that revolutionizes the way housing looks. I see all these cool designs in European design magazines at the bookstore and wonder why the U.S. can’t come up with its own fresh ideas. Maybe this contest will make something happen. It can’t hurt.