Some people find this their only option that’s affordable, especially as costs of living, in numerous areas have sky-rocketed. You might be able to easily eat the rising prices of gas and food, but when you’re living on the margin already, that can be a disaster.
I have often thought that some day, if I could swing it financially, buying a decent plot of correctly zoned land and building ten or so small houses for friends and family. Not as a commune, but more of a Pay It Forward in regards to stability and wealth for me and my loved ones.
Mobile homes are fine, but there are other prefabbed options that look awesome. I downsized from 3k sq feet to 900, and I love it. A garden, a shed with electricity (basically a maker space) and I’m happy. Even happier if there is a river near by 
(I would have to build a pub as well though)
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Like many other commenters here, I just don’t see the problem. The investors raise the rent, but they also fix up the parks and make them a nicer place to live. Those in power often take advantage of the powerless, and it’s a deplorable aspect of civilization, but I don’t see this as a particularly good example of that problem. Trailer parks aren’t exorbitantly priced. As many here have pointed out, you actually get a good bit of value for what you pay.
My read on the “taking advantage” angle was that trailer park residents could just move their trailers to another park with lower rent, BUT they can’t afford the $2,000 moving fee, and the trailer park investors know this, THUS they are taking advantage of the trailer park residents. $2,000 is not pocket change, but it’s certainly an amount of money that someone can reasonably save or otherwise come up with over time. If you purchased a “mobile” home without the ability to make it mobile, you made a bad financial decision.
The various boat analogies being made here are thought-provoking. If a marina raised the slip rates overnight, a boat owner could just move to another marina. But what if that boat owner couldn’t afford the fuel necessary to move the boat, and the marina owner knew it? Then the marina owner is “ripping them off”? Flawed analogy because it doesn’t cost $2,000 in fuel to move a boat?
The same argument could be used for portability of phone numbers. There is a reason why there are now laws forcing telcos to let the customers keep their number when changing a telco.
You can move your mobile home any time you choose, by hiring a company to perform that service at fair market value. Same situation with your phone number, and the FCC’s “local number portability” rules ( https://www.fcc.gov/guides/portability-keeping-your-phone-number-when-changing-service-providers ) also allow companies to charge fees for the cost of porting over a phone number.
If the investors who buy mobile home parks blocked access to trucks that could move the mobile homes, then that would be like a telco refusing to port over a number when a customer changed to a new telco.
The ability to do so rests entirely on your economic ability to do so. Many people who live in a trailer park do not own their homes, they rent them.
The less money you have, the less set of choices you have within the “free market”. The “free market” is essentially a rich man’s playground. You really shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Most people who own boats have the financial ability and the leisure time to own a boat. Let’s not compare renting a trailer to owning a boat. It sort of borders on offensive.
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the weird thing is that I recognize this guy from my undergrad, from his name and picture. worlds collide, i suppose, but it biases me to give him the benefit of the doubt. i’d guess anyone living in, say, nyc or sf is just going to have a harder time expressing sympathy on this issue.
That’s funny… it seems giving the fact that those cities are currently so expensive and so many people are being driven out of city centers, you’d think this would create a greater sense of understanding with everyone else across the country also struggling to pay their bills and live with a bit of dignity. I guess if your head is so far up your ass then you can only see your own struggles, it’s probably par for the course… (I don’t mean you, I mean people who can’t see the lines of connection in housing costs across the board).
But again, we’re treating housing and other basic necessities of life as a commodity in a free market, it’s not surprising that costs are rising across the board.
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yeah, but i think the irrational jealousy and loathing kicks in when they hear “$500/month”.
If they’re so pissed off about that, they could easily move to the rural south and gentrify there. Don’t get me wrong, the rising rents in all major urban areas is a problem that needs to be addressed - especially as it’s pushed out almost everyone but those in the upper classes. But for some people $500 a month is a princely sum, and the majority of their income, meaning that they are literally scrapping by and in some cases going hungry/cold/hot/etc. If people can’t grok that basic fact, I have a real hard time drumming up sympathy for THEM…
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If you rent your mobile home, it’s even easier for you to rent somewhere else. The landlord fixing up the neighborhood and raising rent isn’t ripping anyone off.
I’ve lived paycheck-to-paycheck at low pay jobs when I was younger, and the free market provided me with plenty of choices of cheap places to rent.
Many people own boats, live on them year-round, don’t have a lot of money, and might even be offended if you characterized their lifestyle with phrases like “financial ability” and “leisure time”.
A nice defense of gentrification.
Yep. I’m sure you had infinite choices. How long ago were you poor? Were you raising children? Where did you live? What town, what city? Do you realize how much the cost of living has gone up, across the board, in numerous areas?
I’m sure lots of poor people would be offended by you characterizing their inability to find better affordable housing as a “life choice”, but hey, YMMV.
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I never characterized anyone’s inability to find better affordable housing as a “life choice”. You’ve falsely attributed a quote to me that I never made.
You said:
Yet gloss over the fact that it’s one of the few affordable options for many who live there.
You said:
Ignoring the reality limiting MANY people’s ability to raise capital (because literally everything they make goes to pay to live day to day). What, precisely should they do?
I found your comparision of those who own boats - the VAST MAJORITY OF WHICH ARE OWNED FOR LEISURE TIME (at least here in Amurica, land of the free, home of the brave, working only for the elite) - to people who live in trailer parks, many of whom are renters, not owners.
Not everyone can afford to buy a home. They don’t need to be lectured at by someone who doesn’t understand the basic mechanics of being poor, despite at one point living in the margins.
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You misquoted me, and you should apologize. You said I characterized people’s inability to find better affordable housing as a “life choice”, and you used double quotes to surround the phrase “life choice” above, as if you were quoting my words. I never used that phrase at all; it’s not in any of my posts, and it doesn’t in any way represent my position.
You have a different viewpoint than me on this topic, and that’s fine. In fact, I’m grateful for it. If you’d like to creatively remix or rephrase my viewpoint as a means to further our discussion, then you’re upholding a time-honored internet debate tradition. If you’re going to fabricate phrases and then falsely attribute them to me by enclosing them in double quotes as if you’re quoting me, you’re going to destroy your credibility.
Apparently some if not all parks own water distribution within the park. My naive homeschooled nephew moved to midwest a few years ago from Montana fundamentalist brother’s town and “bought” a trailer in a park that was a pretty decent park when it opened in the late 70’s. I found out they were paying 4 times the normal rate for water and it was often turned off for hours at a time when incoming or outgoing trailers were hooked up due to non-existant or inoperable shut-off valves. The homes that remained were in poor condition and typically changed hands for a few kilobux. He somehow got out of that deal and found a marginally better park with a real fixer upper. Then his ex-stripper wife set him up with another poor people’s rip-off in the form of payday loans before giving him the boot. He’s been several years digging out of these financial black holes the market offered him.
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i guess we just need to develop some moral maturity, and accept the fact that some people are only useful to have their last few pennies wrung out of them before being left to die!
well i did say it was irrational.
on the other hand, in the grand scheme of things, a lot of those “upper classes” in nyc are in nearly as precarious a situation as the people who are in trailer parks. we usually have more money coming in (yes, i live in manhattan), but also more money going out. the majority of people in manhattan aren’t “upper class” in a Marxist way, they’re just a more comfortable class of prole.
sometimes much more comfortable, but isn’t the whole problem that everyone has trouble drumming up sympathy for everyone else?
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My quotes around life choice were not to indicate that you used that term directly, but that you made that comparison indirectly. You do seem to imply, again, indirectly that the people buying boats and the people living in trailer park enjoy the same set of choices in life, and they patently do not.
But if I misunderstood and misrepresented what you said, I apologize for that.
Agreed on the sympathy aspect, but if you’re living in Manhattan, there is always the “you can go live in the burbs” argument, right? the more money you have, the more options you have, is my point. Can you get stuck, absolutely, but not the same way, I think. In reality, we should all be able to decide where we live and not have to sweat so much over costs - whether we want to live in the heart of a major metropolis, out in the middle of nowhere with the critters, or out in the burbs. It shouldn’t be a Faustian bargain for anyone just to have a roof over your head. We all deserve basic dignity and respect. But the more affluent you are, the more you can carve out that space of respect.
As for money going in and out, I think the poorer you are, the more you pay for basics. The overall problem is that very few people other than the upper class have a cushion of savings of any kind. Many with a comfortable middle class living (especially in places like Manhattan) are in many ways still living pay check to pay check without some liquid cash on hand somewhere. Many people have their nest egg almost completely tied up in a mortgage, and of course when the market crashed, many of those (even good mortgages) were upside down. It ties you down and limits your options.
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