Rise & Fall of the double-wide.

[George K]

The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home - Part I

However, one form of prefabrication is able to reliably produce housing substantially cheaper than site-built methods - the manufactured home (formerly the mobile home, also called trailer homes or HUD homes.) Manufactured homes are a particular type of factory-built housing that isn’t required to meet local building codes - instead, manufactured homes are built to the Manufactured Home Construction and Safety Standards, a federal standard administered by HUD. Manufactured homes have an average per-square-foot cost that’s less than half the cost of the average site-built home

(This is a somewhat misleading statistic, as site-built homes will be higher-end than manufactured homes on average and thus more expensive for reasons unrelated to production efficiency. Comparing like for like, the cost-per-square-foot of a manufactured home is somewhere around 10-35% less than the cost of a site-built home.)

Despite their lower cost, manufactured homes today make up a relatively small portion of the housing market. In 2021 manufactured homes were just over 6% of new housing units, with just over 100,000 manufactured homes shipped compared to 1.6 million single family and multifamily housing starts. But this wasn’t always the case - at its peak in the early 1970s, the mobile home industry (they didn’t “officially” become manufactured homes until 1980) was shipping 600,000 homes a year, and mobile homes were over 20% of new housing units....

Since lately there’s been renewed interest in manufactured homes as a potential low-cost housing solution, it’s useful to understand how the industry got to where it is. Why did manufactured homes explode in popularity only for the industry to collapse a few years later? Why aren’t manufactured homes more widely used today? Let’s take a look.

[taiwan_girl]

That is a interesting article.

At least for me, my stereotype for a mobile home (not for camping) in the US is somebody who is very poor and does not take care of it very well.

I am not sure I have ever seen a mobile home outside of the US

[mark]

@taiwan_girl said in Rise & Fall of the double-wide.:

That is a interesting article.

At least for me, my stereotype for a mobile home (not for camping) in the US is somebody who is very poor and does not take care of it very well.

I am not sure I have ever seen a mobile home outside of the US

Yes, the stereotype.

My best friend has crews traveling the country installing infrastructure projects for water and sewage in the manufactured housing industry.

Manufactured housing communities range from what you describe all the way up to very nice, gated, HOA communities, with security, golf courses, fitness centers, gathering places, activity centers, parks, and some of the nicest looking homes you will find anywhere with people that do take care of their stuff. Florida and Arizona and even places like Louisville, MO have a lot of these communities. Some of the communities are occupant owned. They are all partners in the ownership and management of their community.

So, yes the stereotype exists and it exists for a good reason. In the past they have always been vilified as "less than" a site built house and they were by a large margin. They are always featured on the news when a Tornado rips through a community. You never hear, A site built house community was destroyed by a tornado" on the news, yet it actually happens with much more frequency. The manufactured housing industry is still struggling with the reputation of the past.

Modern manufactured housing has evolved over the years and is a range of techniques to build the actual building. Some are 90% assembled at the factory, and some are shipped in sections while others are only shipping the pre-made walls complete with wiring, plumbing and insulation, some just bare walls that are finished on site.

I have seen some manufactured homes, and this was 25+ years ago, that were so nice looking from the exterior with very well appointed interiors, that you would never have known, they were manufactured homes.