Manufactured Home Syndrome

J. B. Jackson, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2000), 222.

Numbers here are kept approximate to protect reseller identities from discovery by using these same public records.

In Texas, many of the white people that I talked to used the term “Louisiana people” to mean Black people.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 16).

Charles Peterson, “Early American Prefabrication,” Gazette Des Beaux-Arts 6, no. XXXIII (1948): 37–46.

Gilbert Herbert, Pioneers of Prefabrication: The British Contribution in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), emphasis mine.

Ibid., 9.

While the US primarily fulfilled the prefab house desires, with thousands of shipped houses, houses were also shipped from China, Tasmania, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and the UK.

Herbert, Pioneers of Prefabrication, 27.

John Fraser Hart, Michelle J. Rhodes, and John T. Morgan, The Unknown World of the Mobile Home (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Robert Kronenburg, Houses in Motion (London: Academy Editions, 2002), 80.

Kenneth J. Cooper, “As Housing Shortage Worsens, Tribes Forced to Use FEMA Trailers,” Truthout, May 6, 2011, ➝.

Kevin Johnson and Richard M. Todd, “The Market for Manufactured Home Loans to American Indian and Alaska Native Borrowers In Indian Country Remains Highly Concentrated,” Center for Indian Country Development, December 1, 2017, ➝.

Mike Baker and Daniel Wagner, “Minorities Exploited by Warren Buffett’s Mobile-Home Empire,” The Seattle Times, December 26, 2015, ➝. The manufactured housing market experienced a securitization-driven market meltdown in the late 1990s that foreshadowed the bursting of the larger housing bubble around a decade later. The boom in risky chattel loans was made possible by large increases in the securitization of manufactured home loans--from $184 million in 1987 to $15 billion in 1999. When the national housing market bubble popped in 2007/8 hundreds of billions of federal dollars were dedicated to rescuing mortgages from default that did not include chattel mobile home loans. Ann M. Burkhart, “Bringing Manufactured Housing into the Real Estate Finance System,” Pepperdine Law Review 37, no. 2 (2010), 427–458.

Lawrence Saunders, “Roll Your Own Home,” Saturday Evening Post, May 23, 1936.

Hart, Rhodes, and Morgan, The Unknown World of the Mobile Home, 9.

Janet Ore, “Mobile Home Syndrome: Engineered Woods and the Making of a New Domestic Ecology in the Post–World War II Era,” Technology and Culture 52, no. 2 (2011): 260–286, 270, 272.

Ibid.

Richard K. Green and Susan M. Wachter, “The American Mortgage in Historical and International Context,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (2005): 93–114, 96–97.

United States and National Commission on Urban Problems, Building the American City: Report of the National Commission on Urban Problems to the Congress and to the President of the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1969).

The ownership rate among U.S. households rose from 43.6 percent in 1940, the last census year before World War II, to 64 percent by 1980 (Census of Population and Housing, 1940 and 1980).

Lawrence Mishel, Lawrence R. Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heather Boushey, The State of Working America, 2002/2003 (Cornell University Press, 2003). Similarly, mortgage debt rose from being 15% of household assets in 1949 to 28% in 1979 and 41% of household assets by 2001.

Mortgages confer status to owners by virtue of having qualified—via credit ratings—for a mortgage/debt relationship with a bank. Constance Perin, Everything In Its Place: Social Order and Land Use in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

Billie Faircloth, Plastics Now: On Architecture’s Relationship to a Continuously Emerging Material (London; New York: Routledge, 2015), 263.

Janet Ore, “Mobile Home Syndrome,” 273–277.

Mike Baker, and Daniel Wagner, “Minorities Exploited by Warren Buffett’s Mobile-Home Empire,” ➝.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 35.

Esther Sullivan, Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018).

Gregory Pierce and Silvia Jimenez, “Unreliable Water Access in U.S. Mobile Homes: Evidence From the American Housing Survey,” Housing Policy Debate 25, no. 4 (October 2, 2015): 739–753, ➝.

Esther Sullivan, Carrie Makarewicz, and Andrew Rumbach, “Affordable but Marginalized,” Journal of the American Planning Association 0, no. 0 (August 25, 2021): 1–13, ➝.

Chip Berry, Carolyn Hronis, and Maggie Woodwad, “Who’s Energy Insecure? You Might Be Surprised.” In ACEEE Proceedings, 2018, ➝.

Bruce Tonn, Erin Rose, and Beth Hawkins, “Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Weatherization Assistance Program: Impact Results,” Energy Policy 118 (July 1, 2018): 279–290. Thanks to Greg Pierce for pointing out this vital connection.

John Johnson and Sullivan Brennan, “$21-Million Deal to Improve Farm Worker Housing,” Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2000, ➝.

John Dialesandro, Noli Brazil, Stephen Wheeler, and Yaser Abunnasr, “Dimensions of Thermal Inequity: Neighborhood Social Demographics and Urban Heat in the Southwestern U.S.,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 3 (January 2021): 941.

Jim Baker, Liz Voigt, and Linda Jun, “Private Equity Giants Converge on Manufactured Homes,” February 2019, ➝.

Mark Kear, Margaret Wilder, Patricia Solís, David Hondula, and Mark Bernstein, “Self-Isolating from COVID-19 in a Mobile Home? That Could Be Deadly in Arizona,” The Arizona Republic, May 3, 2020, ➝.

Dalbyul Lee and Juchul Jung, “The Growth of Low-Income Population in Floodplains: A Case Study of Austin, TX,” KSCE Journal of Civil Engineering 18, no. 2 (March 1, 2014): 683–693, ➝.

Gregory Pierce, C.J. Gabbe, and Annabelle Rosser, “Households Living in Manufactured Housing Face Outsized Exposure to Heat and Wildfire Hazards: Evidence from California,” Natural Hazards Review 23, no. 3 (August 1, 2022).

See Wanda Dalla Costa, “Contextualized Metrics + Narrating Binaries: Defining Place and Process in Indigenous North America,” Presented at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), Santiago, 2016, ➝; David S. Edmunds, Ryan Shelby, Angela James, Lenora Steele, Michelle Baker, Yael Valerie Perez, and Kim TallBear, “Tribal Housing, Codesign, and Cultural Sovereignty,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 38, no. 6 (November 1, 2013): 801–828, ➝; Erin Marie Konsmo and Karyn Recollet, “Afterword: Meeting the Land(s) Where They Are At.” In Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View, edited by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang, 2019.