There should be a word for the particular joy of finding an open parking meter a half-block from your destination.
I had been worried there only might be valet, because this was Beverly Hills and some valet guy is always just waiting to pop out and park your car in places like Beverly Hills. You might think the valet is meant to be a form of catering in this epicenter of flash and gilt, but what I know is the valet is the first checkpoint, assessing who is wealthy enough to belong here and who is feeding, lamprey-like, around the edges.
And me, with my dusty jalopy, the valet always instantly knew my deal.
The year was 2002. Back then, I wrote books and worked for glossy women’s magazines. I had a Malibu address, which really meant I rented a converted garage on a canyon estate that belonged to a movie guy. But on paper, I looked fancy, and it was true that I could pass among the rarified denizens of Westside L.A. — at least most of the time.
That night in Beverly Hills, I was meeting a marketing rep for dinner. She wanted me to write a piece for a big New York magazine about a new restaurant she was handling called Airstream — as in trailer, as in an honest-to-goodness trailer in the middle of Beverly Hills, at the corner of Little Santa Monica and Camden. Chef Fred Eric was the enfant terrible of cuisine at that moment, and his new concept was to create a restaurant-as-performance-art.
The entrance was fashioned to look like an oversized replica of an Airstream door — curved top, steel latch handle. The windows had horizontal glass plates gliding outward, as if they opened by crank. Inside, the counter seats rested on the heads of lawn gnomes. Glowing dioramas on the walls created a view of Beverly Hills as a stylized trailer park: Devo mowing Astroturf, Barbara Streisand doing laundry, Dolly Parton fixing her beehive in the bathroom mirror. Pink flamingos sculpted from porcelain sat in the corner. The counters were made to look like Formica, but weren’t. Faux-Formica.
“Somebody had to go to college to think that one up,” my mother said in my head. Some people have a conscience that speaks to them; I have my mother’s Scotch-and-menthol-cigarette one-liners on mental auto-play.
At Airstream, it was possible to order a magnum of Veuve Cliquot ($128) with your peanut butter and jelly sandwich ($2.75). The “Mac Daddy and Cheese” — what my family called “chili mack,” canned chili over spaghetti noodles topped with cheddar cheese — ran $7.50. (Today, all this would be three times as much.)
The waitress suggested a nice domestic pinot noir with that. Sonoma is producing such fine grapes, don’t you know?
“Yes. Of course. Mais oui,” I said, throwing in some French.
But suddenly, I wanted to hit things. Slap the chef and his mocking, condescending menu. Slap those millionaires at the counter laughing at the gnomes under them.
My face reddened. I felt ashamed by how much I knew about this world that was being joked about.
But I widened my smile; my nonchalance, impeccable.
“You know what? I’ll just have a coffee. Black. Do you have Folgers?”
***
I grew up in a mobile home — the type of domicile that has evolved into today’s manufactured housing.
But let’s be honest, everybody still calls them trailers.
That mobile home of ours provided stability I might otherwise have never known. It gave us privacy, and four walls to call our own. My single mom didn’t have to scramble every month to make rent. And maybe, just maybe, it helped make me the person I am today.
Yet my mother and grandmother would roll over in their graves that I’m telling you this. Why? Because they were always afraid we’d be judged as “those” kind of people: “Trailer trash.”
***
(Illustration by Jeff Goertzen)
But let’s back up.
The wood-framed, metal-clad boxes on wheels to be called trailers were a 1920s American invention. Although initially conceived for short-term travel to “trail” along behind automobiles for the rich, these “galloping bungalows” turned out to be a ready solution to the middle-class housing shortage created when the GIs returned from World War II.
One of those GIs was Scott Camp Jr., my father-in-law’s father, who returned from the front lines in Germany to a wife and two young children. Scott had war medals but no significant money, so the family lived in a travel trailer until he could establish himself as a civilian. Although that was a brief period for the family, my father-in-law still jokes uneasily about being “the original trailer trash” — as if his college degree and subsequent career as a minister can never erase the gluey smell of pressboard walls from his memory.
***
Some historians point to a 1936 court case in Orchard Lake, Michigan, as setting the frame through which people who live in trailers would be viewed. In “Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes,” Allan D. Wallis wrote about the case of automobile factory worker Hildred Gumarsol, who pulled his trailer to camp at the shore of the lake one summer.
That was common enough at the time, but rather than pull the trailer away after a few days, Gumarsol put it up on cement blocks and added a small wooden porch. Since he returned so often to the same spot, he thought he’d save himself the hassle of moving the cumbersome trailer.
But the neighbors threw a fit, afraid the lake area would soon become a shantytown and lower property values. They sued to have Gumarsol’s trailer moved and to prevent others from moving in.
The Gumarsol matter articulated all the arguments against trailers and the biases against their dwellers that have all become stereotypes in American culture, and codified through zoning laws: “Trailer people” do not pay their share of taxes but get to use public services; that trailers are ugly and threaten real estate values; and, perhaps most importantly, the kind of people who would choose to live in a trailer “tend to behave immorally,” to borrow language from the Gumarsol case.
***
Some 18 million Americans live in manufactured housing today. A mere 20 years ago, that number was roughly 7 million greater. You’d think it would be more today, given the acute homelessness and housing crises — not to mention the advances in mobile home quality, safety and functionality.
The 1980 Housing Act established “manufactured housing” as the legal term of reference for industrialized construction built on a chassis that is neither trailer nor conventional stick-built housing. Real estate agents had coined the term “mobile home.”
Whatever you call it, the units themselves have become more substantial with each evolution, being now the only type of housing built by private companies that must conform to federal standards. More than half a century has gone since the days when an unscrupulous manufacturer could wad old newspapers into wall frames and call it insulation.
As SCNG business columnist Jon Lansner has reported, manufactured housing presents one of the best options for putting up highly livable homes in the shortest amount of time, and more cheaply than any other type of housing.
And yet, mobile home manufacturers and park owners contend that California regulations make it impossible to build new mobile home parks and almost impossible to keep the ones we have open.
Why is our dismissal of mobile home parks and those who live there so intractable? Why is it so persistent that we can’t see this as a potential solution to the current housing crisis? Why dismiss people who live in mobile home parks as undesirables and assume those who own the parks are mostly just slumlords? Deeply entrenched prejudice and assumptions fly in both directions, and are exactly what’s keeping us from solving one of the worst social problems of our time.
Facts: There is an urgent need for affordable housing. Home values and rents in California are among the most expensive in the nation, and the state has one of the highest rates of homelessness, according to most any source you want to cite; let’s pick the Public Policy Institute of California for one.
Mobile homes are a viable form of low-income housing. Period.
So, why isn’t it being factored in?
***
(Illustration by Jeff Goertzen)
The irony is mobile homes aren’t really mobile. They’re built to be set on a permanent foundation, and even among the ones that can move, most don’t. It requires permits and a lot of effort to move a mobile home. Plus, in this market starved for affordable homes, it’s often profitable for owners to sell the home at a relative premium and get the key money from the buyers for the lease on the lot where it sits.
Yet the whiff of transience still attaches to them. For instance, a report for the Fannie Mae Foundation, done as late as 2001, noted that the general population considered mobile home residents to be “transient people with unconventional lifestyles.”
I know firsthand that people who live in mobile homes want community. They seek consistency and connectedness, as my single mother did for my family. They turn to mobile homes precisely because they offer a home to call their own, stability you can afford, and it offers them the space and lifestyle they want. You can live well in manufactured housing.
California-based Three Pillar Communities owns some 40 communities in seven states, including many parks here in California. Co-founder Daniel Weisfield has a vision of next-generation mobile home parks. As the website explains, “Daniel’s professional mission is to turn the ‘trailer park’ stereotype on its head. He believes manufactured housing is the best way to close our country’s housing gap and to create affordable home-ownership opportunities.”
Mobile home park owners and operators could be seen as the potential allies of the government in the fight for affordable housing. And yet, politicians seem to prefer stereotypes to solutions.
Builders also see the paradox. On his website Construction Physics, Brian Potter writes about the “failure of prefabrication (building homes in factories instead of on-site) to revolutionize the housing industry. … No one has yet managed to do for housing what Ford did for cars, or what Corning did for lightbulbs. …
“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.”
***
It was 1981. We could have qualified for government housing, if any had been available in our rural New Mexico town. Mom was a single mother, sole supporter of both her daughter and her own mother on a nurse’s wage.
Instead of Section 8, we landed in a mobile home park where $185 a month covered rent and utilities, about half the price of any place we had ever rented. “Can’t beat that,” Mom said.
I remember nothing about packing up to move. One day we were just there. Mom drove up in the Ford Country Squire station wagon to the last row of the park, swinging the steering wheel left onto the gravel parking pad on the side.
Gram’s white shirt collar was ironed. Her brown eyes surveyed the long rectangle of a house, lingering at the bay window above a towing hitch.
“We can pretend it’s a land yacht. There, in the front there, is the bow,” Gram said.
I stared at the bay window and saw the license plate displayed in the corner. “Why is there a license there, like it’s a car or something?”
I thought the license plate must be some person’s idea of a joke about home décor, like the beer can windchimes a few carports over. I was unaware that the law required a license for any home with wheels underneath it, even if those wheels were hidden by a corrugated skirt. I didn’t know it then but that was the reason a mobile home’s value depreciates over time, unlike a site-built home: Even if the home goes nowhere, laws still label it “mobile.”
Inside, the paneling did create the feeling of a ship’s cabin or a submarine, or what I imagined those things to feel like. The trailer sat high, and because it was stationed in the end row of the park, the living room windows faced out onto an empty pasture, onto the road, with a vista as far as the drive-in theater, so if you looked straight it was possible to ignore the neighbors on either side and around in the back, lined as cars are in a busy store parking lot. It was possible to think you did have a home in the country.
The interior — from the fake wrought-iron room divider to the forest-colored appliances in the corner kitchen area to the bay window at the end of the living area — wasn’t nearly as noxious as some of the terrible apartments we’d rented.
In many ways, the trailer showed genius in engineering. Every inch of space was accounted for, employed for some purpose. My room was the first door down the hallway next to the one bathroom; the hallway no wider than a hefty man’s shoulders. Mom and Gram would share the bigger room located at the butt end of the trailer, past the back door and the laundry area.
A plastic knob opened the door to my room, the door itself was air-light because it was hollow — more a suggestion of a door, but still something I could shut for privacy. Behind the door, I found a space that was either a good-sized walk-in closet or the smallest bedroom ever to be designed. A built-in dresser pressed next to a recessed area for hanging clothes. A built-in headboard for a twin bed. A large rectangle window looking out onto the neighbor’s carport.
Gram followed my gaze. “We’ll get those butterfly curtains you liked at Kmart,” she offered. I thought that sounded great, happy that I finally had a space to call my own.
Then, Gram’s eyes took in the brown linoleum we stood on. “This is what throw rugs are for.”
After we settled in, Mom and Gram made the place pretty plush. We had a floral davenport, a stereo set with velvet covers on the speakers. Gold curtains hung from the bay window and on the longest wall were two pictures, one of a matador and another of horses rearing, exactly like the one on the set of the television show “I Dream of Jeannie,” a little detail I always appreciated because it provided evidence we were part of a permanent world, waiting somewhere out there.
***
(Illustration by Jeff Goertzen)
Granted, the mobile home solution to the dearth of affordable housing isn’t perfect.
A hundred years have passed since the galloping bungalow days, and today the homes bear little resemblance to that Depression-era take on the covered wagon. Since 1974, when Congress enacted the Mobile Home Construction and Safety Standards Act, HUD has regulated the industry’s safety standards.
The units themselves have become infinitely more substantial with every passing decade. They’re architecturally designed, they’re energy efficient, they’re spatially enhanced. They can be pretty much whatever you want them to be.
In fact, considering the efficient design of today’s mobile homes and how light they live on the land, leaving no permanent scar, they’re perhaps also the most environmentally sound choice available for housing in this delicate ecosystem. Yet, while ecologically speaking they might be more suitable than most of the McMansions tearing up Southern California hillsides, they will never be considered anything but blights on the landscape.
They’re still considered personal property, like a car, not real property like a condo. Financing for personal property loans, sometimes called “chattel loans,” comes with higher interest rates and shorter terms than mortgage loans. And if you’re in a park, you may own your home but you still have to pay rent for the land underneath it. That rent can go up, or you could even be evicted, although it’s more difficult to evict someone from a mobile home park than an apartment.
That’s because, in California at least, residents aren’t totally powerless.
***
When mobile home parks were expanding in the 1970s and 1980s, the give-and-take between prospective residents and park owners was not what you might expect it to have been. The effort to try to fill spaces gave prospective residents leverage.
And, get this: In some locations in California, mobile home park owners were so eager to attract residents they offered free piloting lessons so prospective tenants could learn to fly airplanes and helicopters if they would agree to move into a mobile home park. Essentially, tenants back then were calling the shots.
That imbalance of power became part of the law that governs such tenancies, and particularly the Mobilehome Residency Law, which is part of the Civil Code. Because mobile home park tenancies differ from standard single-family detached or apartment tenancies, the legislature felt that special circumstances entitled mobile home park tenants to superior protections. And to this day, it’s the tenants who actually have superior bargaining power.
This complicates the stereotype of the all-powerful landlord. California Civil Code, §798.55 (a) says: “a) The Legislature finds and declares that, because of the high cost of moving mobilehomes, the potential for damage resulting therefrom, the requirements relating to the installation of mobilehomes, and the cost of landscaping or lot preparation, it is necessary that the owners of mobilehomes occupied within mobilehome parks be provided with the unique protection from actual or constructive eviction afforded by the provisions of this chapter.”
The Mobilehome Parks Act in California also carried a legislative declaration of policy and intent that flies in the face of the stigma of transience associated with people who live in manufactured housing.
Health & Safety Code §18250 says: “…Because of the high cost of moving manufactured homes and mobilehomes, most owners of manufactured homes and mobilehomes reside within mobilehome parks for substantial periods of time. Because of the relatively permanent nature of residence in such parks and the substantial investment which a manufactured home or mobilehome represents, residents of mobilehome parks are entitled to live in conditions which assure their health, safety, general welfare, and a decent living environment, and which protect the investment of their manufactured homes and mobile homes.”
All that is to say, I think if voters demanded that the existing drawbacks to mobile home living be improved, politicians, banking and businesses would be motivated to institute solutions.
But nothing will change, no solutions can be imagined, if we don’t drop the old ways of thinking.
***
My grandmother had come out of the hills of rural western Pennsylvania and became a fashion buyer in Manhattan, then a “risqué divorcée” for her time; she died still wearing her fake pearls in a single-wide mobile home in the New Mexico desert. My mother joined the Air Force, became a nurse thanks to the GI Bill, traveled the world, married my stepdad — an Army vet — and then she became a widow in a double-wide.
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Hard work and books got me out of the park through a scholarship to study in Australia my last year of high school. (“Only a girl from a trailer park would think a ticket to a penal colony was a step up,” a friend teased.)
That scholarship combined with some luck and financial aid programs for working-class kids landed me at a state university. My subsequent career has since taken me to the center of Hollywood glamor and the tense circles of the New York literati.
“You don’t look like you grew up in a trailer park.”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that in my life. It’s infuriating. And I hate that I know what they’re implying.
***
You might know comedian Vicki Barbolak from “America’s Got Talent,” where she cracked up Simon Cowell and the rest of the judges with her brand of what she calls “Trailer Nasty” humor.
Don’t get me wrong. Barbolak, who hails from Oceanside where she owns a mobile home with a million-dollar ocean view, is funny. Really funny. She seizes the stereotype and wields her jokes if not like a sword then like a big rubber club.
I love the way Barbolak plays with how the trailer park lifestyle is both reviled and embraced as an alluring form of kitsch. Christian Dior once included a “Trailer Park” purse in a spring collection — which was considered daring. At one point at the height of my own Hollywood cool days, I rented the “Cowgirl Palace,” a tricked-out 1967 Fleetwood trailer in Topanga Canyon owned by a stunt woman (famous for her driving in “Thelma and Louise”), and it was considered “edgy.”
But start to really look at how trailers are used in popular literature, film and TV: Want a shorthand for conveying that a character is poor, hopeless and ignorant? Put them in a trailer. A buffoon? Put them in a trailer. An outlaw on the run? Put them in a … well, you know.
The most positive depiction will be the charming rascals, like Jim Rockford and his trailer on the beach in that old show “The Rockford Files.” Still marginal, though. Still outside conventional society.
As amusing and convenient as these references are, they conceal the true intricacy of politics, economics, sociology and psychology that weave together to create a cultural phenomenon. The labels around trailer life have been traded for so long that it’s almost impossible to see behind those labels — even if you live in one.
***
I sometimes think of our neighbors in the park I grew up in and the parks in which my mom and grandmother later lived: a music professor; a retired high school teacher from a well-off family in Iowa; a widowed cop with three troubled boys; a sheriff’s deputy; a construction worker; a beauty salon owner who hailed from Juarez. I knew them all.
These people were not “trash,” nor were we. We all deserve a home to call our own. Which is becoming more elusive every day. Let this be a clarion call for cooperation between government and the private sector in California. Now is the time, Golden State. If you could take another look, it might just get people into homes.
As for me, my life’s work has made me rich in knowledge and experience — and not much else. Today, I hope I can bring the story full circle and one day retire to a mobile home. I imagine a cute two-bedroom on a plot of land in the mountains outside of Julian.
A home in the country. Like where I grew up, only better.
(Illustration by Jeff Goertzen)