Archinect - News

Academics ‘debunk stereotypes’ around mobile home parks in search for affordable housing solutions

2022-08-19T12:44:00-04:00

A group of North American professors is seeking to debunk commonly-held stereotypes about mobile home parks in the United States. City & Regional Planning Assistant Professor Zachary Lamb (University of California, Berkeley), Geography & Planning Assistant Professor Jason Spicer (University of Toronto), and City & Regional Planning Assistant Professor Linda Shi (Cornell University) hope that their defense of the typology will make mobile homes a “new face of affordable housing.”

“Over 20 million Americans live in manufactured housing — more than in public housing and federally subsidized rental housing combined,” the group says in their recent thought piece on The Conversation. “Yet many people, including urban planners and affordable housing researchers, see manufactured housing parks as problems. In contrast, we see them as part of the solution to housing crises.”

In response to the critique that manufactured housing is ‘shoddy,’ the group argues that manufactured homes have had ...

How a mobile home community created a co-op and bought its own land

2016-12-28T13:47:00-05:00

Park Plaza is a mobile home park, or what industry calls a manufactured housing community. Five years ago, the residents banded together, formed a nonprofit co-op and bought their entire neighborhood from the company that owned it. Today, these residents exert democratic control over almost 9 acres of prime suburbs, with 80 manufactured houses sited on them.

"There are no precise figures, but the U.S. Census Bureau estimates there are more than 8 million manufactured houses across the country. Housing specialists say they're an important source of affordable housing."

The Dollar General store of housing

2014-04-07T11:16:00-04:00

With around 10,000 lots scattered mostly across the Midwest and the Central Plains, Rolfe and Reynolds are about equivalent in size to a public-housing agency in a midsize city — and in an important way, they play the same role. Those living in public housing are generally required to pay up to 30 percent of their household income as their share of the rent. Rolfe and Reynolds’s tenants pay on average closer to 20 percent.

In Southern California Gary Rivlin attends Mobile Home University and profiles it's founder Frank Rolfe.

Architecture Student Converts School Bus Into Cozy Home

2013-08-19T19:36:00-04:00

School buses are so much fun. The springy seats, the awkward-to-open windows [..]—it all hearkens back to a time in your life when you were younger, happier and worry-free. But did you ever imagine living in one? Hank Butitta did. By his last semester at architecture school, Butitta had grown weary of doing projects that only existed on paper, ones that were destined to be filed away and forgotten. He got sick of making things that nobody cared about. So what did he do? He bought a school bus.