Mobile Homes Lose Their Mobility : Now They’re ‘Manufactured’ and Gaining Respectability

In 1979, San Diego County lawmakers liberated mobile home owners by lifting a five-year moratorium and telling them they could place their factory-built houses on individual home sites in the unincorporated parts of the county.

In 1980, the state of California followed suit with a law modeled after the county’s, saying that, with some conditions, mobile homes could be placed on conventional home lots in cities and counties throughout the state.

No longer would mobile homes be bound to mobile home parks, with their shuffleboard courts and clubhouses and swimming pools--and rows upon rows of mobile home neighbors and increasing rents.

Instead, the mobile home owner could buy his own piece of land and get some room to stretch.

The decision to free mobile homes was hailed as yet another step toward offering more affordable housing in an expensive housing market. And it was seen as another move toward ending discrimination against mobile homes. Evolving from little more than trailers forming impromptu roadside communities along tobacco roads of the South, many mobile homes today are large and attractive with wet bars, cathedral ceilings, dry-wall construction, skylights and fireplaces.

Critics, however, complained that mobile homes on single lots would devalue neighboring, conventionally built--and more expensive--homes. And some people speculated that allowing the more affordable factory-built homes in the county’s unincorporated areas would spark a rush of development, forcing an extension of urban services into rural neighborhoods.

What has happened in the past six years? Simply, and curiously, there has been no such exodus of mobile homes from parks to single lots, despite predictions from both supporters and critics that the law would prompt wholesale changes in the backcountry landscape.

Why not?

Generally, people move into mobile homes as much for the life style, security and camaraderie afforded them at mobile home parks as for the benefits of the home itself, industry experts say.

Furthermore, many owners of mobile homes have pursued a handful of other options to beat the rising cost of park living--but those have allowed them to stay in park-type communities. In some cities, they successfully lobbied for rent control commissions to temper rent increases. Elsewhere, the tenants have purchased or leased their parks, or formed nonprofit corporations and developed their own, brand-new parks.

Plus, for those people in search of affordable housing, mobile homes--or manufactured houses, as they are now called--aren’t necessarily the answer because even though the mobile home is cheaper than a conventional house, the buyer must still face the cost of the land, which isn’t any cheaper just because a manufactured home is going on it.

Finally, most people who opt to live in a rural setting and are willing to pay the price for the land generally are willing to spend the money for larger, conventionally built homes. Then, industry spokesmen acknowledge, there is still some stigma attached to living in mobile homes, considered by some to be less than quality housing.

So, despite predictions that some of the county’s 38,000 mobile home households would move to the hillsides and valleys of North and East County, there has been no mass relocation.

Even in the City of San Diego, where the 1980 state law was expected to prompt “in-filling” of vacant lots in older neighborhoods with new manufactured homes, that hasn’t been the case.

According to figures from the housing division of the city’s Department of Building and Inspection, only about 20 manufactured homes have been placed on city lots since 1980.

In the unincorporated areas of the county, only about 100 manufactured homes have been put on single lots since the 1979 law, according to county figures.

In smaller cities, officials strain to think of any manufactured homes on single lots. Poway has none, for example, and San Marcos--with one of the greatest concentrations of mobile home parks in the nation--has only one mobile home on a single lot.

Indeed, the woman in San Marcos who wanted to put her mobile home on a one-acre lot caused quite a stir three years ago, even though it was quite legal.

“We were all up in arms and we fought it all we could at City Hall, but there was nothing we could do about it. The law’s the law,” recalled Paul Filkins, who lives next door to the target of his criticism.

“Most people (who own manufactured homes) don’t have enough money to fix them up right,” Filkins suggested.

But luckily, Filkins said, his neighbor invested a large amount of money landscaping her parcel “and she’s made a pretty nice place out of it.”

“We’re all lucky that she spent the money she did on her place,” he said.

The woman, Alice Wondra, had lived in a mobile home park in Carlsbad, at the insistence of her ailing husband, who wanted a maintenance-free home and a carefree life style.

After her husband died and rents at the park skyrocketed, Wondra decided to move out. Since nobody offered her a reasonable price on her home, she looked--and found--a lot where she could move her manufactured home.

“At first, there was a misunderstanding over what I wanted to do,” she said. “The neighbors didn’t have any concept of what I intended to do. The people now say they are delighted. They’ve apologized, and now we’re all friends. They said to me, ‘Oh, we had no idea how nice it would turn out.’ ”

Wondra’s home meets the county requirements for manufactured houses on single lots: a pitched roof with composition material or better quality; wood or stucco siding (hers is wood), and on a foundation. Wondra’s home has Oriental architectural features, and her one acre is heavily landscaped--to the degree that, from some angles, the home can’t even be seen.

Wondra says her life style is not desired by most mobile home owners. After all, she says, she has an acre of land to care for, while most of her old neighbors had no affinity for yard work and preferred, instead, green-painted pebbles and a few potted plants.

“Sometimes I feel a little self-conscious (about living in a manufactured home in a neighborhood of ranch-style houses), but I hated tribal type communal living,” she said.

Echoing her sentiments is Norma Kravitcz. She and her husband, Frank, were the first people in San Diego County to apply for a permit to put a manufactured house on a single lot after the 1979 law took effect.

The couple had lived in a mobile home park for years, she said, but the close proximity of neighbors dampened, rather than enhanced, their life. “My husband (a wood craftsman) had a tiny little saw but he was still afraid to run it because people would complain,” she said. “The neighbor next door even complained about our wind chime. I couldn’t handle that.”

So the Kravitczes bought 2.5 acres in rural Potrero, nine miles west of Campo near California 94 in East County.

Being the first people to seek permission to put a manufactured home on a single lot caused some problems for the couple, she said.

“Nobody at the time could make up their mind how we should go about doing it,” she said. “The law said it had to be on a foundation, but the county didn’t know what kind of foundation so they threw it back to the manufacturer and he wasn’t knowledgeable either.

“Then they told us we had to fill out an environmental impact report. We had to drive 50 miles into San Diego to get the paper work and pay $100, and then we had to go back out and take pictures of the site and fill out the information and drive it back to San Diego two days later. No sooner did we get home when the phone rang and they said they didn’t need it after all.”

Early in 1980, the couple moved their 24-foot by 65-foot, $30,000 manufactured home onto their land. “It would have cost us a lot more to build a new home,” she said. “And it would have been a lot more involved than just bringing in a mobile home and setting it down with the appliances, drapes and carpet already in it. There’s no upkeep to this place, and now my husband can work all he wants to on his wood.”

San Diego County had allowed mobile homes to be placed on single home site lots until 1974, when the moratorium was issued, partly out of concern that rural parts of the county were growing too fast because of mobile homes on individual lots.

When the county in 1979 dropped the moratorium, it did so on the condition that the homes look as similar as possible to conventional homes. Thus, the homes were required to have pitched roofs with overhanging eaves, house-like siding and foundations. That last requirement may have been a blessing to the homeowner, who now could seek a real estate loan in purchasing his mobile home, rather than a personal property loan --with its higher interest rates --for a home not permanently attached to a foundation.

About this same time, the state realized that such mobile homes were not mobile at all and decided to call them manufactured homes. So the owners began paying property tax on their homes, versus fees to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Today’s manufactured homes cost $35,000 to $110,000, depending on amenities and design. Historically, the owner has put his home in a traditional mobile home park, when monthly rents were far cheaper than today’s average of $300 and $350.

As mobile home owners in recent years looked for ways to get out from under the increasing rents, they came up with several solutions besides moving onto a regular home site lot.

Some moved into new parks that offered small, own-your-own lots, generally at a cost of $15,000 and $45,000. These new parks allow a mixture of manufactured homes, prefab homes (where entire walls and trusses are delivered to the site and assembled within about 60 days) and modular homes (where individual, factory-built rooms are trucked to a building site and connected together in just a few days).

At three mobile home parks in San Diego County, homeowners have formed associations to buy the entire park from the landlord.

In a park in Vista, mobile home owners have a collective, long-term lease with the owner in order to control rent increases.

About half a dozen groups of mobile home owners in North County, frustrated by rent increases, have grouped together to form their own nonprofit corporations and build their own parks from square one.

Perhaps the most novel solution is being considered by the City of Escondido, which wants to sell tax-free revenue bonds to finance the purchase of entire mobile home parks from willing park owners. The city would, in turn, sell the individual mobile home plots to the mobile home owners, and their mortgage payments would go to repay the revenue bonds. The proposal is being scrutinized by officials in Washington to determine if tax-free bonds can be used in such a manner.

“The whole country is watching Escondido on this one because it would open up a whole new way for mobile home owners to buy their parks,” said Marie Malone, vice president of the Golden State Mobilhome Owners League.

Mobile home salesman Tom Paden, who is chairman of both San Diego’s and the county’s commissions on manufactured housing and who helped draft the county’s 1979 law, said he still expects backcountry mobile home living to catch on.

“Now that the (real estate loan) interest rates have come down from where they were in ’80 and ‘81, and the economy turns around, there will be more single-lot sitings,” Paden said.

“I’m dealing with a guy who’s got a big piece of property and is looking at one of our 1,600-square-foot homes which can be delivered and set up, complete with appliances, for $52,000. He had a contractor give him a bid for the same size house, and it came to almost $90,000--without the appliances.”

Malone says she expects single-lot mobile home living to catch on the same way condominiums were initially scorned, then became popular over the last 15 years.

“After World War II, young couples would go out and buy a little, two-bedroom home as their starter,” she said. “Fifteen years ago, condominiums were introduced and became popular. The next trend, I think, will be young couples buying manufactured housing.”