Wheel estate.

• Author: Green, Joshua
• Position: The Unknown World of the Mobile Home - Book Review

THE UNKNOWN WORLD OF THE MOBILE HOME by John Fraser Hart, Michelle J. Rhodes, John T. Morgan Johns Hopkins University Press, $42.00

IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE A MORE maligned sector of the housing market than mobile homes: The very term calls to mind rural poverty, tornado damage, and the tawdry domestic violence of "Cops." The authors of The Unknown World of the Mobile Home, all geographers, have set themselves to the considerable task of rehabilitating this image in this careful examination of the history, economics, and public-policy issues surrounding mobile homes, one of the fastest growing segments of today's housing market.

The earliest mobiles appeared in the 1920s and were often homemade travel trailers consisting of little more than canvas and wood. Arthur G. Sherman, the president of a Detroit pharmaceutical company, is generally credited with being the first to mass produce them. Sherman's six-by-nine -foot rolling wooden box (with coal-burning stove) appealed mightily to the newly mobile post-war generation that embraced "automobile camping." Such sporting titans of the day as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and even President Warren Harding were renowned enthusiasts. By 1933, Sherman dominated a market restricted only by state highway regulations. Municipal campgrounds sprang up along roadsides nationwide to cater to this new breed of tourist.

The idyllic image of camping along the open road didn't last long. Practically from the outset, trailer parks and campgrounds attracted undesirables--not vacationers, but traveling salesmen, seasonal workers, and transients. The Great Depression drove the financially desperate into trailer homes in ever larger numbers, sparking what today are common complaints: Trailer parks depress property values; they're dens of iniquity; and their inhabitants don't pay their fair share of taxes. By 1937, Fortune magazine was stigmatizing them as "crowded rookeries of itinerant flophouses." Their image was forever tarnished.

To stave off trailer folk, municipal governments began charging fees, limiting stays, and passing restrictive zoning ordinances that banished trailers to the outskirts of town. Prudish civic leaders charged that children reared in one-room mobiles were gaining a corrupting early knowledge of sex. Moreover, trailers were "uniquely susceptible" to fire and high winds. Mobile homes got a brief respite from this opprobrium during World War II when they served as convenient housing for war...