I want a mobile home!

Thinking about housing made me think of mobile homes. Other forms of housing have significant drawbacks. For example, construction of dwelling units (single family homes, condos, apartments) are far more expensive and generate a great deal of waste. Manufactured housing is a way to decrease those adverse characteristics but that are, nonetheless, unavoidable. Attached housing, such as apartments and townhomes, have shared walls which conduct sound and increases the likelihood of spreading vermin or pests. As clean as an apartment may be, if the neighbor has roaches, you have roaches. Also, the poor health habits of one's neighbors can transmit across the walls through ductwork. For example, smoking or drug use. Or even worse, drug manufacture (Figure 1). The manufacture of methamphetamines is dangerous to one's health and extremely explosive. I recall a commercial where a young girl playing in her room in an apartment was above an apartment where methamphetamines were being manufactured. As the old saying goes, "you can't pick your neighbors."

Figure 1. Drug bust in residential home.
Source: http://starbulletin.com/2007/01/31/news/artcops.jpg


Though I can agree with high density housing as it decreases the building footprint per resident, for health and noise considerations, I would prefer to live in a mobile home. I think mobile homes are built with less waste as they are built in factories as opposed to conventional on-site construction. In addition, mobile homes have the possibility of being less invasive on the environment. Now the mobile home parks I have been through generally have paved the entire place with asphalt (Figure 2). But, it may be possible to employ permeable pavement (Video 1), bioswales, or something.


Figure 2. Mobile home park.
Source: http://www.affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/mobile_home_park_key_west_small.jpg



Video 1. Permeable pavement construction and demonstration.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CjHk5FhAdI


The building standards of mobile homes are historically inferior to that of conventional housing. However, strides have been made in mobile home construction that approach or nearly equal the quality of conventional housing. This has increased costs of mobile home construction but not nearly to the level of conventional housing. But then, of course, conventional housing is generally much larger, in terms of square footage, in addition to other costs such as those associated with building foundations. But who needs that much space? As an indicator of social position, wealthy people sometimes purchase large luxury homes. Ridiculously large homes that appear to serve nothing more than one's vanity. It reminds me of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree..." (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Xanadu.
Source: http://www.alysion.org/poems2/xanadu.jpg