Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Trailer Park as Community

[Marganne Meyer (marganne]

At 6:20 PM -0500 2/17/10, Blaise Tobia wrote:
>  Building coho trailer parks, slowly converting apartment buildings, 
> organicaly changing neighborhoods - these should all be part of the 
> mix.

Thanks for passing along the article. A few of us over in the small 
house society and low-cost community housing lists continue to talk 
about trailer parks and modular homes. Every mobile home park doesn't 
have to be run down and entirely covered by asphalt. The one in the 
article worked because it was family run on site. The owner sold or 
rented to people they would consider good neighbors.

It gets by the common problem of zoning restrictions that limit the 
number of homes that can be built on one lot -- whether that lot is 
small or many acres large. Modular homes can be extremely energy 
efficient and many things can be done with mobile homes to make them 
more sustainable.

The down side is the up-front cost of purchasing an existing park.
They can be very expensive.

This might well be the avenue I take unless some of us can bring 
together a successful small home/cottage project where some sweat 
equity is welcome and one of the main goals is keeping expenses under 
control.

I'm still absorbing all the information written recently about cost 
estimates. It occurs to me that one way to keep expenses down and 
shorten the building phase is to use one of several well-designed 
modular homes.

You get a slab down and all the utilities there, then the company 
brings the home in prefabricated pieces and puts it up, sometimes 
within a few days or a few weeks. The modular homes actually are 
fully built in the manufactures' warehouse, then disassembled and 
transported.

Modular homes also are extendable if/when you want to add a room or 
shop or whatever, but can't afford it at the start of the project.

I miss that feeling of neighborliness I had when I grew up living in 
a 5-house culdesac (sp?).

Blaise is right, though. Community can be created in almost any kind 
of structure. It depends more on people wanting to know their 
neighbors and make the effort to care about each other. Not always 
perfect, but the best planned cohousing projects run into the same 
problems sometimes.