Manufactured Housing

Trailers and Mobile Homes

During this same period, a particular form of factory-built housing was successfully achieving widespread utilization, in large part because it was not perceived as “housing.” Beginning in the late 1920s, automobile trailers that could be towed by the family car were being produced in factories. The automobile camping trip was embraced by tens of thousands of U.S. families as both a way to return to nature and see the country. Material shortages along with gasoline rationing during World War II largely shut down the [Page 439]market for the manufacturing of automobile trailers, but the industry retooled to produce house trailers designed as year-round dwellings for a market of war plant workers. The government became the primary buyer of such housing. However, in the middle of the war years, the government terminated its purchases, in part under pressure from local governments who raised the fear that the temporary war worker homes would become postwar slums in their communities. After the war, there was a new need for housing that was mobile. Huge federal construction projects for building dams, nuclear power plants, and the like generated a need for dwellings that could provide a comfortable home yet be moved from site to site. Since these were year-round homes, it was desirable to make them more spacious. In response, the “ten-wide,” a 10-foot-wide house trailer, was developed. Its inventor, Elmer Frey, declared that it should be called a mobile home because it was a home and it was mobile. The name took, and the wider units soon became the industry standard.

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