How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

by Stewart Brand

Mobile homes are always being attacked. By aesthetes for their appearance. By bigots for housing the “wrong” people. By the construction industry for “unfair” competition. By local government for paying insufficient taxes. (In fact, mobile-home park operators usually provide services such as sewage, water, garbage, and thoroughfares that government is spared paying for.) Many counties simply outlaw mobile homes. In 1970 the federal government recognized that most of the nation’s low-cost housing was in mobile homes, and it set out to help the industry, but it messed up. HUD (Housing and Urban Development) came up with such a burdensome set of regulations that small manufacturers were driven out of business. Allan Wallis points out that “the smaller manufacturers, who needed a distinctive product to compete, were often a source of design innovation.”29 A highly creative industry was made stodgy by the strictures of approval.