Wheel Estate

Nearly a sixth of the new houses being built this year in the U.S. are mobile homes, the product of what the 4,000,000 Americans who live in them affectionately call the "wheel estate" industry. Busily shedding their old image as cramped trailers, mobile homes are moving in rapidly on the market for low-priced housing. On top of gains averaging 25% in 1962 and 1963, the production of such homes has spurted 23% this year. Last week the Mobile Homes Manufacturers' Association announced that the industry built 159,250 units through October--a record equal to 19% of the ten-month starts of private, one-family houses.

Conventional housing's big new competitor has fattened so fast largely because factory-built mobile homes escape such hobbles as archaic distribution of materials, costly on-site construction and building and zoning codes, all of which boost the cost of traditional housing. Today's typical mobile home, a 550-sq.-ft. unit with two bedrooms, a bathroom, kitchen-dinette and living room, sells fully furnished for $5,600 on such terms as 20% down and $70 a month for seven years.

Although mobile homes are built to travel, it takes a truck to haul them (unlike smaller travel trailers, which can be towed by an ordinary auto). Their owners tend to set them on foundations, skirt them with shrubbery and even porches. Manufacturers claim that, rather than mobility, they are selling a prefabricated, delivered-to-the-site house that is easy to relocate. "We are the answer to low-cost housing," says M.H.M.A. Managing Director Edward Wilson. "The home-builders can't do much about it. They're tied. We have moved into a vacuum." The makers of mobile homes have grown into a $1 billion industry of 200 firms, five of which now have annual sales above $30 million.

Although half the industry's sales are to young married couples who need inexpensive shelter, mobile homes are growing bigger and more luxurious. Some carpeted, air-conditioned models command $16,000; 12-ft.-wide units now account for 21% of industry sales v. 7% last year. Many of the nation's 20,231 mobile-home parks match such amenities with pools and golf courses. "We were uneasy when we invited Jascha Heifetz to our trailer for a weekend visit," says Mrs. Raymond Kendall, wife of the dean of music at the University of Southern California, "but he had such a good time he invited himself back." For the Kendalls, their oceanside unit an hour's drive from Los Angeles is a second home; for most owners, a mobile home is their only abode. Mobile homes are a long way from becoming the prevailing U.S. way of life, but they are a major part of that life: in Palm Springs more than half the population lives in them.

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