Short Home sweet mobile home. A quarter of all the new homes built in the United States in the last twenty-five years were rolled to their sites on wheels. Once one adjusts to the cubist similarity of the trailers, even a low-income court can be a pleasant place to live.
Children play safely on common lawns.
Cars are held to a crawl by speed bumps. Everybody knows everybody, sharing sugar and snow shovels, conversation and child care. But according to a 1990 study compiled by the American Association of Retired Persons, more than half of all mobile-home owners live on someone else's land, tied down by the huge investment of a trailer yet subject to the whims of an unregulated landlord. While almost all states regulate the relationship between apartment tenants and their landlords, few laws exist to protect residents of mobile homes from those who own the parking pads beneath them. The rural states of the South and West, where mobile homes are most popular, tend to offer the least regulation.