Mobile Homes Timeline: Manufactured Housing Through the Years

Wheel Estate author Allan Wallis calls the mobile home "the single most significant and unique housing innovation in 20th century America…. No other innovation has been more widely adopted nor simultaneously more broadly vilified."

By the 50s and 60s, trailers had become viable domiciles, and mobile home parks had sprouted along the outskirts of thousands of towns. A typical park had a central shower and laundry facility with outhouses placed between every two units.

In the 1940s, Malibu’s Paradise Cove attracted fisherman. Nowadays it attracts savvy (and sometimes celebrity) city dwellers looking for a weekend beach house. Though older mobile homes still exist in the 270-lot park, new residents often tear trailers down to the chassis and rebuild.

Once it's been delivered and properly set up, a manufactured home can be hard to distinguish from a traditional site-built home. A case in point is Cavco’s HUD-code Santa Fe, with its stucco façade and parapet roof line (log vigas can also be ordered). Square footage ranges from 1,300 to 3,200. Ceilings reach as high as 10'. 

At Cavco, it takes 7-10 days to complete each home. Here, a section of roof is hoisted onto its corresponding module. Scaffolding provides an easier, safer way for team members to work on all levels of the structure. Galvanized steel strapping is part of the 'tie down' system for transport.

Mobile home parks can still be found throughout the country, but today more manufactured homes are placed on private property. Out of the 51,606 homes shipped throughout the U.S. in 2011, Texas received the most.