- Any discussion of trailer parks should start with the fact that most forms of low-income housing have been criminalized in nearly every major US city. Beginning in the 1920s, urban policymakers and planners started banning what they deemed as low-quality housing, including boarding houses, residential hotels, and low-quality apartments.
- Trailer parks are not only cheap due to manufacturing; they’re also cheap thanks to their surprising exemption from most conventional land-use controls. Most cities zone very little space for trailer parks—presumably a reflection of the general bias against low-income housing. But where they exist, they are often subject to uniquely liberal land-use regulation, with minimal setbacks, fewer parking requirements, and tiny minimum lot sizes.
- By combining these liberal land-use regulations with narrow streets shared by all users, we ironically find in many trailer parks a kind of traditional urban design more common in European and Japanese cities.
Thanks! Missed it entirely as well. I think that the efforts to eradicate low-income housing are strongly correlated with the externalities of said housing. A bunch of low-income neighborhoods in the Netherlands got labeled "Problematic Neigborhoods" due to their high levels of crime, pollution and joblessness. Interestingly, the homogenous housing and income types were deemed the core of the problem. So almost all new developments need to have a certain amount of social housing to make sure that people and classes are mixed more. That seems like the polar opposite of how I think the US dealt with it, which is to let the markets rule the day leading to gated communities on the one hand and ghettos on the other instead of a mixed environment.When we stop treating low-income communities as objects of scorn, to be subjected to top-down, paternalistic planning, we might find that we have a lot to learn from them