Life in the Slow Lane

Their owners used to be poor people parked at the edge of town. Newlyweds, retirees and blue-collar workers with flimsy jobs bought mobile homes because they could not afford anything better. Able to avoid the cost of land, they had only to rent a space and pay for the utilities supplied by operators of the lots that sprang up in American towns during the 1950s. When interest rates and construction costs shot up during the past few years, houses delivered on wheels suddenly gained new popularity. Almost 11 million Americans now live in mobile homes. Astonishingly, the units accounted for some 36% of all new single-family detached houses sold in the U.S. last year. This pleases Joseph Morris, president of Champion Home Builders Co., a mobile-home manufacturer based in Dryden, Mich.: "People no longer stigmatize our homes as 'little tin boxes.' "

And no wonder. Those tin boxes have stopped looking like railroad cars. Priced from $7,500 to upwards of $80,000, mobile homes now come with pitched roofs, wood siding and such optional amenities as sunken baths, hot tubs and wood-burning fireplaces. Some developers link two or more of these units together to form spacious homes that look at first glance like site-built dwellings.

Despite the improvements, the main reason people live in these units is still price. Where else could Mark Bronson, 32, a social worker in Kennewick, Wash., who earns $16,000 a year, get a two-bedroom house, complete with wall-to-wall carpeting, built-in appliances and other furnishings, that costs $20,000? Says his wife Janice, 27: "Our home is part of the American dream, on a lesser plane."

The demand for this kind of housing may soon lose steam, however. Although industry analysts expect sales of mobile homes to rise another 10% next year, from an estimated 235,000 this year to 258,500 units, they think that falling interest rates will contribute to far stronger growth in sales of conventional housing. One reason: mortgage rates for mobile homes are usually pegged to consumer lending rates, which are not falling as quickly as rates available to site-built home buyers.

But there is still something to say for a house that is firmly planted in the ground. Nice as their mobile home has been in the economic pinch, Janice Bronson, for one, would welcome the switch. Says she: "This one does not have a sense of permanence. For one thing, when I run a load of wash, I can't have a record playing; the whole house shakes."

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