Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes

Oxford University Press, USA, 1991. Hardcover. Like New/Very Good. 6x1x9. Mobile homes--or manufactured housing, as they are called today--provide shelter for more than twelve and a half million Americans, and in the last two decades have accounted for one quarter of all new single family housing produced annually. Yet they have been attacked as unsafe and unsatisfactory, and critics have argued that they should be banned or restricted. But to Allan Wallis, the mobile home embodies many of the most fundamental American ideals of home and community.In Wheel Estate, Allan Wallis offers a lively and informative history of this much-maligned form of housing over six decades. He begins with the travel trailers of the late 1920s and 1930s, describing models that were built like yachts or unfolded like Polaroid cameras. With the Second World War, Wallis writes, the industry mushroomed as trailers became homes for thousands of defense workers; he vividly portrays the communities they lived in and the trailer houses that were turned out under government contract. After the war, severe housing shortages sustained demand for trailers as year-round housing. The industry responded with new models--now called mobile homes--that tried to strike a balance between house and vehicle, even as owners built their own often fanciful additions (including one mobile home complete with Egyptian pylons). The results, illustrated in Wheel Estate, were sometimes comic, but they revealed what Americans thought their housing ought to look like.