Marlene Doty lives in a gated neighborhood with a pool, playground and community center. She owns a spacious three-bedroom, two-bathroom house and has a fireplace in her family room.
This is the new wave in trailer homes. Doty moved from the Marsh Run mobile home park in Charlottesville to this trailer in Chantilly, located in Northern Virginia, for employment reasons. But if she wanted a classy mobile home in Charlottesville, she wouldn't have had to look too far.
"You can't rent an apartment for anywhere near the same price," Doty said. "[And] you're hurting in some places to find a place to live, much less an affordable one."
With more retirees, working couples and young families looking for affordable homes in the area, mobile homes increasingly are becoming a solution for many home-buyers in Charlottesville. Catering to wide price ranges and home sizes, the trailers (also called "manufactured homes") aim to offer comfortable living at affordable prices.
"It's like living in a nice apartment without living on top of someone else," Doty said.
Local residents can expect the trailer park population to increase. For example, developers currently are building the Forrest Springs park, which is a smaller, more high-end community featuring 50homes near the Charlottesville-Albemarle Regional airport.
And rather than using them to travel, most Charlottesville residents purchase a home and leave it in the same place for years, allowing permanent mobile home communities to sprout up in the area.
According to Missy Creasy, a Charlottesville City neighborhood planner, there are at least 13 trailer parks sprinkled around Charlottesville, with an average of 50 to 75 homes at each site. The largest park in Charlottesville, with over 400 homes, is Southwood off 5th Street near the Downtown Mall. In the past three years, builders have added 100 homes to the area, with plans to expand even more in 2002.
Vince Madison, a sales representative at Oakwood Homes, says mobile homes offer appealing lower rent.
"Most people in mobile home parks [don't] have enough money to own their own homes," he said. "So why pay $800 per month when you can pay $500 per month?"
Madison estimates that Oakwood sells 20 homes each year to mobile parks in Charlottesville, and another 40 to 60 each year in surrounding areas.
For residents like Doty, her Chantilly home's biggest appeal is the community that surrounds it. Living in a mobile home park, Doty enjoys the mix of people.
There are "enough elementary school kids in the neighborhood to have to have two school buses come to pick them up every day," she said.
Doty takes advantage of the regular ice cream socials and holiday parties at the community center to get to know her neighbors better.
In addition to differences in residents, actual trailers can vary too. In the past decade, trailer homes have moved from single-wide versions, which are the size of one tractor trailer flat bed, to double-wide models, and finally into modular homes. With modular homes, customers can choose their home, room by room. Like puzzle pieces, the rooms are assembled to form a completely customized home. Whereas, you would otherwise have to take a house or apartment "as-is," mobile homes can be tailored to your every liking.
Other benefits of mobile homes are that the building materials are never exposed to the elements, as construction takes place indoors, and that the final product is inspected multiple times. Mass production is what makes mobile homes so much less expensive than their equivalent counterparts.
As Madison claims, one look at the homes can quickly break down any stereotypes. He relates the story of a mobile home inspector who came to see a site, ready to criticize the new trailers because he opposed expanding mobile homes in Charlottesville. When he saw a new trailer site though, he quickly changed his tune.
"The inspector couldn't believe his eyes," he said.
And with more young couples entering the trailer market recently, it seems like Charlottesville residents think so too.
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