Urbanism and Senior Living: The Cases For and Against Mobile Home Parks

For several years, I was on the board of a local Rebuilding Together affiliate, a non-profit organization that provides free home repairs for low-income homeowners.  Like most affiliates, our biggest event of the year was an April workday when several hundred local citizens volunteered a day of labor.

One year, a project captain invited a group of volunteers to her home for post-workday beverages.  I found myself in her kitchen, sipping a beer and chatting with a city councilmember who had worked on a project.

I assume the councilmember had worked on a mobile home because the discussion quickly turned to the role of mobile homes in our city.  His view was that mobile homes were a temporary aberration and that the long-term goal of the city should be to replace them with stick-built homes.  His principal argument was the longer life of well-maintained stick-built construction, although he also noted the horizontal spread of single-story mobile homes and the opportunity for more compact living with stick-built residences.

With that memory in mind, it was interesting to read the suggestion by Lisa Margonelli in Pacific Standard that mobile home parks might have an essential role in the housing future of all of us, particularly seniors.  She looks in depth at the Pismo Dunes mobile home park, near Pismo Beach, California.

Margonelli’s argument is that mobile home parks provide a low-cost alternative to other options, while also fostering a relationship between seniors, a supportive network that others have called a “naturally-occurring retirement community”.

I’ll use the dichotomy between the councilmember’s comments and Margonelli’s article as a starting point from which to write about the possible role of mobile home parks as senior communities and to conclude a series of posts I’ve written about urbanism and senior living.  I won’t forget urbanism and seniors and will find opportunities to add more insights on the subject, but will begin focusing elsewhere in my next post.

Margonelli makes a reasonable case for mobile homes, but I’ll add another point.  Mobile home parks encourage alternative transportation modes.  With narrow roads, frequent driveways, and a well-gridded layout, automobile drivers intuitively reduce their speed, often as low as 15 miles per hour, well below the 20 mile per hour threshold where the dominance of cars begins to wane.

Margonelli notes the use of golf carts in the Pismo Dunes, which can be a fine choice for seniors no longer capable of handling an auto.

I can add another transportation option.  A North Bay reader emailed me extolling her adult tricycle, noting the improved mobility which it has given her and including a photo of a Napa senior on a tricycle touring the damage on the morning after the recent earthquake.  An adult tricycle can be another fine alternative transportation choice within a mobile home park.

Also, walking within a mobile home park is often safer than walking on city streets.

Against the positives noted by Margonelli and by me, there is a legitimate list of concerns about mobile home parks as a housing solution, including some that touch upon the councilmember’s concerns.

Heading the list is construction quality.  Margonelli notes that quality of mobile homes has been improving.  She’s likely correct, but mobile homes still remain at the lower-end of the construction spectrum.  And it seems inevitable that they’ll remain at the lower-end.

During my time on the Rebuilding Together board, we often debated how much money to allocate toward mobile home repair.  Although we never went as far as another affiliate which limited mobile home repairs to one-third of their annual budget, we remained aware of the potential black hole of mobile home repairs.  Many years, we could have spent our entire budget on mobile homes and still left needs unmet.  Plus we found that repairs to stick-built construction were less likely to require return visits in future years.

Next, the density of most mobile home parks is insufficient to support urban uses such as stores or pubs.  (Margonelli notes that a grocery store is within walking distance of Pismo Dunes, but the store is beyond the boundary of the mobile home park and even then remains an anomaly.)  It’s the inherent nature of the single-story, non-shared-wall development to spread out, reducing the number of residents within walkable distance of businesses.

Furthermore, the nature of most mobile home parks is to be enclosed, with limited entry points and few opportunities for others to pass through a park enroute to other destinations.  But the nature of an effective urban community to be well-gridded, allowing efficient travel, which is essential for those on foot or bicycles.

Perhaps the only location is which mobile home parks don’t undermine an urban land-use configuration is where they back against any geographical feature that would have already precluded urban connections.  It’s not coincidental that Pismo Dunes backs up to an ocean beach or that many of the Petaluma mobile home parks adjoin a freeway.

But the biggest concern about mobile home parks, at least to me, is the social insulation.  I’ve been reading “The Filter Bubble” by Eli Pariser.  His thesis is that personalization of internet experiences, by which Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and others feed us articles consistent with what they’ve calculated to be our interest and values, undermines the free flow of objective information on which our democracy depends.

The internet personalization models against which he rails is evident in our every internet session.  In the last week, I’ve researched travel options in Ireland and senior living facilities in the North Bay.  Now, I can’t go anywhere on the internet without being bombarded by ads for Irish tour services and North Bay senior living options.  It feels both creepy and intrusive.

Similarly, I had a frequent commenter on Petaluma Patch who was continually offering links to anti-urbanism articles from obscure and credibility-challenged sources.  At first, I marveled at his misplaced diligence in finding these articles.

However, I came to realize that he had created a filter bubble in which the internet was feeding him anti-urban articles.  He had only to go on-line to have an article shoved in front of him which, with dubious fact and flawed logic, seemed to rebut something I had written.  And he then felt a need to accept the article as the truth and to share it.

It was a shame that the opportunity for the two of us to have a rational exchange of perspectives was undermined by the internet.

Urbanism combats the personalization trend on the internet.  I love the idea of a CEO and a mail clerk talking in the elevator of an apartment building where both live, each if one is in a penthouse when the other is in a micro-apartment.  Similarly, I like watching various demographic segments chatting in a downtown pub. 

My personal hell would be to live among folks who are like me and who think as I do.  Even as I age, I want to live among people who offer new and thought-provoking perspectives.  We already offer too few of these opportunities and mobile home parks, by their very nature, are part of the deficiency.

Summing it up, while Margonelli makes a reasonable case for mobile home parks, I favor the position of the councilmember.  As a housing solution, particularly as we move toward a more urban world, we can and should do better than mobile home parks.

By the way, nothing here is intended to disparage the residents of mobile home parks nor to criticize the choice of people who find enjoyment in their mobile homes.  Instead, it is to castigate the rest of us for creating a world in which mobile homes, with all their deficiencies, are the only option for many folks.

In my next post, I’ll write about water conservation.  Candidates for the Petaluma City Council have been talking about a moratorium on building permits while the drought persists.  I applaud the concern, but will argue that another approach would be more appropriate.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Venice 2007: Locating the Everyday Stuff

For a holiday respite, my Friday posts through December and into January will tell of a trip I took to Venice

in 2007. Using photos and notes that I took at the time, I’ll highlight the urbanist issues of day-to-day life in what may be the most famous car-free city in the world.

In my first four posts, I finished my first day in Venice, having survived a trans-Atlantic redeye, wrangled with a clerk at Marco Polo Airport, inadvertently crossed my landlord’s aging mother, bumped my head into the beams of the converted attic I’ll call home for two weeks, and still found my way to take the favorite photo of my two weeks in Serenissima.

Having used four posts to complete a single day, I need to take a different approach to the remainder of my two weeks.  Beginning today, I’ll write about individual aspects of Venetian life, at least as experienced by an American visitor.  This post will be about the challenges of finding the necessities of apartment life in a city that where the familiar organization and visual clues of U.S. city planning are missing.

The Test: A couple of years ago, I attended a birthday where I dined at the same table with a Nobel Prize winner.  He said something during the meal that stayed with me.  At the time an octogenarian (he has since passed away), he said “Aging isn’t hard once you realize that the systems that once worked on automatic now require manual operation.”

It was insightful advice.  And it has a parallel in being an American in Venice.  The acts of daily life, such as getting on the internet, buying breakfast, or doing laundry, that seem automatic in the U.S. require a higher level of manual operation in Venice.

Internet Access: To be fair to my Venetian landlord, he truthfully advised me that there was no internet access in the apartment he was renting to me.  It may have been the last time that he told me the truth.

He also told me that there were multiple internet cafes in the adjoining plaza of Campo San Polo.  I believed him.  I shouldn’t have.  Not only is there no Internet café in Campo San Polo, I never found an internet café anywhere in the San Polo sestiere.

And I looked at length, taking several long walks in the San Polo and Santa Croce sestieres, shown in these photos.  Lovely places, but without tourist amenities.

(Quick political lesson: Venice has been divided into the same six administrative districts, or sestieres, since the 14th century.  There’s no gerrymandering in Venice.  In addition to San Polo, there are San Marco, Castello, Cannareggio, Santa Croce, and Dorsodoro.  San Marco is the tourist center of town, with the Doge’s Palace, St. Mark’s Basilica, Piazza San Marco, and much of the lodging and tourist retail.  In tourist guides, my sestiere of San Polo is often combined with Santa Croce.  However, there are no Internet cafes in Santa Croce either.)

Admittedly, much of that problem lay in my gullibility.  As a character early in “The City of Falling Angels” says “All Venetians lie, including me when I tell you this.”  Venetian landlords weren’t an exception.

It took several days, but I finally found an internet café in the San Marco sestiere, only a single vaporetto

stop from my apartment.  (More proof of the essential role of the vaporetto to my stay.)

Furthermore, I loved the location of the internet café.  Its windows looked out upon a canal that was frequented by tourist gondolas.  There was nothing more fun than emailing an acquaintance in the Midwest while a gondola glided past only a few feet away.

Computer Recharging: Next, I realized that that my outlet adapter was only for use in Britain.  The camera store about forty feet from my front door sold me a voltage converter that connected to the outlet and the computer, but had too little capacity for my laptop and promptly burned up.  My fault, not theirs.  It was clearly labeled.

It took another couple of days and two trips to the only Venetian hardware store before I had found the correct adaptor.  It was a marvelous urban hardware store, much like Tomasini’s in Petaluma, only with all merchandise delivered by canal barges to a dock at the back door and products that looked almost familiar, but not quite. 

Cash: Remember how my landlord duped me about Internet cafes?  Same thing on ATMs.  His emails to me said that there were several ATMs in Campo San Polo and that he did all his banking there.  I don’t know with whom he banked, but it was like no banking I know.  By actual count, the non-residential uses on the plaza were a 700-year old church, two restaurants, a deli, and a store that sold Beatle memorabilia (I just report it, I don’t explain it).  No ATMs in sight.

The absence of an ATM wasn’t much of a problem, as I found one within a few blocks.  But wouldn’t you think that “I do all my banking there” might be hard to write when there are no banks there?

Groceries: But rising above the other searches for ATMs, internet cafes, etc. was the hunt for food.  I didn’t choose to eat all my meals in restaurants.  But coming from a place where food generally comes from either 50,000 square-foot supermarkets or 15,000 square-foot specialty grocers, finding groceries in Venice was a challenge.  Simply put, it was a land of convenience stores tucked into unlikely places.  (Think unmarked 7-11s on narrow pedestrian byways.)

My first two grocery stops where across the lagoon in Lido.   I stumbled across a store while exploring and returned because I still hadn’t found a store in Venice proper.  Eventually I came across a few stores closer to my apartment, plus I made several purchases in the Rialto Market.

But I was still surprised to find a grocery store only a few hundred feet from my front door on the day before I was to depart.  It was down a small walkway off a bridge that I had crossed many times.  But it was only open for a few hours perhaps five days a week.  Had I spotted it earlier, I could have made good use of it.  But I survived regardless.

If the primary thrust of my trip had been culture or photography, I might have been frustrated by the time required to solve the puzzle of everyday life.  But as my goal instead was to see how to adjust to local life, I found the effort fascinating.  Urban problem-solving as a daily puzzle.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)