Overview

In 'Wheel Estate', Allan Wallis offers a lively and informative history of the mobile home in the United States over six decades. His colorful account, extensively illustrated with period photographs and vivid portraits of the people who live in mobile homes and the industry pioneers who designed and built them, will inform and amuse anyone curious about this American phenomenon. Beginning with the travel trailers of the late 1920s and 1930s--with models that were built like yachts or unfolded like Polaroid cameras--Wallis moves through the World War II era, when the industry mushroomed as trailers became homes for thousands of defense workers, to the post war era, when trailers became 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). Carrying the story up to the present, Wallis links the need for mobile homes to continuing housing crises. He traces regulations and reforms aimed at ""linear living,"" arguing in the end that manufactured housing remains distinctively American and embodies fundamental national ideas of home and community. >

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9780801856419

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Reviews

This pioneering study succeeds admirably...Wallis's work is solidly researched, well written, extensively illustrated, and a true contribution to both American vehicular and housing history. --'Technology and Culture' A significant book. --'Boston Globe' A sober yet entertaining account--packed with information--of a singularly American invention. The book is at its liveliest when discussing the first half of the 20th century, when the form was first being played with and celebrated. --'Washington Times'

While the 60-year social and technological history of mobile homes may seem a subject of limited interest, Wallis (Environmental Design/Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) places it within the broader scope of architectural and cultural movements with such facility that he forces us to reconsider what we understand about the character of American housing. Two processes, Wallis writes, have shaped the use, form, and meaning of the mobile home. First, the design and growth as carried out by manufacturers and the innovations wrought by individual owners; second, the regulation and categorization by zoning boards, bankers, and insurance companies, which have effectively slowed the growth and tinged the social acceptability of trailer living. Wallis traces the origins of the modern mobile home to the auto camps of the 1920's, and surveys the wide variety - often homemade - of travel trailers, auto-tents, and campers, some of which evolved out of economic necessity, others from the desire for camping comfort and utility. Early commercial models included the Aerocar, the Covered Wagon, and the Expando, which featured pullout rooms. As Wallis discusses the 30's and 40's, he notes community and institutional resistance to what was perceived as cheap housing for an undesirable, transient underclass. However, when the War Department opened a plant in Ypsilanti, Mich., in 1941, more than 20,000 workers were housed in what came to be called manufactured housing. Estimates are that the government had as many as 200,000 trailers in use during WW II. Today, Wallis notes, there are more than eight million mobile homes; they have comprised onequarter of new housing starts over the past 20 years. The author persuasively argues for the mobile home as an innovative housing alternative, based in part on the fact that they have become the predominant unsubsidized type of affordable housing in the United States. Adroitly written, and offering intelligent, feasible solutions to a complicated, growing problem. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Allan D. Wallis is director of research for the National Civil League and assistant professor of public policy at the Graduate School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado at Denver

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