In the 1940s, most office spaces were giant, open-planned grids of desks, filled with people on typewriters and ledgers, buzzing about in service of getting work done. Sometime in the sixties, a group of forward-thinking designers at Office Furniture Company Knoll saw a lot of room for improvement in this model, in many ways due to the changing nature of office work. Instead of the cacophonous noise and singularly functional sea of desks, they envisioned the “Action Office”—a series of adjustable partitions to combat noise disruption, arranged in a dynamic way and with unique purpose to allow movement of employees through the space to find the best setting to fit particular tasks. It was a then radical idea to put the efficiency and efficacy of the office space itself above the “pack ‘em in” philosophy of the past and usher in a new era of worker productivity.

What happened, though, is that the powers that be thought the Action Office needed a little tweaking in the name of cost efficiency. And over the coming decades, that dynamic, movement-encouraging set of mobile partitions became stationary boxes that we came to know and loathe as the cubicle farm. What started as a noble, human centric idea to increase worker happiness came to instead embody the most depressing manifestation of cost efficiency and the demoralizing, monotonous state of office work. The Action Office got fed into the capitalist machine, whose profit-driven thinking started a decay of the spirit of the project until there was no spirit left to give. Thankfully, the cycle started to break with the dotcom boom, and silly additions like ping pong tables and beer kegs helped people realize that a happy worker was a great worker, and it was worth investing in that happiness, even in service of the bottom line.

Fuller’s “Dymaxion” Neighborhood Concept

With that analogy, let's take a look at the concept of a trailer park. Free of the connotation they have today, the concept of a trailer park is fairly altruistic. It is in service of creating naturally affordable homes through the efficiency of manufacturing and the subsidy through density of putting them on a shared neighborhood infrastructure, often including shared amenities. Progressive architects like Buckminster Fuller and Jean Prouve spent many years developing concepts for human experience-focused prefab homes meant to bring great, affordable design to the masses through these same ideas of cost subsidy. But over time, the machine turned that vision into a nightmare as they continued to tune for profit over customer satisfaction.

Nowadays, trailer parks have a rather dismal connotation. The cheapest ones have become depreciable assets—poorly insulated, built to decay and need replacement instead of built to last with care and upkeep as a house should be. And the land they sit on is more often than not a lease agreement with a landowner/landlord, meaning there was only an illusion of home ownership. It’s more akin to renting a parking space for a car than it is to owning a home. Trailer park developments have the business connotation, however, of being a “money printing machine”—which more often than not in the business world means they are closer to a scam than a great product. Lack of a sense of ownership and rising user costs means people forgo maintenance and upkeep of the units and leased land, and over time they become eyesores. In short, there is plenty of reason for neighborhoods to be afraid of their development and what it would mean to the surrounding area.

The similarity in vision of cottage courts and other naturally affordable housing concepts is part of what has prevented these housing types from coming back into fashion. Neighbors fear that “affordable” = “people who don’t take care of their property, are more likely to engage in crime, and drag down the reputation and home values of surrounding houses”. In the effectively predatory world of today's trailer parks, they are not necessarily wrong in that belief. But if you start to look back to that original vision, you can see how it's simply a way to diversify housing options in a neighborhood if you can create a sense of ownership, care, and community to enable people to take pride in an appreciating asset, rather than being stuck in a cycle of rentals and decay.

At MicroLife, we feel that pocket neighborhoods are a gateway to changing this mindset. They are well-built, compact and sustainable cottages, more often than not on fee simple lots that allow outright ownership and retain value. And studies have shown again and again that introducing affordable homes to existing neighborhoods not only does not negatively affect nearby home values, but actually increase them by creating diversity, vibrancy and community, and decreasing crime.

Bucking the “depreciable asset on rented land” model reverses the negative trend of the trailer park. Once someone is a true home and landowner, they now have an opportunity to begin a cycle of generational wealth building through the care and upkeep of their newly minted home. Like their surrounding homeowners, they are then motivated to keep up their properties and keep their communities flourishing in service of that increasing source of familial wealth.

When you couple that idea with the human connection-driven design philosophy of missing middle housing, you can see how this not only improves home values for the whole neighborhood, but helps actually turn people into neighbors who interact and share empathy and values.

This is why we at MicroLife want to use our developments to increase access to home ownership by selling our cottages once they are complete. It additionally lets us as an organization rescue the capital we’ve put into a project and immediately roll it into the next one—without the heavy operational burden of property management and rental units. It allows more people to break out of the rental cycle, which in of itself is often a driver of community decay—renters aren’t owners and don’t always treat their assets as such—whether they be apartments in a 4plex or single family homes. Increasing access to ownership is one of the primary ways we can help create safer, more vibrant and inclusive communities.

Devin Vermeulen

Director of Design & Development

MicroLife Institute

Make Trailer Parks Great Again

Escaping McMansion Hell.