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- Trailer parks, tiny houses, and RV sites are booming in Austin, Bloomberg reported.
- The pandemic has accelerated a shift to living in mobile homes, a globalization expert told Insider.
- Younger generations are leading the way, he said, and it's opening up paths to economic and social mobility.
Fifteen miles east of downtown Austin, Texas, a community known as Oak Ranch is growing.
But it's not an Austin suburb. It's a trailer park, and the incoming residents fueling its growth happen to be Tesla workers.
So reported Bloomberg's Michael Smith and Shelly Hagan in an article detailing Elon Musk's influence in the Austin housing market. The city has been a magnet for Americans seeking more space, fewer taxes, and warmer weather during the pandemic, with a particularly strong pull towards those in Silicon Valley. The Tesla CEO is no exception, as he famously decamped from California to Texas during the pandemic.
But when the world's richest man moves to town to build a new Tesla Gigafactory, it's no surprise that an affordability crisis follows. Tesla promised 5,000 to 10,000 "middle-skill" jobs paying a little under $50,000 a year at its factory, but that doesn't go far in a city where the median house listed is $525,000. Austinites are making lemonade with the latest economic lemons they've been given, by turning to trailer parks like Oak Ranch, tiny houses, and RVs.
As globalization expert Parag Khanna wrote in his new book, "Move: The Forces Uprooting Us," the trailer home "is the ultimate symbol of the new American mobility." He told Insider that this type of small home is bigger than ever during the pandemic, and it's thanks to younger generations.
The trailer home is becoming cool
Khanna's book explores how the youth are shaping the future with a mobile lifestyle. The trailer home is a key part of that, he wrote, emerging as a "trendy, cost-effective, and sustainable alternative to traditional homeownership."
To be clear, a trailer home is typically used to refer to a prefabricated house, such as a mobile or manufactured home. There are differences between all of these, and they are not the same as a tiny house or a camper van, both of which fall more into the RV category.
All of these alternative lifestyles have something in common that Khanna is referring to: they enable owners to live a more nomadic lifestyle and present a more affordable solution to aspiring homeowners in a time when housing prices are sky high.
That's exactly what many millennials were seeking in the 2010s, causing mobile and minimalist living like the tiny house movement and #vanlife to to take off.
Now facing their generation's second housing crisis, and freed from the office in an era of remote work, they've been even more inclined to turn to a life on wheels since the pandemic began. Millennials in Austin are one cohort exemplifying this trend, real estate broker Matt Menard told Bloomberg.
"Their instinct is, 'I'm not going to be stuck in place. I'm not going to take on more debt. I don't need to own that home,'" Khanna said.
Since the pandemic began, makers of camper vans, RVs, and travel trailers have been updating on existing builds or creating new floor plans to accommodate the growing market. Tiny house builders saw sales fly last year, and the number of Americans who would consider living in one increased from 53% in 2018 to 56% in 2020, according to two separate studies.
Khanna argues that the increase in trailer living is a good thing because physical mobility opens up paths to economic and social mobility. He said it's even creating a new version of the American Dream. The new version of the "picket fence," he said, is having a tiny home that's mobile enough to give you a view of Boise, one week, and Tahoe the next.
"When people move, their circumstances improve," he told Insider, likening it to a mouse in the wheel who stays inside their cage to run faster. The solution, he said, is to move to a different cage.
source https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-making-mobile-homes-cool-new-american-dream-austin-tesla-2021-11