Mobile-home buyers, beware. The government is about to make life miserable for you. But it's for your own good.
At least that's how the high-minded regulators at HUD see it. The word out of Washington is that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is about to respond to Hurricane Andrew. Last summer Andrew wiped out 1,292 of 1,300 mobile homes at a park in Homestead, Fla. Understandably, HUD doesn't want to see a repeat performance. But in the process of averting it, the agency is in danger of letting good intentions triumph over good judgment.As matters now stand, mobile homes in south Florida and other places sometimes punished by giant storms must be able to withstand winds up to 90 mph. That isn't good enough for HUD. Scripps Howard News Service reports that HUD is planning to push the standard to 110 mph, about that of conventional housing.
Superficially, the higher number makes good safety sense. The trouble is that it would drive the cost of mobile homes beyond the reach of many potential buyers.
The average existing conventional home now costs $130,000. By contrast, the typical single-section mobile home goes for under $21,000, or around one-sixth as much. No wonder mobile-home purchases skyrocketed in recession-racked 1992. But what happens to the least well-off prospective buyers when mobile homes suddenly jump in price $10,000 - the estimated cost of the proposed HUD regulations?
The answer is that they stay where they are. That may be in public housing, a tenement or a rental house in a crime-ridden ghetto. Such abodes often pose their own safety threats, and on a much more regular basis than an Andrew-class hurricane, which strikes but once or twice a century. (Incidentally, the 135 mph winds that obliterated the Homestead trailer park would have done the same to a collection of mansions.)
A mobile home can be built to be as unbudgeable as a battleship. But the cost would take away the home's chief virtue, economy.
Consumers who now buy mobile homes are making rational decisions, weighing the risks of their new living status against the perils of their former environments. Beyond insisting on certain bedrock safety standards - such as fire-resistant materials - the government should let them be.