After living in a mobile home park for most of my childhood, I don’t want those kind of neighbors.
The folks that think it’s wise to spend $70k+ on a trailer are often the same folks who think it’s ok to have multiple broken down cars in the yard and/or multiple unfixed and unrestrained dogs running around and/or the worst of all: people who don’t see the irony of waving a Gadsden flag right next to their thin blue line flag.
I can confirm, just down the street there are two mobile homes. (Within less than a few minutes walking distance, before they were evicted, one of these homes had several instances of domestic violence, repeated calls to the animal control who on entering the house found several dogs days into starvation eating their own feces from hunger (they also would growl and bark at anyone attempting to walk or bike down the road). They were close enough that every so often we could hear the angry yelling for hours on end as the woman and her partner(s?) would fight. The other one, while quieter has approximately 3 unused vehicles, assorted junk, and lots of other good stuff dangerously close to spilling on to the neighbor territory, I'm living in a very rural state and can assure you this is the norm
People generally like to have aesthetically pleasing views with their surroundings. Heaping piles of junk in a yard is considered unsightly by many, and often associated with other problems.
Shaming people because they don't want to live next to a scrap yard isn't helpful or appropriate.
Telling people what you find acceptable about the aesthetics of their home and property is the flip side of the same coin…
I don’t want to live next to a junkyard property, but I dislike restrictions on my property even less, so I choose to live in an area where I can do what I want, and my neighbors can do what they want.
If you have a dislike of “unsightly” properties, the solution is to live in a place where that is not allowed, not to try to impose your will on others who are living in a place where that is allowed.
One of the benefits of living in a rural area/area without HOA is that you can do many things that you wouldn’t be allowed to elsewhere.
One of the dangers is that your neighbors can do the same.
Is there any data/studies that proves that derelict properties actually drag down adjacent property values? My own anecdata and property valuation suggest otherwise, but I hear the property value line often enough that I would like to know if it’s true.
Let’s be honest: it varies widely. There are parks with age restrictions: they tend to be okay. There are parks that do enforce their bylaws, including visual appearances, and they’re pretty good. A well-managed small park of newer double-wides and larger pads can be a nice place to live.
As with all housing, there are good neighbourhoods and bad. Hell, my in-law is in a nice millionaires neighbourhood and his immediate next-door neighbour is a swinging cokehead wife abuser who throws ragers every few months. It’s hell, but the properties are all freehold: short of a lawsuit, ain’t nothing to be done.
I shouldn't have specified "mobile home parks." In my personal experience, the people who buy plots of land and move mobile homes in are often worse than anything you'll find in a mobile home park.
The park I grew up in had some rules and regulations, but everything goes whenever you buy a plot of land out in the county.
Ah, yes, the infamous small acreage with an old, failing mobile home. I grew up in the wilds. Many of the people were not living in town for good reason. It was not an environment packed with high-functioning people. A lot of abusive families. A lot of hard-scrabble survival.
My family bought one of the very first lots in a new lake front property development way back in the 60s. After a very slow sale of these other lots in the development, the developer halved the size of the lots and opened them for mobile homes. The lots sold, the mobile homes moved in, and my family's property valued plummeted.
There were more than a few neighbors that fit the very stereotype you imagine, and they were the ones that lived there full time. Most of the direct neighbors were just weekenders (as were we).
sounds like a good outcome to me. more affordable housing and all it costs is a drop in the resale value of vacation homes, (that also comes with a drop in property taxes for those same vacation homes.)
It's attitudes like this that have caused my wife and I to build our forever home in the middle of a a huge plot of land. The house will not be visible from the road and I'll be able to fire a gun in any direction without worrying about hitting anything or anyone. We've both grown weary of allowing our comfort to be dictated by neighbors and however they decide to behave on a particular day.
We’ve already bought the land fortunately. I’m just building up another nest egg before I start construction while I clear out a home site and improve it with trees and a road and such in the interim. We don’t take on debt so it’s going a bit slower than one would expect.
Don't make any modifications to the land until you are ready to build. I don't know what the full definition of "unimproved lot" would be, but clearing land for construction site, adding roads, etc definitely sound to me as improvements. Those improvements will have a not friendly affect on your taxes. If your plot is big enough, add the minimum number of head of some sort of animal to possibly qualify for ag exemptions.
Lots of games to be played that you might be unaware of to keep from slowing the growth of that nest egg.
i guess in the sense that we aren’t the only animals to enforce territory. on the other hand we probably are the only animals to have conceived of “rights”.
One version I've heard is the concern that land value will decline if neighboring property turns into a kind of holding grounds for run-down, ill-maintained old trailers.
It does seem like our vernacular in this space is ripe for change; perhaps "homes on wheels" is teasing open that door...
The folks that think it’s wise to spend $70k+ on a trailer are often the same folks who think it’s ok to have multiple broken down cars in the yard and/or multiple unfixed and unrestrained dogs running around and/or the worst of all: people who don’t see the irony of waving a Gadsden flag right next to their thin blue line flag.