Trashing a homely image

If a couple walks into D Mart Mobile Homes in Fruitland and says they're looking to buy a trailer, general manager Ralph James will tell them they've come to the wrong place.

"We don't have trailers here," James said. "All they have to do is look around our showroom and they'll see that."

What they will see is a showroom that features 21 "upscale" mobile homes that are the results of an industry that has made changes to erase the images of the rundown "tin-box" trailers of the past. What the industry refers to as manufactured homes now can include perks: Jacuzzis, custom kitchens, vaulted ceilings, skylights and two-car garages.

In the nicest of the lot at D Mart -- a $70,000, 2,300-square-foot-home -- there are solid-oak cabinets, a whirlpool, fireplace, walk-in-closets and pantries, three bedrooms and two full bathrooms.

"We have drywall now, standard wall sizes and we can even set them up with garages, porches or patios," James said. "Some of them, you'd be hard pressed to tell any difference from an on-site home."

It's an argument that millions of Americans agree with. According to the Manufactured Housing Institute, 22 million Americans -- about 8 percent of the population -- lived in 10 million manufactured homes in 2000. Manufactured housing retail sales were estimated at $9.5 billion in 2001. Last year, one out of every eight new single-family housing starts were manufactured homes.

But it hasn't always been that way. For years, when people thought of trailers, the last perk they envisioned was a Jacuzzi.

"We've definitely been battling that image," said Bruce Savage, a spokesman with the Manufactured Housing Institute, which is based in Arlington, Va. "We want to make people realize that manufactured homes of 2002 are not the trailers of the 1960s and '70s. The problem is that there are still a lot of them out there."

Those rusted-out, small trailers perpetuate the stereotype that people who live in manufactured homes don't take care of them, move them constantly and are lower-class residents. But Savage said recent statistics show that most mobile homes are never moved and 67 percent of them are located on private property.

Until 15 years ago, it was a mass production-based industry, and there was a mentality that if people didn't like trailers, they could go somewhere else, Savage said.

"We knew that if we were going to survive as an industry, we were going to have to change that," Savage said. "We didn't want to be the house that people turned to when they couldn't afford anything else. That was a kind of economic discrimination, calling people trailer trash and things like that. We didn't want that."

Consumer-driven industry

That's when the shift was made to become a consumer-driven industry, and they began including amenities that people wanted.

Bill Wooten, the lot manager at Monty's Manufactured Homes on South Kingshighway, said people no longer seem worried about having a bad image, especially when they realize how much more cost-effective a manufactured home is. He said manufactured homes cost about $30 a square foot while traditional homes cost about $100 a square foot.

Mark Hetherington and his wife, Donna, have been living in a manufactured home for more than four months. Hetherington is an air traffic controller at the Cape Girardeau Regional Airport, and his wife is a travel agent at Med Assets/HSCA.

They used to live in a three-bedroom house in Hillcrest Subdivision, but after their children grew up they didn't need as much space.

"At first my wife was nervous about a mobile home," Hetherington said. "We had seen 'COPS' and were aware of the trailer-park mentality. But after we looked at it quite a bit, there was no reason not to."

Their mobile home has a two-car garage, a porch and they plan to build a patio, in addition to the three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The Hetheringtons own their own property.

"Each of these things comes with a little expense, but we have it the way we wanted," he said. "We're tickled with the way the place turned out."

What about tornadoes?

"A tornado is going to hurt a house too," he said. "To us, this just made more sense."

Savage acknowledges the stereotype will persist as long as the older trailer parks are around.

"Those types of images are still going to be around," he said. "There's still a look-down-your-nose mentality. But we're making progress."

smoyers@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137