FEMA trailers from several RV companies
have been flowing out of factories in the north, bound for the
ruined cities of the south. The trailers are specially built
for FEMA, assembled quickly, with few frills and features. They
generally cost about $10,000 each, much less than their consumer
counterparts. The trailers made by Pilgrim International in Indiana,
for example, have only four small windows, one on one side, and
three on the other.
As of February, 2006, according to the New York Times, 72,000
have been installed and occupied, at their place of need, mostly
in trailer parks set up in parking lots on government land, or
on private property, next to their owners’ ruined houses.
The FEMA trailer program seems to have been more successful
than their mobile home program, the other part of FEMA’s $4 billion
emergency “manufactured housing” program for hurricane victims.
While the trailers are considered vehicles, the mobile homes,
larger and more expensive then the trailers, averaging $34,000
each, are considered buildings. As a result, federal law prevents
them from being installed in flood plains, the very places where
they are most needed.
This and other siting problems at the local level, as well as
problems with FEMA’s bureaucracy, has meant that in February,
2006, of the 25,000 mobile homes ordered by FEMA, only about
2,700 have been installed, and that most are still in logistics
yards, already falling apart. Over 10,000 are at one site alone,
covering the landscape at a former military airfield in Hope,
Arkansas. America’s largest mobile home park, inhabited by no
one.
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