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The first home my mother purchased, after divorcing my father, was a double-wide trailer.
It was not lifestyles of the rich and famous, to be sure; but it was ours and we had our own rooms.
It was a step up from renting.
In a thread where people are trying to figure out why millennials are having trouble buying homes my mention of that double-wide has gotten a lot of contemptuous comments.
I don't find any shame in coming from humble beginnings.
Especially since we had come down a lot from where we were before dad relocated us from the Chicago to Minneapolis area and selling our much larger home in the process.
Mom started from almost zero.
She worked hard and got a better house after paying off that trailer.
She had a home made to order that she retired to.
Hers is not a story deserving contempt. It should be admired.
She stayed within her means and stripped out non-essentials to get her goals accomplished.
It's a model I'm following with my far more modest home than most of my relatives.
I'm not ashamed of my little house. I am not envious of my cousin's much larger homes.
I'm not built that way.
Millennials who lived YOLO, now complaining they are priced out of the market. They and the younger generations fail to account for the 30 million+ people that shouldn't be in the country all needing housing and keeping wages low for some jobs along with the H1b visas that are keeping wages low in formerly well paying jobs like IT.
ReplyDeleteeveryone thinks they should make a gazillion dollars work at wally world and living in a mansion...at this point, especially with the world the way it is, i would be happy in a cave...panzer guy...
ReplyDeleteMost of the trailer parks around here are well kept, indicating that the residents may be short of cash but not pride. My only objection to mobile homes is not owning the ground. I would be perfectly happy with a double wide on land I own instead of building a house.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in a home that was built by my Great Grandy Daddy to replace the house that General Sherman torched.
ReplyDeleteI was (and still am) decently well off. But my best friend growing up lived in a trailer. He and his family were and are good people.
The first home I ever had on my own was that little half-a-trailer down in the park in Ames. It wasn't much, but it was mine. People who sneer at trailers just for being trailers betray their inner snobbery.
ReplyDeleteIn the early 1990s when I first moved out of my parents modest home (paid for in cash, because that's how my dad did business) in Ames, I lived in a tight efficiency apartment in an old house in the Valley Junction part of West Des Moines that had been converted. Due to the flood of 1993 I moved in with my at the time girlfriend who had a trailer in a park on the south side of Des Moines near the airport. So I'm familar with trailer park living. There's no shame in it, especially as a stepping stone. It definitely beats sharing walls in an apartment situation. Later when I moved up a little bit work wise my then first wife and I bought an old house on the NE side of Des Moines (that burned down a few years ago). We were only there for 5 years before work took us to Texas. Sadly she only lived in that house a few years before cancer took her way too young. I've now been in my current house for almost 24 years. That's longer than I lived anywhere else by quite a bit. I've been re-married longer than I was the first time. It's now getting to be that I've lived the majority of my adult life in one place. Things have been up and down because the tech job market is crazy cyclical (and currently nearing rock bottom) but I guess I can't complain too much.
ReplyDelete-swj