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- Trailer parks, tiny houses and RV parks are booming in Austin, Bloomberg reported.
- The pandemic has accelerated the shift towards living in RVs, a globalization expert told Insider.
- Younger generations are pioneers and open the way to economic and social mobility.
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Fifteen miles east of downtown Austin, Texas, grows a community known as Oak Ranch.
But it’s not a suburb of Austin. It’s a trailer park, and the incoming residents who fuel its growth are Tesla workers.
Bloombergs Michael Smith and Shelly Hagan reported in an article about Elon Musk’s influence on the Austin real estate market. The city has been a magnet for Americans looking for more space, less taxes, and warmer weather during the pandemic, with a particularly strong pull for those in Silicon Valley. The Tesla CEO is no exception, as he is known to have made his way from California to Texas during the pandemic.
But when the richest man in the world moves to town to build a new Tesla Gigafactory, it’s no surprise an affordability crisis ensues. Tesla promised 5,000-10,000 “middle-skilled” jobs for a little less than $ 50,000 a year at its factory, but that doesn’t go far in a city where the average home value is $ 525,000. Austinites make lemonade with the latest economical lemons they got by turning to trailer parks like Oak Ranch, Tiny Houses, and RVs.
As globalization expert Parag Khanna wrote in his new book “Move: The Forces Uprooting Us”, the caravan is “the ultimate symbol of the new American mobility”. He told Insider that this type of small home is bigger than ever during the pandemic, thanks to younger generations.
The trailer home will be cool
Khanna’s book examines how young people are shaping the future with a mobile lifestyle. The caravan is an important part of it, he wrote, and it turned out to be a “trendy, inexpensive and sustainable alternative to the traditional home”.
To be clear, a caravan is usually used to refer to a prefabricated house, such as a mobile home or a prefabricated house. There are differences between all of these and they are not the same as a tiny house or an RV, both of which fall more into the RV category.
All of these alternative lifestyles have one thing in common, which Khanna is referring to: they enable property owners to live nomadic lives and offer aspiring homeowners a more affordable solution at a time when property prices are sky high.
This is exactly what many millennials were looking for in the 2010s and brought mobile and minimalist living such as the tiny house movement and #vanlife to life.
Now they are facing the second housing crisis of their generation and are freed from the office in an era of remote work and have been even more inclined to turn to a life on wheels since the beginning of the pandemic. Austin millennials are an example of this trend, real estate agent Matt Menard told Bloomberg.
“Her instinct is, ‘I won’t get stuck. I won’t take on any more debt. I don’t need to own this house,'” said Khanna.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, RV, RV and trailer manufacturers have been updating existing buildings or creating new floor plans to accommodate the growing market. Tiny home builders saw sales jump last year, and the number of Americans who would consider living in one rose from 53% in 2018 to 56% in 2020, according to two separate studies.
Khanna argues that the increase in caravan living is a good thing as physical mobility opens up avenues to economic and social mobility. He said it even creates a new version of the American Dream. The new version of the “picket fence,” he said, has a tiny house mobile enough to give you a peek at Boise one week and Tahoe the next.
“When people move, their circumstances improve,” he told Insider, likening it to a mouse on a wheel that stays in its cage to run faster. The solution, he said, is to move to a different cage.
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https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-making-mobile-homes-cool-new-american-dream-austin-tesla-2021-11
