BEYOND THE TRAI LER 1 Beyond the Trailer: Rethinking affordable manufactured housing in the U.S. CARLOS REI MERS Catholic University of America I NTRODUCTI ON There are possibilities in low-income housing that the manufactured housing industry has not considered or explored sufficiently. Residential low-income areas on the periphery of some American cities show an elaborate spatial complexity, building creativity, and growing ingenuity in the way housing is built and completed through time. One of the most important characteristics that makes housing in these areas interesting is its incremental character. In these housing environments, decisions on investment in housing are gauged by carefully balancing between housing needs and the household’s available resources. Housing is then built in two or more stages in an incremental process of continuous improvement. Some of these residential environments show great potential to consolidate into good urban habitats and become incorporated into cities as healthy neighborhoods. Prefabricated housing and the manufactured housing industry has a modest but relevant presence in this context. However, manufactured housing has the potential of a bigger share of this housing stock because its capacity to preserve its value, relative tradability, and higher fabrication standards. Taking into consideration the characteristics of incremental housing as well as the way and type of investments that are made by these low-income households would give the manufactured industry access to an untapped group that would benefit from the advantages of manufactured housing over other options. This paper is based on a study on the long term changes operated in low-income housing located in the peri-urban areas of Texas. The study identified the characteristics and types of investments made by households in their housing including spatial priorities, housing typologies and technologies, and type of investments made in housing in time. This paper explores avenues for the manufactured housing industry to expand its offer of affordable housing by developing new products that integrate many of the notions operating in low-income housing environments observed in this study and in many places across America. The paper proposes concrete examples on how this could be done. BACKGROUND This paper is part of a larger research on how low-income housing has been built in the low- income peri-urban subdivisions of South Texas known as colonias. Colonias are settlements located in the urban periphery of cities of the four southern states of the US border. These settlements were developed out of the jurisdiction of cities in what was originally rural unserviced land subdivided and sold by land speculators to low-income people searching for affordable housing. 1