Real talk, a tiny home we’ll equipped will run $40k to $100k; you only get close to the low end with lower end materials and supplying the labor yourself (I’ve helped build and haul to their final location more than one).
With that said, the greatest challenge is the stigma of a trailer park. The local community NIMBYs fight hard to not permit new communities from being established (speaking as someone who optioned a parcel of land in central Florida for this purpose and had to go plead the case at planning meetings), and existing ones are getting snapped up by private equity and real estate investors to turn the financial screws on people who have nowhere else to go.
I think this model works as a coop or non profit land trust, where the resident owns the home but the community protects their stake in the lot. Think “A Tiny Home For Good” Tiny Home Park Edition. You need to defend against the Capital vultures.
I had some stigma against trailer parks, but due to housing costs, I got serious about them once. I could actually afford a home on my single salary! That got my hopes up. There was even a trailer park near me, close to transit, close to a grocery store, close to some nice parks, it even had some vacancies! Awesome.
But then I looked at the terms. The trailer park is on a 99 year lease, coming up in about 5 years. The homes are the property of their owners, the land is not. Most of the homes are functionally immobile. A new build is more expensive than buying used, so to get an actually mobile home doubles the cost -- add disposal fees to that.
Trailer park residents are living on the edge, a ticking timebomb where they might get evicted without the ability to move their homes, or if they're lucky, they can move their homes but they'll still be forced out of their neighborhood at a time when all their neighbors are also trying to move under duress to the same closest trailer parks they can find. And if they can't find a place, they lose the home and pay for its disposal.
The stigma is real, but it's not the greatest challenge. The soaring land prices are.
Obviously the answer would be to let the owner of the mobile home buy the land the mobile home is sitting on or to let the government manage the land lease directly and only charge property tax.
Around here, the lease-land mobile-like homes are retirement communities. It is admittedly getting close to the time when we’ll see community-wide leasing agreements come up for renegotiation. The concept really works out well for the Boomer-aged. Good luck if you’re a Gen Z.
Freehold land prices are up ten-fold. Lease rates? TBD.
Are you still in Central Florida? Maybe you never actually were, just optioned the land? I'm a recent migrant to this area and would be interested in hearing more about the challenges of this region. Where can I learn more about what you are doing?
Tiny home dream for me died once I found out I couldn't park it as primary residence on residential zoned land in my city. Any big cities where you can do this and own the property? Paying rent for a house you own in the clear is a non-starter.
All zoning is local. You’ll have to research prospective locales to understand the nuance. Tiny homes kept on trailers are done for a reason; to be regulated as RVs instead of a fixed structured, avoiding typical ADU or structure to lot size ratio issues.
"In the last few years, some US cities made a surprising break with the mobile-exclusionary tradition by legalizing residence in RVs or tiny houses on wheels on residential lots. First Fresno, then Los Angeles and San Jose, and various cities & states now allow mobile Accessory Dwelling Units. Portland allowed one movable home per residential lot in the 2021 Shelter to Housing Continuum zoning reforms, and Oakland created a new residential type, “Vehicular Residential Facilities,” which allows multiple vehicle dwellings on sites with sufficient area."
You can build a permanent structure that's the bare minimum really cheaply and then just park the tiny home there, and that really only matters if you want to get grid utilities.
They’re about $5000 a pop. Maybe if you steal everything from a construction site, a tiny home could be built for $10K.