(Reading time:5 minutes)
It’s no secret that RVs have become the default home of last resort for people who can no longer afford a “normal” place to live. Photos of battered trailers and motorhomes lining West Coast streets have become a cliché, but a less visible version of the same trend can be found in RV parks all across the country, where “full-timers” and “seasonals” have put down roots. Once meant as recreational facilities for weekenders and as overnight stops for travelers, with only a sprinkling of longer-term traveling nurses, construction workers and other itinerants, RV parks these days increasingly look like wheeled subdivisions, thanks to the growing shortage of affordable sticks-and-bricks housing.
But as I’ve written before, in a blog I no longer update that focused on campgrounds and RV parks, the RV industry is deeply conflicted about this state of affairs. On the one hand, encouraging people to live—rather than merely recreate—in RVs is a money-maker, assuring park owners of more consistent cash flow and less work than is required for a campground full of overnighters. On the other hand, RVs are built to a far less rigorous standard than their bigger cousins, variously known as house trailers, mobile homes or manufactured housing, which are subject to rules set by the federal department of Housing and Urban Development. RVs, after all, are recreational vehicles, not homes.
Or at least that’s the prevailing fiction.
The problem is that the more people choose—or are forced—to live in RVs full-time, and the more RV park owners either encourage or turn a blind eye to this practice, the more this fiction becomes unsustainable. And as the proliferation of such substandard housing becomes more widely recognized, there’s always the risk of an official crackdown by politicians and rule-makers. Why, after all, should it be acceptable for people to live in homes that don’t meet electrical, fire and other housing codes simply because they sit on wheels? The possibility that Washington or Richmond might suddenly wake up to their responsibility for ensuring that people’s homes are not death traps, thereby strangling the golden goose, has grown big enough to cause industry palpitations, even as the overall trend continues to grow unchecked.
Case in point: the November issue of Woodall’s Campground Magazine, in which an editorial concedes that a severe housing shortage of 4.7 million homes has made RVs an attractive alternative. Yet industry manufacturers “have spent years highlighting the fact that PMRVs are for temporary stays only. . . . For park owners, operators and developer, that means they can approach local officials and highlight the fact that PMRVs are not like permanent trailers or homes, and that they aren’t meant for long-term housing, something many local officials are concerned about when a new RV park, campground or glamping park is proposed.”
As, indeed, they (local officials) should be, and not just when new parks are proposed.
PMRVs is an acronym for Park Model Recreational Vehicles, which is to say, RVs on steroids. Technically bound by RV construction rules that limit their footprint to 400 square feet, they nevertheless can be up to 14-feet wide, which makes them quite unlike any “vehicle” most people would recognize. And while they’re supposedly limited to a single main floor, an exception that manufacturers carved out for “small lofts” has grown over the years to allow secondary spaces up to five feet high. The resulting behemoths are as unlikely to be moved with any frequency as their even larger “mobile home” cousins.
Nor are they furnished in a way that speaks to a transient or recreational lifestyle, as the same Woodall’s issue amply illustrates in a lengthy article under the telling headline, “Rise of the Destination Trailer: Drawbacks of Travel Persuade Some to Put Down Semi-Permanent Roots.” As the article makes clear, it’s not just the hassles of traveling that are doing the persuading, nor are those roots merely semi-permanent—not with trailers “that trade traditional RV mobility for an otherwise unattainable level of residential living.”
Leading off this rhapsodic account is the Benchmark 44LFT: “It’s taller, it’s longer and you’ll typically find that it has equipment that wouldn’t take the pounding of the road—things like wide patio doors, larger and better appliances,” a manufacturer’s representative told the magazine. Indeed, at 44 feet and 11 inches in length, the Benchmark is as long a trailer as can be found on the market but also has two slide-outs—one of which runs the full length of the main cabin—and two loft bedrooms in addition to a master bedroom suite and two bathrooms. The whole thing weighs in at 18,000 pounds GWVR, which requires more towing chops than even the beefiest pick-up can provide.
In other words, there is nothing about the Benchmark, or other PMRVs, that suggests it’s “for temporary stays only.” Nor is there anything about these behemoths that highlights “the fact” that they “are not like permanent trailers or homes, and that they aren’t meant for long-term housing,” no matter how much Woodall’s editor may protest to the contrary. Indeed, a more stark example of how an industry can talk out of both sides of its mouth simultaneously would be hard to find.
It wasn’t all that long ago that industry spokespeople were a bit more honest about things, perhaps because they weren’t feeling as much regulatory heat. Talking to Woodall’s in August of 2023, Dick Grymonprez, longtime director of park model sales at a major manufacturer, was far more philosophical. “If you think about it, a person’s going to live wherever they want to live,” he told the magazine. “The RV business doesn’t want to admit this, but there are people that live in RVs year-round, full-time. There are people that live in park models year-round.”
He’s absolutely right, and the responsible thing for the industry would be to acknowledge as much—and to accept the implications of that acknowledgment.
Looking askance 