An examination of the common trailer park reveals a few key lessons about land use, urban design, and private governance.

"Trailer parks remain one of the last forms of housing in US cities provided by the market explicitly for low-income residents," writes Nolan Gray. "Better still, they offer a working example of traditional urban design elements and private governance."
According to Gray, trailer parks are an outlier in the U.S. real estate market. But there very existence offers a lot of instruction about how land use regulation and market forces work. Gray writes: "where they exist, [trailer parks] are often subject to uniquely liberal land-use regulation, with minimal setbacks, fewer parking requirements, and tiny minimum lot sizes. The result is that many trailer parks have relatively high population densities.
There's more:
By combining these liberal land-use regulations with narrow streets shared by all users, we ironically find in many trailer parks a kind of traditional urban design more common in European and Japanese cities. With functional urban densities and traditional urban design, the only thing missing in most trailer parks is a natural mixture of commercial and industrial uses.
Gray concludes the article by proposing three key lessons to be learned from trailer parks.
FULL STORY: RECLAIMING "REDNECK" URBANISM: WHAT URBAN PLANNERS CAN LEARN FROM TRAILER PARKS

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