It all started back in the 20's people had all these new cars and were like "i want to go camping and i dont want to frickin walk i want to frickin drive my model t okay foo" so people used tent trailers... it just made sense and as the 20's went on it became more and more popular. 
Enter the Great Depression...
Hundreds of thousands of people moved to other regions to escape the dust bowl and other poverty stricken areas. Because of huge population shifts there wasnt enough housing to accomidate these new arrivals. People started setting thier car campers in campgrounds when there wasnt any housing available and soon campgrounds that would accept these semi permanent tennants were dubbed "TRAILER PARKS"
Not soon after their conception municipalities began viewing these areas as "trailer slums" full of questionable transients. Many areas during this time declared war on trailer parks and trailer courts (the urban counterpart) by developing exclusionary zoning and ordinences that said trailers were not housing.
WWII
The second world war pushed trailer housing forward. Wartime factories, mines ect... needed a large amount of temporary housing and this brought forth the creation of "the Spartan" a 22-foot-long, eight-foot-wide trailer with a canvas top that included a kitchen and bathroom-the first true house trailer. The government ended up buying 35,000 of these units at $750 per trailer, and constructing 8,500 trailer parks to site them... but in the post-war years the old bugaboo of “trailer-camp-slums” re-emerged."
"Many municipalities... (once again used) “snob-zoning,” (tactics) declaring trailer parks commercial businesses and relegating them to nonresidential zones, i.e. on the other side of the tracks, in industrial areas, and alongside highway corridors outside of town." Because of their relegation to non-residential low quality areas, trailer park developments began to move to less restrictive unincorporated areas...
"In the mid-1960s, mobile home production really began to take off. Manufacturers were early adopters of new technologies such as pneumatic-powered hand tools for nailing, stapling and cutting; automated machinery for manufacturing windows, doors and drawers; new and stronger adhesives, and panel construction machines. These advances greatly reduced the hand labor involved in the construction process and drove down the costs, making mobile homes better and more affordable....In 1965, just under 300,000 mobile home units were shipped. By 1972, the industry shipped an astonishing 575,000 units, amounting to one-third of all new single family housing constructed that year in the United States."
"During the same period in the absence of any meaningful regulation or standards, many manufacturers... began churning out poorly engineered, shoddily constructed mobile homes made of the cheapest possible materials, particularly plastic products that were highly flammable. Many models were dangerously unsafe and full of plumbing, electrical and structural defects."
"In 1974, Congress passed watershed legislation, the National Mobile Home Construction and Safety Standards Act, which formally recognized mobile home manufacturing as a major industry"
modern erra
"The industry, despite wonderful advances in its products, continues to be flawed by a largely unregulated system of selling and financing its products that invites abuses — collusion, misrepresentation and fraud, to name a few... Unlike the auto makers, the manufactured home builders have never fostered a strong cradle-to-the-grave system to protect the buyer after the sale...In short, there were a lot of questionable dealings between dealers and finance companies. For awhile there, a case could be made that what was really being sold were not homes, but loans."
"In the conventional arena, unstimulated by government, capital follows opportunity. It seldom leads. There’s effective demand in mobile homes, and substandard financing. This, coupled with mobile homes’ quasi-illegitimate zoning birth, has given the entire industry the dubious standing of a red-headed stepchild among types of housing, and a complete invisibility in affordable housing."
and there it is... now what?
-sources:
http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2007/04/mobile_home_par.html
The Grissim Buyer's Guide to Manufactured Homes & Land: How to Find a Reputable Dealer and Negotiate a Fair Price on the Best Kept Secret in American Housing by John Grissim
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