People are building houses all over Portland, making room for the thousands of people who are expected to move here within the next few years. Almost everyone I know is resigned to the realities of modern life. They want to own a home, and they are willing to work for years and years in jobs they don't necessarily enjoy in exchange for the security that homeownership affords. This might be a good plan for some people, but it doesn't work for me. I simply don't wants to be burdened with a mortgage, stuck in a dead-end job, and completely enslaved by the economic realities of modern daily living. Don't get me wrong – I want to own a house, but who wants to have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars?
A lot of people never even consider the possibilities of transportable houses as an alternative to new home construction. I know I didn't think about it until I was employed by a company that specializes in them. They make prefabricated buildings as well as mobile homes. When most people think about transportable houses, they get some pretty negative images in their heads. The most common association is with trailer parks, often viewed as hotbeds of drug use, poverty, and ignorance. Living in transportable houses is widely seen as a sign of failure. The reality, however, is much different.
You see, the way that people do house construction simply doesn't make sense. The great thing about prefabricated houses is that they can be made cheaply because they are made in whole lines. They do not need to have an architect or engineer draw up a new design for each house. Instead, hundreds can be built off of any one given design. There are even home building kids that allow you to put together your own building out of premade pieces. Not only is it much cheaper than buying a home from a developer, but it is easy enough that, with a little bit of help and a lot of time, you can do it yourself!
A lot of these transportable houses work very well as permanent of semi-permanent buildings, and almost all of them are a lot cheaper than other homes. In my case, I was able to cut the price of home ownership drastically by simply buying a piece of property and sticking a transportable home on it. I own my own house, and am debt free.
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