The i-House is a next-generation, green manufactured home. It’s from Clayton Homes, who have been building mobile homes for over 70 years. (They were bought by Warren Buffet in 2003.)
It’ll sell for about $100,000, which puts it above trailer park homes but below regular houses. And it definitely has some nice features.
The butterfly roof was designed for a rainwater catchment system, as well as to carry the optional $8,000 solar pv system (depending on the orientation of house). Amenities include Ikea fixtures, dual-flush toilets, bamboo flooring, recycled content decking material, Japanese-style climate control in each room, and low E efficient windows. Plus, with Clayton Homes’ manufacturing prowess, they’ve found that construction waste is kept to a couple garbage cans or less per home.
Lloyd Alter at Treehugger used to be in the prefab house business, and has an insider’s view.
If Clayton is offering a green 100K mobile home, then they think that the mobile home park market is expanding beyond its traditionally blue collar base.
Clayton is either spectacularly well-timed or will spectacularly fail with this. There is a huge cohort of young people who can no longer get mortgages for traditional housing; the trailer park model of owning your home while renting your land works in that milieu.
