LARGE Mobile homes are rather hard to move.

You need to remove stuff, add stuff for a couple of days, before you can hook up and haul to another site. Think awnings, skirting, tow bars, lights, the piers they rest on, wheels and axles, splitting the home into two or three towable parts.

Cost for moving double-wide can be 3000 to 5000 dollars. Watched a crew of two guys work a entire week getting a nice double ready. Now five people are working to split it. Time and Money.

Mostly this is due the fact they need roadworthy wheels. So if you can eliminate the wheels, you might drastically cut the moving expense.

See link for modular homes.

Dumpsters don't need fancy wheels. There are dumpsters that are move by a forklift style and dumpsters that are called roll off.

If mobile homes were designed to be moved by either of these existing dumpster moving systems the expense might be less.

The forklift type would involve say 10 trips, and a sliced salami sort of design.

The roll off style could have much larger parts. 2 to 4 maybe.

One gotcha is the added expense of reinforced concrete pad with a utility trench on which to set the parts. A few mobile home parks have pads, but most are dirt or gravel over dirt.

Another gotcha is joining all the parts and roofing the whole.

And living in house that was moved in by a trash truck might freak some sensitive souls.

More later.
-- popbottle, Mar 25 2014

modular Modular_20Homes
A prior hb modular homes idea [popbottle, Mar 25 2014]

If they were modular enough you could have a parts exchange for the heavier and bulkier parts. You swap your roof with somebody in town X, who has swapped with someone in Y, who swapped with Z, who's coming to the dustbowl you're leaving.

With computers and the Internet, weird chains of exchange are more manageable than before. Trouble is I suppose if one family is leaving, others probably are, too, and no-one's moving in to replace them.
-- skoomphemph, Mar 25 2014


you could just make houses out of shipping containers, which is really really baked.
-- bs0u0155, Mar 25 2014


Inter-modal container, please. Shipping container is so imprecise.
-- WcW, Mar 25 2014



random, halfbakery