In our nation’s moment of pandering to the far left, perhaps it’s time to pay homage to the simple fact that mobile home parks can be just as woke as the next business – only it’s a fact and not just a PR posturing. As the only sustainable form of housing that’s green due to size and environmentally friendly since it creates no pollution, we could out-woke even the wokest business without breaking a sweat.
Episode 239: Let's Go Woke For a Second Transcript
Wikipedia defines woke as alert to injustice in society, but as we all know right now, in our society, woke means anything but that. In fact, woke typically means creating more injustice than it means solving. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast. We're gonna talk about wokeness and mobile home parks. Let's first point out that many businesses use this entire woke vision as a great way to advance their corporate profitability. Now, the first thing they do is, they'll put a woke spin on things they already did. Doesn't cost them a penny to do so, so, just pretend like it's some great additional attribute. I was in a restaurant recently, and they had a big sign on the wall of the restaurant saying that all of their wines are sustainably grown. How in the world do you sustainably grow wine? I lived out in the Missouri wine country down here in the very tip of the Ozarks, many, many wineries down here, and wine is pretty easy on the growing side. You basically grow great bushes and you harvest the great bushes annually. And if you go out to a wine farm, you won't find much excitement going on in the farming part of it, it's all in the process of making the wine, but not in the growing of it.
But here's a restaurant trying to pretend that their wines, which is true pretty much of all wines, that the wines are sustainably grown. And then, other times I'll go to a hotel and I'll check into the hotel and I'll see a little sign in the room and it says, "If you don't need your towel washed, then hang it up in the bathroom, but if you need it washed throw it on the floor, because you see, we no longer wash your towels unless you let us know, because we're trying to save the environment. Trying to keep the amount of soap we put in the sewer lines down." Well, you know, that's a ridiculous excuse. They're trying to save money on not washing as many towels. Every time they wash towels, it costs them money and water and hot water and soap. So, most businesses use woke, not truly because they care, not in the least, but because it's a way to get higher sales from people who are more left-leaning and all very woke conscious. But mobile home parks, we're the real deal. If you wanna get woke, we can take you on toe for toe, eye for eye in wokeness and beat almost any other business.
Let's go through why mobile home parks, if you really wanna talk woke, how we are at the top of the pile. Number one, we are truly sustainable. We're not the wine country with the sustainable growing of the grapes, no, we are actually a sustainable group. We are the only people in the world that can provide affordable housing that is not subsidized. If you watched those C-SPAN hearings a few years ago of Congress, when they suddenly appeared horrified that our affordable housing programs in America are not sustainable. That Section 8 is nothing more than a handout from the US government to apartment owners, and then they feigned this, oh, I never knew that. Well, give me a break. We all know that. All other forms of affordable housing in the United States only exist because the government covers the full amount of rent and you the taxpayer pay for it. Not with mobile home parks. We are cheap enough with our product that people can actually pay for it, who even earn such things as minimum wage or in any other form of assistance program. Also, for many mobile home parks, one or more utilities are private, they're actually home-grown right on the property, whether it's well water or septic.
As a result, we don't even take up any city utility capabilities or limitations. So we're pretty much the most sustainable form of housing you will find in the United States. But we're also green. How are we green? What does green mean? Green is this kind of catch word for anything that's kind of environmentally friendly. And so, in the whole green space, we have to be green because our homes are very, very small. So our total utility cost with mobile home parks and mobile homes is a fraction of what it is in typical residential homes and developments. Instead of 2500 and 3500 square foot homes, most of our homes are under a thousand. Some as small as under 500 square feet. So clearly, when it comes to green, oh yeah, well, we're as green as any other form of housing you will ever find not only in the United States, but in the world at large. Also because our homes are small and built in factories, we have tiny amounts of construction cost and use of such items as lumber. Go to any mobile home factory in the United States, you'll see they typically knock out seven to eight sections a day, that means seven to eight single-wides or might mean four double-wides.
But the bottom line is, we produce in our industry literally a home an hour on an eight-hour work day when the usual stick-built home, they labor over for months and months and months, using all types of resources that mobile homes don't use. So the bottom line is, when it comes to the product itself, when you wanna talk green, you won't find anything that's greener than mobile homes. And as long as we're talking an environmental friendliness, 'cause that's another way people like to phrase theology it is, environmentally friendly, our industry creates no pollution, none, zero, zilch. No, I'm sorry. Nike can't truly say that, they create pollution in the processes of building sneakers, but no, we don't create any pollution. Also, we don't really have any irrigation. All the time, places, point fingers at those who irrigate their lawns as using all of our wonderful water to do nothing more than grow green grass. While in most mobile home parks, you'll find no irrigation systems at all. Also, no chemicals are used. So, we are not an industry where we use chemicals, we don't make chemicals. So, as far as the environment goes, environment is just totally at ease with a mobile home park.
Mother nature just could not be happier than having us sitting on top of the Earth. Also equally important as an industry, and this is a very important item, we truly give back. We're not like Bombas that sells you socks, and then with every order of X dollars, we're gonna give away a sock. That will cost to Bombas a probably what? A quarter, a nickel, a penny? In our industry, we give back thousands of dollars a year to our residents in the following format. Number one, all the time we are fixing residents' homes when needed for the general betterment of the community at large, when people cannot afford to fix their own homes, mobile home park is gonna step in and they do the job for them. So in that way, we are constantly giving back to the residents at no cost to them whatsoever. In a quantity and a proportion, much, much higher based on sales than any other American corporation that I know. We even do entire events focused on nothing but giving back, such as spring clean-up events.
So we hold actual events where we spend our own dollars to not only beautify the property, but to help build that sense of community. We're also often forging situations when we buy these properties for people who don't have their rent current, well, we will forgive the past rent. Do you know any other business that does that? I don't. I can't imagine Coca-Cola when the restaurant changes accounts over, the Coke doesn't say, "Wait a minute, you still owe us for that delivery of Coke from last month." But in mobile home parks frequently, that's what does occur. When you buy the [0:08:33.2] ____ part from mom-and-pop and you may have someone behind in their rent, a year, two years, five years, because mom-and-pop never worked the whole idea of collecting rent or no pay, no stay, we often just forgive it, there's no point in chasing after the customer, it wasn't part of our budget, we could try and collect it, but typically mobile home park owners give back, realize the person was let to be put in a bad position by mom-and-pop, and we just let it go.
In fact, in general, with mobile home parks all the time, we're bringing these old parks back to life. There's no greater give back to the residents than pumping the needed money into the infrastructure, improving the management and making their quality of life higher. And that goes for not only the residents in the mobile home park, but the entire surrounding community. All the stick-built homes, retail centers and things that look on to the mobile home park, they are also overjoyed when we re-do the entries and all of the quality of the property inside. So, when it comes to giving back as a company, you will never find any group that gives back more than the mobile home park owners. The bottom line to it is, we are the real deal on wokeness, we are the folks who actually deliver on all the tenants of the entire woke movement, but we don't talk about it much, and most importantly, we get no respect for anything we do. We're constantly criticized for raising rents even in tiny, tiny motions, $15, $20, at the time when apartments raise theirs hundreds of dollars. We get no credit for that.
Nike and other groups, well, they're all over the media, it's wonderful people because they might put some new woke adjective on to something in an ad campaign, yet mobile home park owners day in, day out, we do all those initiatives, and yet we never get any due respect or notoriety for it. Kind of a sad situation and kind of a sad world right now. Of course, things run in cycles, and I'm pretty sure that the entire term woke will disappear into the ethereal universe and they're not too far to the future, people will move on to things they find more important at the moment. But let it be known here and now, if you wanna talk about woke, well, we can out woke anybody. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast. I hope you enjoyed this, talk to you again, soon.