Near the end of his life, the American poet Theodore Roethke went to visit the Irish poet Richard Murphy on the island of Inishbofin, off the west coast of Ireland. After several weeks of increasingly erratic behavior (Roethke suffered from what we now call bipolar disorder), he became violent and was carted off to an insane asylum in Ballinasloe, in the eastern part of County Galway for six weeks. When he returned to Inishbofin, he said that the publicly-funded asylum in Ballinsloe was more pleasant than the top-tier private places he had stayed at in the United States, and he appreciated the fact that they would let him out at night to drink at bars in town where the male nurses hung out off-duty.
The contemporary Irish writer Kevin Barry wrote a short story called Roethke in the Bughouse which describes Roethke’s stay at Ballinsloe from the point of view of the poet, using the first-person ‘he/him’ narrative voice (don’t ask). Barry doesn’t write language; he writes pyrotechnics. Here’s Barry’s Roethke, speaking with his therapist inside the big house:
-Is this a happy town or a saddish kind of town, O’Reilly?
-Do you believe that towns have their own emotions?
-It’s clear to me. Also they are sexed.
-I’m interested in this.
-All you have to do is look out the fucking window, Doctor. This Ballinasloe is very obviously a female place.
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Here’s Barry’s Roethke describing, I suspect, Barry in drag as Roethke:
He is priapic. He is humid. He is ambitious.
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Here’s Barry’s Roethke discussing the craft of writing:
When you say you’re going in to work, as a writer, what you mean is you’re about to crawl into your fucking nerves.
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And here’s the real Roethke, discussing the mind’s inability to contain knowledge in a way that I, for one, find very moving:
— Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I’ll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.
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As far as I know, neither Barry nor Roethke knew or know about the manufactured housing industry, but Barry hit it on the head when he spoke about going in to work. To manage a mobile home park is to crawl into your fucking nerves.
I bought three new TRU homes in 2023. The two that were installed in my park in northern New York are still empty. If that persists into Q2, I will rent them out with an option to buy. I am not happy with that, but those are the breaks if you try to sell new homes in a difficult market.
The home in the park in central New York is under contract, but it is in chattel mortgage limbo.
The legal status of a manufactured home affixed to a permanent foundation on rented land depends on context. For federal income tax purposes, it is real estate. For statute of frauds purposes, the better view is that it should be treated as real estate.[1] For secured lending purposes, it is personal property. This is because it is impossible for banks to register their security interest in such a home in the deed registry, because the home could be moved after the interest is recorded. This law evolved during the mid twentieth century, when mobile homes were more mobile than they are now. It may not map well onto contemporary facts – but it is still the law.
Because of the foregoing, most banks will not finance homes in parks. If you want to finance a home on rented land, you need to go to a chattel lender.[2]
The list of chattel lenders is short. The biggest names are Twenty-First, Triad and Credit Human. A few other lenders operate in this space. Two loan brokers who I know of help borrowers navigate the lending process.
Two months ago, a woman contacted Dee Dee, the manager of the park in central New York, to look at the TRU home that was for sale there. She said she liked the home. She filled out an application and was approved. She signed a contract, put down a deposit. I asked her what she was going to do for financing. She said, ‘We have been approved by Triad’. I said, ‘Good’.
(After she was approved, the woman told us that she was buying the home for her daughter. Since her co-applicant was another woman with the same last name, I assumed that the applicant was the mother and the co-applicant was the daughter. At the document signing, I was surprised to see two middle-aged women sitting across the table from me. It took fifteen minutes for the penny to drop and for me to realize that they were a same-sex couple, one of whom had taken the other’s last name.
When the money moves, these women will be the third Lesbian couple in that park. Lesbians tend to be excellent residents. They pay their lot rent on time, they keep their lots neat enough, and they don’t bother the neighbors. I think that this is because they don’t have men in their homes. Men are the source of most problems in the manufactured housing industry. If Lesbian bars still existed, I would advertise there.
A friend of mine used to have a tee shirt that showed two women speaking with each other:
Q: What would the world be like with no men?
A: A bunch of fat, happy women and no violence.
I don’t know whether I would want to live in that world as, say, a specimen of an extinct sex – but I would love to own a park in it.)
I asked Triad what they needed. They gave me a list of documents that could be transmitted by PDF and a list that needed to be mailed as hard copies with wet signatures. One of the documents that they needed was a PDF of the check for the down payment.
The buyers and I met. I realized that they were a Lesbian couple. They gave me a check for the balance of the down-payment, signed the relevant documents, and took copies for their files. I mailed the wet-sig docs to Triad, deposited the check for the down-payment, and waited for the loan proceeds to be deposited into my bank account.
As the buyers and I were chatting, one of the two said that they had adopted the daughter that they were buying the home for out of the foster-care system. She was sixteen when they got her, she said and she was so messed up that she had pink hair.
‘Plenty of people have pink hair’, I said. ‘It doesn’t mean they are messed up.’
‘We also have Jamie’s devil-child’, she said.
Jamie is one of the lesbians who live in that park. She often has one or two foster children living with her. When she became pregnant, a nine-year-old boy who was living with her stabbed her in the stomach with a pencil. Jamie called CPS and told them to pick up the kid immediately. That is the devil child.
‘Erm – I hope the devil child won’t be living in the park’, I said.
‘Oh, no’, she said. ‘It will only be our daughter and her boyfriend.’
‘Who is the boyfriend’, I asked. Would it kill them to adopt lesbian girls, I thought. Do they have to adopt breeder-spawn?
‘He’s studying at SUNY Cortland’, she said.
‘What is he studying?’
‘Physics.’
‘He should be OK, then.’
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When Jamie decided to have a child by artificial insemination, it was the talk of the park. Art, the lecherous old bastard who is mayor of that park, told her, ‘I’ll donate to your sperm bank’.
‘Kiss my ass, Art’, Jamie said.
‘No artificial insemination, though’, Art said. ‘Direct deposit only’.
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A few days after I mailed the packet of wet-sig documents to Triad, they asked me for additional paystubs from the borrower and the last two account statements. After some email confusion, it became clear that they wanted the borrower’s bank statements, not mine. I called them and asked, ‘Why are you asking me for these items? I don’t have them. The borrower does. She is your client. Why don’t you ask her directly?’
‘We ask you, as the retailer, to handle this.’
‘It would be quicker if you asked her directly.
‘It’s policy.’
‘What statements do you want?’
‘Last two.’
‘Which paystubs?’
‘Last two.’
‘I will relay the message.’
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A day later, my phone farted and this email popped out:
VOD SOURCE- RCD STMTS 9/1-11/30; SOURCED $8,633.99 FROM #2200 & $1000 FROM EM; NEED REMAINING $9,633.99 SOURCED
I replied, ‘I am not sure what this means. What do you need from me, and what do you need from the borrower?’
The supervisor of the person who sent me the email replied, ‘We need to source the remaining down payment. Customer needs to supply statements that show where the other $9633.99 for downpayment came from.’
Determining the source of funds used for a downpayment is a common lending requirement. Banks need to get comfortable that borrowers have the means to make loan payments. In order to do that, they need to know that the downpayment was not borrowed, because if that is the case, they could be subordinate to the lender of the funds for the downpayment. But this is usually done as part of the loan approval process, before the downpayment is made. In this case, Triad was asking for proof after the loan had been approved, and after the down-payment had been made. I had already signed the bill of sale and given up possession of the Certificate of Origin. I had deposited the down payment. But I would not have access to the loan proceeds until Triad was able to determine the source of the down payment. And to complicate things, we had provided Triad with what they had asked for – but Triad was moving the goal posts.
I wrote back, ‘What is sufficient to show that? They clearly had the money, because they paid the down payment. Since money is fungible, in-flows can’t be directly linked to out-flows. Please tell me and the client exactly what you need to resolve this. Thanks.’
The manager at the bank replied, ‘We have to source the entire downpayment. We need to see that it was not borrowed. The statements we received only source part of the downpayment. Need to source the remaining 9633.99. Thank you.’
I emailed back, ‘My question is – how can you do that? For all we know, that money was inherited ten years ago and has sat in that account since. In specific terms, what do you need? Accounts showing deposits at least equal to that amount, or deposits going far enough back for you to be comfortable that that is her money?’
Texts to the buyer went like this (edits have been made for brevity and clarity):
Dirt Lease: They need to see the source of the remaining $9,633.99 that was paid for the down payment. Can you please call these people tomorrow and walk through this with them? I think they need statements showing deposits equal to that amount. Thanks.
Buyer: These people! I totally did that and explained…I’ll call them tomorrow. I don’t understand what is so confusing for them.
DL: I share your exasperation. I have asked them what, exactly, they need to get comfortable. I think that it might be either (i) statements showing deposits for the extra amounts, or (ii) statements with amounts sufficient to cover the whole downpayment going far enough back in time for them to believe that you did not steal the money. Please call them tomorrow and ask them, exactly, what they want.
DL: …and thank you.
Buyer: I didn’t steal it, I promise! Also I will ask them to contact me and not bother you!
DL: I know that you didn’t steal it, embezzle it, or borrow it from a dead body. I think the way to get them to put a fork in this is to ask exactly what they need, rather than playing twenty questions.
Buyer: they say I have to go to the bank and get an official statement created because it’s not the end of the month. I’m headed over there soon then I’ll email them.
DL: Thank you. With luck, that will get them comfortable.
That was Friday afternoon. Let’s see what the gibbering eedjits have up their sleeve on Monday.
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I recently spoke with one of the founders of a start-up called Zippy. Zippy aims to provide loans to purchasers of manufactured homes in parks secured by chattel financing. Their secret sauce is that they are, well zippy. They are easy to use. That is important when your clientele is not sophisticated. They are not licensed in New York State yet. I asked the founder to put me on speed dial and to call me as soon as they are.
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–Did you know that madmen are much the same everywhere, Dr. O’Reilly?
-Much of a muchnness, Ted, do you believe so?
-I do, actually.
Some whang-doodle off a hill farm – you can tell the hill people everywhere, too, the wind-startled look – some whang-doodle wept into his chest as he mooched the corridor and made two syllables again and again, a name, and wept to his chest, and I bet those were the syllables of his mama’s name, her name forever on his dry cracked lips and his shit-crusted shirt-tail hanging all undone. What is with these Micks and their mothers?…He considers suavely the needle-thin doctor.
-Is this a reasonable kind of establishment, Doctor? Is this a reasonable kind of town?
-Tell me what you mean.
-Might a man go for a walk in the evenings, take the evening air?
-There’s one pub I’ll allow you to go to, Ted. Our nurses drink there and they’ll look after you.
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So – we remain in this position, awaiting orders. With luck, the doctor will relieve us of Triad’s company during the evenings. Zippy is on the way. Until he arrives, we have to deal with the whang-doodles as best we can on our own.
[1] The Statute of Frauds is a common law doctrine that says that contracts regarding certain matters must be in writing to be enforceable. For example, contracts made in consideration of marriage need to be documented in writing, as do conveyances of real property.
[2] The term ‘chattel’ comes from the Latin ‘capitalis’, which is the adjectival form of the term ‘caput’, meaning ‘head’. The term ‘cattle’ comes from the same root. I do not know how the two terms evolved away from each other. One possibility is that they evolved independently of each other. You see this in English doublets like ‘frail’ which comes from the Norman French ‘fraile’, which comes from the Latin ‘fragilis’ and ‘fragile’, which was borrowed directly from Latin at a later date, bypassing Norman French. I would not be surprised if ‘chattel’ and ‘cattle’ came into English from the same source at the same time and the distinction between the words was made when the English economy changed in a way that made the distinction between cattle and other types of assets relevant. Readers who know about this are encouraged to write in.