SPEAKER_12: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Some companies are big, others are small. To Robert Half, their hiring needs are equally huge. At Robert Half, our specialized recruiting professionals elevate their expertise with proprietary A.I. tools to transform candidate discovery, assessment, and selection. Whether sourcing talent locally or in any geography that works for you, Robert Half can pinpoint hard to find candidates in finance and accounting, technology, marketing and creative, legal, and administrative and customer support. At Robert Half, we know talent. Learn more at roberthalf.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The state of Utah has about 3 million people, and a third of them live in one valley, surrounded on three sides by 7,000-foot mountains and to the northwest by a great, salty lake. The valley is home to the state capital, Salt Lake City, and a bunch of other small cities and towns that over time have grown together into one big mass. One of the towns amid the sprawl is Midvale. Okay, we are in Midvale, Utah.
SPEAKER_08: Producer Emmett Fitzgerald recently took a trip to Midvale, Utah to visit a mobile home park.
SPEAKER_12: I am standing outside of the Applewood community.
SPEAKER_08: Applewood is a small mobile home community for seniors. You have to be 55 or older to live there.
SPEAKER_12: It's about 7 acres with 56 lots, and it looks a lot like the rest of suburban Midvale, except the houses are smaller and closer together. It has its own little road with its own speed limit, 10 miles per hour.
SPEAKER_08: It's a very quiet community.
SPEAKER_12: Except for that wheatlacker.
SPEAKER_08: The houses are just a few feet apart, but they all look nice. They're in really good shape. Little gardens out front of each one. Some daffodils. Let's see, should I use this side entrance or the front entrance?
SPEAKER_02: Hello!
SPEAKER_08: Hi there! Come on in! Thank you. This is Sherlene Stovin. She convinced me I needed to come visit Applewood after one phone call.
SPEAKER_04: There's something in my voice on the phone that attracts people. I can get on that phone, and I'm not bragging, but I can get anything I want. And I don't know how I do it.
SPEAKER_08: Sherlene's home is immaculate. She has spotless white carpeting from wall to wall, and all this modern furniture that's been carefully color coordinated. And it's really spacious inside. She says that when people first walk in, they seem surprised that a mobile home could be so nice. They'll say, This is a home! And I'm going, yeah.
SPEAKER_04: It's a manufactured home, and it is built stronger and better than 90% of these little track rooms that you find. But it's hard for people to get past this tunnel vision of trailers and trailer trash. Mobile homes don't get a lot of love in our culture, but they represent a lot of the affordable housing in the United States.
SPEAKER_12: Throughout the 90s, mobile homes made up about two-thirds of new affordable housing.
SPEAKER_08: Sherlene bought her mobile home, or manufactured home, in 1994. She was divorced. Her kids were grown up and out of a house. She wanted to buy her own place, but she couldn't afford a tract home in the suburbs. When I bought, I was just excited to think, I can actually now have a beautiful home that I can afford.
SPEAKER_04: Those tract homes I couldn't afford. I had to borrow money, and the loan on the borrowing of the money plus the pad fee was less than what I was paying to rent an apartment. But when you buy a manufactured home, the structure itself is only half of the equation.
SPEAKER_12: Then you need to find a place to put it.
SPEAKER_08: And Sherlene found what seemed like the perfect spot. A small, quiet mobile home park with an empty lot.
SPEAKER_04: When I moved here, I moved here February of 1994. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I have a little bit of a backyard, and I plan a little bit of a garden. My little tomato and my cucumber. I want just a little bit of ground. And this is just enough. It's perfect.
SPEAKER_12: But it wasn't actually perfect. The same dynamic that made this housing situation great for Sherlene also made her vulnerable. Because the mobile home was hers, but the land underneath it wasn't.
SPEAKER_07: Part of the paradox at the heart of manufactured housing is that it's precisely the thing that makes it so affordable that also makes this a highly insecure form of housing. This is Esther Sullivan, a sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver, who studies the relationship between poverty and housing.
SPEAKER_08: She says that about a third of mobile homeowners live in parks like Applewood, where they rent a plot of land for their home. She calls this arrangement halfway home ownership because it's filled with all this uncertainty. Residents in parks basically live at the whim of the property owner, where the property owner has the majority of rights in that community.
SPEAKER_07: So they are subject to oftentimes poor and shoddy maintenance, ever-increasing rents, and eventually they can be subject to park closure and redevelopment with very little notice.
SPEAKER_08: One day in 2011, Sherlene came home and found a letter. We all received this letter.
SPEAKER_04: Your rent is now going up $89 per month, and in six months it's going to go up another $89 per month.
SPEAKER_08: For decades, the owner of Applewood had taken good care of the park and kept rents low and affordable, but there were new owners now. And we all went ballistic.
SPEAKER_04: Who can afford 89 and then another 89? We're seniors, we're on limited income. Are you kidding?
SPEAKER_08: They managed to negotiate the increases down to $70 each, but still, in a six-month period, the rent for each lot went from $320 to $460. And rumors started swirling that the increases might just be the first step in a plan to force them out. And so Sherlene started digging into what was going on, and pretty soon she discovered that the new landlords had submitted a plan to the city to build a three-story apartment complex, right on top of Applewood.
SPEAKER_04: Then we understood why they were trying to financially evict us.
SPEAKER_08: But Sherlene wasn't just going to up and leave. She'd have to figure something out.
SPEAKER_12: Owning your own home has long been seen as a cornerstone of middle-class stability in this country. Home ownership helps you build wealth, and as long as you're able to pay your mortgage, you don't have to worry about getting evicted. That security is kind of why we buy houses.
SPEAKER_08: But that security just isn't there for many mobile homeowners, including Sherlene Stovin and the rest of the community at Applewood. We're going to get back to their story in a second, but to understand how mobile homeowners ended up in the precarious position of owning a home without land, we have to go back to the early 20th century, and the dawn of the automobile age.
SPEAKER_09: People had cars for the first time and could go out and explore America by attaching little trailers to the backs of their Model Ts or whatever cars they had. This is Andrew Hurley, a history professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
SPEAKER_08: He says that the first trailer owners were wealthy vacationers known as tin can tourists. Trailing along in a trailer, happy as can be, no rent to pay the landlord no siree.
SPEAKER_08: But then came the Great Depression, when migrant workers started living in trailers full-time as they traveled the country looking for work.
SPEAKER_09: And so there were thousands of itinerant individuals and families in search of work that didn't really know when they or if they would be coming back to where they had originated. And so trailer was something that they could attach to the back of their car and just take their home along with them.
SPEAKER_07: And they started to site these homes together in basically what became the first mobile home parks. These parks were really seen as a major drain on local resources. Writings of the time refer to these as trailer slums.
SPEAKER_08: This was the beginning of a kind of classist trailer stigma that is still very much around today. But the event that really solidified the trailer as a viable form of American housing was World War II.
SPEAKER_05: American industry has met the challenge of war. American factories have achieved the impossible. American mass production is delivering the goods.
SPEAKER_12: As the war got underway, factories popped up in all these remote parts of the country. But because they had been undeveloped, there was no housing and there was no capacity to build a new housing because construction materials were prioritized for war production.
SPEAKER_12: So the government bought thousands of trailers to house the wartime workforce. But this was always supposed to be a temporary solution.
SPEAKER_08: When the war ended, the expectation was that people would give up their trailers and move back into conventional homes. But that didn't happen.
SPEAKER_12: Trailers continued to be an affordable housing option for people who didn't have the money to buy a home in the expanding suburbs. And a lot of these mobile homeowners rented pads in one of the many mobile home parks that were popping up all over the country. Esther Sullivan says these parks continued to spread throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s as the government was investing less and less in public housing. So just as we've increasingly slashed the budget of HUD and the production of affordable housing, we've seen the incredible rise of manufactured housing and specifically manufactured housing in mobile home parks to fill that gap.
SPEAKER_07: Through it all, mobile homes were never really able to shake off the stigma that began during the Great Depression.
SPEAKER_08: People just did not want mobile home parks built in their backyard. In fact, cities used all the tools in the urban planning toolkit to render mobile home parks invisible. For the last half of a century, planning and zoning laws have required that mobile home parks be walled in, fenced off, visually screened, landscaped out of sight, so that the average citizen in a town or city might not ever know that a park was located where it was located.
SPEAKER_07: These parks were often built on marginal land on the outskirts of cities. Because mobile homes are legally classified as a form of transportation rather than housing, they could be built on land that wasn't zoned residential.
SPEAKER_12: So separate them from residences and single family homes and more often place mobile homes in commercial or industrial zones as well as in hazard places like floodplains or substandard land.
SPEAKER_08: But as cities develop and expand, mobile home parks become valuable property that can be bought up and redeveloped into something more profitable.
SPEAKER_12: A new apartment building, a condo complex, or a Walmart.
SPEAKER_07: Almost any other land use is prioritized over a mobile home park in the decisions of local city councils and in the eyes of developers. And the redevelopment of mobile home parks means mass eviction for mobile home park residents.
SPEAKER_08: Which brings us back to Midvale, Utah, and that little mobile home park for seniors where over 50 manufactured homes were on the verge of being evicted to make way for an apartment complex. I asked everyone I met at Applewood if they considered the possibility of redevelopment and eviction when they moved in. I just hadn't thought about that fact.
SPEAKER_03: This is Beth Durfee. She moved into Applewood with her husband Russell a couple of years ago.
SPEAKER_08: I didn't think about the fact that I would have to remove my home or leave my home and having to move out. I never thought that that was possible until they told me that it was.
SPEAKER_08: A lot of people, including many developers, assume that if you evict a mobile home park, the residents will just pick up their houses and move them somewhere else. But the truth is, mobile homes aren't really mobile anymore.
SPEAKER_12: In the mid-20th century, the mobile home industry split in two. One branch continued making travel trailers and RVs, while the other started manufacturing houses designed to be lived in full-time. These mobile homes started to look less like trailers and more like conventional single-family houses with multiple rooms and hallways and in-board bathrooms. And they got harder and harder to move. Today, the term mobile home is more or less a misnomer.
SPEAKER_08: A mobile home is not intended to be mobile except when it is first transported from the factory and installed on the site.
SPEAKER_07: And if you try to move it again…
SPEAKER_12: It requires specialized trucking and hauling at great expense to homeowners. It can cost between $5,000 and $15,000 to move one of these homes.
SPEAKER_12: Moving can also cause serious structural problems. It can damage the home so severely that it becomes unlivable.
SPEAKER_08: And even if residents of Applewood were willing to take that risk and had a spare $15,000 lying around, finding a new place to put their home could be next to impossible. Because there has not been any new manufactured home communities built in Utah for a long, long, long, long time.
SPEAKER_04: There's not that many spaces in any of these parks to put 56 homes.
SPEAKER_08: This is Charlene Stovin again. She says that if she got evicted, she would probably have to abandon her home and move in with one of her kids. But some of these people have no family or their family is so far away, where would they go?
SPEAKER_08: Charlene was determined not to let that happen at Applewood. And she talked to some local community organizers who advised her to start a homeowners association.
SPEAKER_04: So our first meeting was at a carport. I can't remember which carport, but one of the carports here we all met decided this is what we needed to do to save ourselves. And I of course became president. Of course. And I thought, OK, what do I do now? I'm clueless. But she kept asking people for help and little by little, they started rallying people to their cause.
SPEAKER_08: The residents started a petition to save Applewood and got over 2,600 signatures. Charlene testified before the mayor and the city council and told them, If we allow this, guess what? You're going to have 56 homeowners that will be homeless.
SPEAKER_04: And what are you going to do with us?
SPEAKER_08: Homelessness is a huge problem in Utah right now, and it's been exacerbated by a housing shortage. And apartment complexes are going up all over the Salt Lake Valley to try and meet a growing demand. Charlene says that's good.
SPEAKER_04: You need the apartments. Great. Build them. But don't displace people in order to do it.
SPEAKER_12: Charlene and the other residents of Applewood fought for several years to stay in their homes. There were a lot of twists and turns and late nights and a whole lot of emails. But eventually, after a lot of public pressure, the development company gave up on the project and decided to put Applewood up for sale.
SPEAKER_08: And when Charlene heard that, she remembered an organization that she thought might be able to help them out. It was called ROC USA.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, so ROC stands for Resident Owned Communities, and we help homeowners in mobile home parks buy their communities as co-ops. This is Paul Bradley, the president of ROC USA, which is based in New Hampshire.
SPEAKER_08: Bradley began organizing mobile home co-ops with the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund back in the 80s. They even got legislation passed in New Hampshire that gives mobile homeowners a first option to purchase the land whenever a park goes up for sale.
SPEAKER_06: Today, about 27 percent of the manufactured home communities or mobile home parks in New Hampshire are resident owned. So that's 127 or so communities.
SPEAKER_12: Bradley thinks we need to build more affordable housing, but he also wants to protect the affordable housing we already have. Right now, mobile homes represent the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing produced in this country. Bradley says that if we can help mobile homeowners buy the land beneath their parks, then the risk of mass eviction disappears.
SPEAKER_08: And so in 2008, Bradley launched ROC USA in an effort to spread New Hampshire's cooperative ownership model nationwide. So far, they've been really successful.
SPEAKER_06: So we're a national network of just over 220 communities, 14,000 homeowners, and we're operating with co-ops in 15 states.
SPEAKER_12: When Sherlene called Paul Bradley, things were not looking good for Applewood. The land had already been sold to two new developers for $4.8 million. But Sherlene and Paul approached the new owners and explained the situation.
SPEAKER_08: They talked about how difficult it would be to move their homes, and asked if the new owners would be willing to sell the park to the residents. And they said, we didn't realize you wanted to purchase the property,
SPEAKER_06: but if you want to and you can do it within the next couple of months, we'll sell it to you. Otherwise, if we're going to own it, eventually we're going to close it down. Buying a mobile home park worth at least $4.8 million seemed like a very tall order for the residents of Applewood.
SPEAKER_08: Individually, no one in the park could even come close to getting a mortgage for that kind of money. But together, as a co-op, the financial picture was different. ROC USA was willing to give the residents a very low-interest loan for $3.6 million. They would still need to find some more money, though, and so they went to a low-income housing firm in Utah, called the Olean Walker Housing Loan Fund. So there I am again, pleading my case.
SPEAKER_04: And Gloria, who is the director, said, I've thought about this the last three months, and I've decided we need to help these people. We need to give them the money they need. So between it all, we finally come up with the $5 million that we needed. And on February 9th, we signed, and we own the land.
SPEAKER_12: After four and a half years of fighting for their little piece of ground, the land officially belongs to the Applewood Homeowners' Cooperative.
SPEAKER_08: To pay off their collective mortgage, the residents agreed to pay $60 more a month than they had previously been paying in rent. It's going to be a challenge for some of them, but the monthly costs should be stable from here on out, and they'll no longer need to worry about eviction.
SPEAKER_02: We could breathe again. We don't have to worry about losing our home and everything we have in it. Now we can own our home and feel at ease.
SPEAKER_08: This is Russell Durfee, who lives in Applewood with his wife Beth, who you heard from earlier. He says that at their age, they're just happy to have a secure place to live.
SPEAKER_02: We're getting so old and feeble that we don't know how much longer we're going to live, so when we go grocery shopping, we daresn't even buy a green banana. Ready to vote right from fast.
SPEAKER_03: That's enough jokes. You can never get enough jokes. Get out of here.
SPEAKER_08: Sherlene is also relieved, but the stress hasn't gone away completely. They own the place now. They've got a co-op to run and bills to pay.
SPEAKER_04: Before, it was fighting to gain the land. Now it's a whole different set of pressures of just getting this running smoothly. And the co-op is a different ball game, because now we're in charge. It's up to us to make it work. Otherwise, we're in deep, deep doo-doo.
SPEAKER_08: But they aren't on their own. RockUSA is helping them structure the co-op and deal with the finances. And of course, a cooperative Applewood means cooperative living. There are lots of meetings and elections, committees, more committees. There's the community rules enforcement committee, there's the finance committee,
SPEAKER_04: there's the orientation committee, there's the maintenance committee, there's the social committee. These are all committees we're trying to get organized.
SPEAKER_08: Russell Durfee says he's not well enough to participate as much as he would like, but he went to the first general meeting of the co-op and he was really impressed. They asked for volunteers to be president, vice president, and so forth.
SPEAKER_02: In every position, they had volunteers. Didn't have to coax people to serve as leaders, they just automatically volunteered to do it.
SPEAKER_08: Russell says they have lots of different skills and decades of experience here in Applewood. And they're trying to take advantage of everyone's talents. The head of the maintenance committee, for example, is a retired engineer. Our secretary is kind of automatic. She was the secretary for a police department.
SPEAKER_02: I asked her how she could possibly list and have it fast and get all the notes down and so forth. I said, well, I did it for many years.
SPEAKER_12: A co-op is going to be a lot of work, but at least for now, people are glad to be a part of it and to finally own the land under their homes, together. Esther Sullivan, the sociologist we spoke to for this story, has a new book out later this year. It's called Manufactured Insecurity, Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place. She actually lived in several mobile home parks that were undergoing eviction and studied the impacts. You can find a link to the book on our website, 99pi.org. The ever-evolving design of mobile homes and the concept of mobile home skyscrapers, right after this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Football's back and Whole Foods Market has got everything you need for a delicious tailgate or watch party. Level up game day hosting with animal welfare certified meat. We're talking marinated chicken wings, organic chicken sausages, hot dogs, and more. And if you really want to step it up, catering makes tailgates a breeze. Explore the Whole Foods Market catering menu at shop.wfm.com and don't sleep on the build your own taco bar. Everyone loves it. Plus, from September 20th through October 17th, you can save 20% on your next catering order with promo code fall catering. All one word. Terms apply. If you're heading over to a friend's house, bring snacks from Whole Foods Market like late July tortilla chips, Primal Kitchen queso dip or buffalo sauce, beef jerky, cheese pickles, or salted nuts. Grab football ready sides that are already prepared like mac and cheese, potato salad, or sushi. I am telling you, the prepared foods at Whole Foods cannot be beat. They have saved my bacon so many times. It comes to feeding anybody who's coming over. Elevate game day at Whole Foods Market. Chances are you're listening to 99% invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media, or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are, it's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember, T-Mobile's got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile.com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile.com. When Emmett was reporting this story, he discovered all the different names for these things and that they were used interchangeably, but also had different meanings for different people, terms like trailer, manufactured home, mobile home. And Cole Stead is here to talk about the rise of the term mobile home and how that design evolved over time.
SPEAKER_11: Right. And Emmett was telling me that when he was interviewing people for the story, like everybody was just using a different term for sort of the same thing. But this actual term mobile home, according to Stuart Brand's really excellent book, How Buildings Learn, was actually coined by a man named Elmer Frey. And I haven't been able to verify that independently, but Frey did play a big role in popularizing it, if nothing else. And he's this really interesting character. In the 40s, he started a mobile home manufacturing business in Wisconsin, and he sold a lot of these eight-foot-wide homes, but he also lobbied to be able to transport 10-foot-wides on public roads. And what is the big difference between an eight-foot-wide home and a 10-foot-wide home, those two feet?
SPEAKER_12: So if you think about a typical mobile home at the time, the real limitation is that horizontal dimension. You can make one that's dozens of feet long, but it's really hard to fit in walls and a hallway if it's too thin.
SPEAKER_11: So if you add a few feet of width, you can suddenly subdivide space, create rooms, and connect them via a side corridor. So now you can walk past these fully enclosed individual spaces rather than always stepping through one room to get to another, and that means you've got privacy and you can fit a family more comfortably. Some builders would also make ones that would expand on-site to become wider, and then of course you've got your double-wides and your triple-wides designed to be joined together on-site.
SPEAKER_12: And as you make these leaps, it sounds like mobile home is becoming less and less mobile, actually.
SPEAKER_11: Exactly. As 10-wides and then 12-wides gained popularity, they were increasingly created to just be shipped out, set down, and lived in. And for HUD, you know, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, this posed a problem. A lot of these relatively immobile homes were not being constructed to the same standards as normal lot-built houses. So in the mid-1970s, Congress passed the Mobile Home Construction and Safety Standards Act, which basically was to make sure that new manufactured homes would be more energy-efficient and disaster-resistant. And so what did those regulations do to the industry and the mobile home housing stock?
SPEAKER_12: Well, the new HUD codes set standards for things like safety and durability, but also heating, plumbing, ventilation, air conditioning, electrical systems, all those things you normally associate with regional building codes, but that didn't always apply to mobile homes.
SPEAKER_11: And from a federal standpoint, this is where that manufactured homes distinction comes in. Predictably, of course, some people in the business of producing prefab homes weren't exactly pleased with the added layer of regulations. You don't say. But, you know, the new rules did lead to better design and stir your construction.
SPEAKER_12: So you mentioned through a Brand's book, How Buildings Learn, which is all about the ways that buildings evolve and adapt over time. But it seems to me that, you know, whatever you call these types of homes, they're basically kind of pre-designed, self-contained, and they're not really designed to change over time.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, in a way that's true. They don't have to change over time. You know, the factory builds it, ships it out, sets it down, plugs it in, and it's good to go. But Brand points out that these initial modules are actually rich with potential too. As he puts it, a smaller unit can become the quote seed around which a larger home grows. So for instance, an owner might build out a shed roof to create a porch, and then eventually enclose that on all sides to create interior space. So for somebody who can't afford a house right away, or a big house at least, this kind of base model approach allows owners to build out on their own terms when they have the time and the budget. Of course, this is also tied up in that increasing immobility of manufactured housing too, right? Once you start expanding this thing. They're there to stay.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah. And so what about Frey, the original mobile home popularizer, is a builder and seller of these kinds of structures. What was his reaction to the shift from mobile homes to these immobile manufactured houses? So he ended up exploring some pretty extreme ideas in the 1960s and 70s.
SPEAKER_11: While HUD's over here developing standards, Frey is actually proposing skyscrapers for mobile homes. And one of his early plans was to erect these two spiraling towers in Milwaukee, each with hundreds of parking spaces for portable dwellings. And those towers would also have restaurants and shops and community spaces above and below the parking slash living areas. So maybe you stay for a few years, pull up the parking brake, and roll your home to the next mobile skyscraper park in another city where you get a new job. And in each place, you'd be living in a walkable downtown. And that's reminiscent of Ready Player One, where the main character lives, and the stacks, which are these stacks and stacks of mobile houses, which don't really look all that nice, exactly.
SPEAKER_12: No, I mean, they're really kind of not very appealing.
SPEAKER_11: And frankly, the prototypes that Frey made, they were just a couple stories tall, and they basically looked like that. And they weren't that appealing, and they didn't work that well. But his larger vision of these really tall towers was actually pretty interesting, if you think about it. You know, if it had worked out, his so-called skyscraper terrace could have brought mobile housing right into the heart of cities, and combined mobility with urban density in a really unprecedented way. Well, you can see pictures of Frey's proposed skyscraper terrace and other vertical mobile housing designs on our website. It's 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_12: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmet Fitzgerald. Mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif. Music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is the senior producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor Delaney Hall, Avery Truffleman, Taryn Massa, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, an independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radio-topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars, and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit, too. But if you're thinking, I need more 99pi in my life, well, we have all the old episodes and new articles about design every couple of days on our beautiful website. It's 99pi.org. Radio-Topia from PRX.
SPEAKER_10: Great sleep can be hard to come by these days, and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming.
SPEAKER_12: Serta's new and improved Perfect Sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions. With zoned comfort, memory foam, and a cool-to-the-touch cover, the Serta Perfect Sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at Serta.com.
SPEAKER_00: Don't take intresto with an ACE inhibitor or alaskarin, or if you've had angioedema with an ACE or ARB. Don't take with alaskarin or within 36 hours of taking an ACE inhibitor. The most serious side effects are angioedema, low blood pressure, kidney problems, or high blood potassium. Angioedema is swelling of your face, lips, tongue, and throat that may cause death. If it causes difficulty breathing, get emergency help.
SPEAKER_01: Ask your doctor about intresto. To learn more, visit support.intresto.com or call 833-446-6699. For pricing, visit intresto.com backslash cost. If you can't afford your medication, Novartis may be able to help.
SPEAKER_10: You've been dreaming about the dress. Come find the one at David's Bridal. The most glamorous designer wedding gowns are now 15% off. Bridesmaid dresses that fit beautifully start around $99. Whether you need a veil, jewelry, shoes, or even lingerie and shapewear, it's all at David's Bridal. Take 20% off outfit-making accessories for a limited time. Stop by your local David's Bridal store or shop davidsbridal.com today. Terms and conditions apply.
