Do you live in a Mobile Home or RV? Tell us about it.
We downsized and moved into ours about six years ago. It's a 1977 Skyline Expando. It's a 60 ft.X 12 ft. single with an expanded living room. Two bed, 1 bath. We're in a Senior (55 and older) park in a small town in the northern wine country in Northern California. Never saw myself in a Mobile Home, but we really like it. Nice neighbors, well managed and affordable park. Earlier retirement than we planned due to health reasons reduced our income and this worked out fine.
We installed a complete new kitchen and painted all the wood paneling, so it looks much newer than it's actual age.
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and my husband's a fishing fanatic, but they show a little bit of the diversity of lifestyles and locations to be chosen. We do have a home in GA that before many more years pass we'll downsize from, to what not decided on yet. But could well be a MH in a great location.
First old MH is in an over-55 cooperative on a FL coastal estuary in a string of towns between Tampa and Sarasota, purchased as a winter snowbird retreat because we had friends there. It's on a canal and has its own boat dock, but most aren't and are very reasonably priced in a park that's on the water and has great amenities all around. Its mostly snowbird owners walk and bike to almost every possible service and keep the monthly HOA fee low because that's the way they want it. The wind kept my aging husband off the water too often, and we wanted to spend more time there but the HOA outlawed pets and we had to leave them with friends, so we started renting it out.
After we found a second, "temporary" MH at the very bottom of the market that we could bring our pets to. Because we'd discovered we could live in wonderful comfort with a whole different and great lifestyle for comparatively very little. All in all, since friends helped us slide almost accidentally into it, I wish everyone on limited incomes would have a chance to check out this possibility. So many, of course, would never at least consider it and that's a shame. We wouldn't consider what we see many settling for.
So, I'm sitting in our "temporary," a decrepit old single wide that tends to sink unevenly into the old seabed sand in rural central FL, chosen because it's surrounded by pond and marsh with a lot of preserve around, river and lakes very close by. Neighbors range from good friends to the reasons the sheriff's department routinely patrols. But it's beautiful and we love it. We also tore out some walls and remodeled the kitchen (Ikea white) to make it nice (views and doors out to porch and sunroom in both directions!), but in our case it's in something that technically at least literally isn't worth the cost of demolishing it. 
We're now looking for a third inland on a chain of lakes away from sea winds, after selling the first. DH is getting older, and this one'll be in a resident-owned park again for ease of living, with covered boat slips the HOA maintains and other amenities and activities. And yard space for me to play at gardening. Our choice will be either cooperative (owners own the land in common) or fee simple (you own the land). In both cases, again, any HOA fees will be low in a resident-owned park. The MH will be old and small (almost certainly under 1300) because that's what we can afford in a park with a marina. And almost all coops are old with old MHs.
We like children and would be happy to be around all ages, but in our price range over 55 means predominantly middle class owners with their lives in order (and here in FL usually a main home elsewhere), while all-ages parks in our modest price range are extremely varied, from lives in order to chronic basket cases and levels of maintenance to reflect it.
Without our boat dock requirement, what we pay for wonky older places would buy a very nice, larger home like MrBill's, in a nice park. We haven't considered land lease or rent because the money slips away each month to the (usually) corporation owner, and, as said, rent could be raised or the park closed at any time. Unless that's the only way. One big advantage of going that way, though, is that a lot of those MHs sell very inexpensively -- some are flat dumped to get free of the monthly rent -- so relatively little initial investment is required to get into a very nice place to live.
