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Green Trailer Park Homes @ $120/Sq Ft from Marmol Radzinger

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Who says green building has to cost more? Marmol Radziner Prefab has just contracted with the city of Santa Monica to build a mobile home park.

It has rooftop solar panels, solar hot-water heaters and Energy Star appliances, Solartube daylighting, CFLs, rain barrels, compost bins and vertical green screens for small-space gardening, in short – the works.

Cost? Just $120 a square foot, including all the green upgrades. In a nation that is lucky to build for $250 a square foot, that is an amazing achievement.

These certainly get the sustainable job done. But… the company known for its gorgeous prefabs seems to have left its gorgeous design hat back at the office. Sure, it’s cheaper to build simple shed roofs, and keep size in check, these are 400 to 1,000 square feet. But they could look better than this with a little design smarts. Even the colors are nothing to write home about. How can they not know that a boring color costs just the same as a great one?

If you don’t select the green upgrade, the units are only $60 a square foot to build, but that defeats the purpose: making green building available even at the trailer park, because, especially for low income folks, the cost of energy paid out monthly over time far exceeds the difference between the $60 and the $120 per square foot of the initial price.

So don’t be fooled by the “cheaper” option. It’s like a Payday loan from a loan shark, that takes advantage of trailer park dwellers with apparently great low price offers. But if you are in the market for a cheap and green house that’s just $75,000, with a tiny carbon footprint, and virtually no utility bills forever, head on down to LA.