When NPR's Morning Edition runs a story telling everyone housing is affordable in Key West, you get the idea that perhaps that as little as Conchs may know about the world outside, the rest of the country doesn't really have a clue about daily living in the Keys.
The story goes that housing is cheap enough ordinary people can afford to buy. "Ordinary people" in this context are people who depend on paychecks to pay their bills, which in Key West tends to make them extraordinary. Stadium Trailer Park is one of four trailer parks in Key West that provide sort of affordable housing in the city limits.
Stadium apartments resemble nothing quite so much as emergency military housing erected to meet an immediate need, but because this is Key West a temporary shelter has a tendency to become permanent by some form of economic osmosis it is difficult to classify.
Like so many communities that are desirable as vacation centers the credit boom of recent memory persuaded a great many people they too could afford to actually own a house in the Keys, land of American Title Companies, English as one of the major languages (Cuban-Spanish and Creole not far behind with Uzbek coming in stronger all the time) and the US dollar for currency. Why buy in Antigua or Belize or even Costa Rica when you can have sunshine all winter and have the ability to read the newspaper in the local language?
So the trailers have become more or less affordable in a town that has done a remarkable amount for people who need shelter. key West has everything, from free air conditioned tent dormitories on Stock Island known as KOTS- Keys Overnight Temporary Shelter, which is as temporary as any other accommodations, to acres of public housing scattered around town including conversion of military housing deeded to the city notably at Poinciana Housing and years ago George Allen apartments off First Street.
Stadium is the largest trailer park, with I'd guess a hundred and fifty lots on it, judging by the numbers assigned to the trailers/ It is a community unto itself and you would be wrong to think this is anything other than a community of working people.
People who think they want to move to Key West often wonder if there are good or bad neighborhoods and they call the Police Department to ask. I tell them in Key West it's all down to your neighbors, this is a city with trailers on lots next to multi million dollar homes and the size of one's income doesn't measure how nice a neighbor you will be.
For some people the biggest disadvantage of a trailer is that it is patently unsafe to sit out a hurricane in one. The most severe damage from hurricanes tends to come from tornadoes embedded in the storm and everyone knows that 200 mile-an-hour winds cause damage. They wipe trailers and their residents out completely. Live in a trailer and prepare to evacuate, to a friend's more solid apartment or ride the city provided buses to shelters on the mainland.
The picture above shows Glynn Archer Drive heading north toward North Roosevelt Boulevard. Glynn Archer is known in Key West as 14th Street, it's old name, which is just one of those confusions that lurk everywhere in the Southernmost City to trip up newcomers. On the left there used to be Poinciana Elementary School which was replaced by the "new" school across the ball park on Kennedy Drive (13th Street, as was though nobody calls it
that!). All that's left of the old school are the bus shelters, Dali-esque roofs eccentrically covering the sidewalk.
The school zone is long gone.
A trailer makes an affordable home in a town where 1200 square foot cottages were routinely selling for $700,000 dollars. Even today to find an "affordable" home through a short sale or a bank repo you have to plan to plunk down at least a quarter million for a fixer upper and if that is affordable I think the term once again needs to be re-defined. Remember too that homes in Key West don't always come with the amenities you might expect. I have seen homes with no foundations, with sketchy roof-to-wall connections, no insulation is normal, even in this heat and bedrooms are the size of closets. Double glazed windows? Ha! Central air? Not likely! A garden? Maybe... and off street parking? Only for full price, please.
The office below is a concrete block structure on the edge of the park which stretches all the way behind Publix and Sears to the north and the park goes east toward Mariner's Cove on Northside Drive. Mariner's Cove was an apartment building designed to be affordable for people connected to making their living from the sea, though whether it still is I couldn't say.
I guess trailers here are pretty much like trailers everywhere else, rows and rows of them and as usual not too many trees in a working a person's neighborhood.
This trailer was for sale for $12,000 though that doesn't buy the land on the lot which costs several hundred dollars a month to rent. Hope the neighbors are easy to get along with if you buy.
Stadium is almost a town within a town and it takes police officers ages to learn where the various trailers are. Most have numbers, some have letters and a few have double letters to mark their lots. It is a warren.
This is Northside Drive along the northern edge of the park looking toward Sears and Publix on the left.
Not everyone lives in a wooden 19th century house in Key West. If you want a tourist free home this is the place to come.
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For thoughts on the economy this Memorial Day Weekend:
Cornish Lane is another of those little colons off the main street... 
...and easy to miss unless you are a Labrador with an inquisitive nose.
Splashes of color come from natural things and this to me is the joy of living where the sun is bright and hot- everything is in primary colors. This is not the land of fog and subtle shapes and dimly seen landscapes. 
Even the Conch Train provides a lump of yellow as background as it passes down Grinnell Street toward the west.
World travelers come home to roost and bring their dust catchers with them. 
Perhaps they are French Canadians with a winter place in the sun, or perhaps they spent a long wet weekend in Paris, city of gray skies and wet sidewalks. (Remember, Nowhere Is As Wonderful As Key West, wannabe Conch). Especially Key West under construction. 
I have seen a few homes actively under renovation around town which seems as though someone around here believes the economy is getting better. Good for them and may they keep spending, right?
Cornish Lane is named for Andrew Cornish known to his contemporaries as Sandy, according to J. Wills Burke's superb The Streets of Key West. He says Sandy Cornish was born a slave in the 1790s, and bought his freedom with his wife Lillah in 1839. Then God, in a mischievous moment intervened and the documents witnessing Sandy's freedom got destroyed in a fire and back Sandy went onto the slave auction block in New Orleans. Eventually Sandy escaped and cut himself up to make himself valueless as a slave and he and Lillah lived happily every after on the fringes of "civilization" (the Confederate States) selling fruit and vegetables with his wife Lillah in Key West. All's well that ends well.
So Cornish got a church named for him on Whitehead Street and a lane here in the outer 'burbs of Old Town. I love the decrepitude of Key West, a city where the elements conspire to restore the natural order of things. A plank after all is just a shaped piece of wood. It doesn't actually have to do anything.
Tourists are frequently told that Key West homes were built from scavenged ship's timbers by wreckers who salvaged what they could off passing ships that landed accidentally (we hope) on the reef. It sounds romantic and it looks lovely. To live in? 
I grew up in old homes and know intimately how complex systems in elderly stages of failure can be. I like modern conveniences and yes I know all about carbon footprints. Sigh. 
I don't like photographing modern ranchette homes unless it is to tack on a tart comment. This stuff looks lovely but I don't want to live here. 
Got foundations? Hell no, we don't need no stinking foundations! A reminder this is a home in 21st century America. Can we please protect it because happily for us all there are people who not only like looking at these places but want to preserve and use them as well. 
They feel to me like old wooden boats. I love to look at them and enjoy seeing them around but ownership is not for me. 
This is blue sky, a daily Key West event.
this is an exhausted Yellow Labrador. She too is a daily event in summer when heat at sidewalk level is not dog friendly. 15 blocks and she's panting, so a slow stroll on Cornish Lane was an excellent way to end the stroll.
Two more blocks to iced water (princess does not enjoy warm water, it turns out), and an air conditioned car.
The moon is past full but still able to compete with the sun at dawn. 
The big white pipe alongside the new bridge transports water from the depleted South Florida Aquifer to Key West.
Looking west at Cudjoe Key. This picture would be perfect with a few large lumps of tar and an oily sheen on the water. Give it time...
Mangrove islands floating past my commute.
The light by 6:30am is almost fully day. To me this is the dangerous time to be on the road if you have any passing ambitions. There are many drivers, stupid people, especially in dark colored cars who think that because they can see out that they are visible on the darkened road even without their lights on. Turning their lights on in the half light would be too sensible. I have a dread of passing and slamming head on into the Grim Reeper lurking around a darkened car.
Now you know this is a pretty road, because it has a Federal label. 
The next channel north along the highway is Niles Channel and separates Summerland from Ramrod Keys. The forty foot bridge gives great views across the Flagler Bridge and south to the open water. 
This is the view north from the bridge, where I will be walking Cheyenne in about ten minutes.
My wife is upstairs sawing logs. Cheyenne is ready to get in the car and go smell a mangrove. 
When I'm not walking South Roosevelt and photographing my Bonneville, sometimes I walk the White Street Pier and watch the homeless nap and the anglers dangle their lines. This place on the other hand attracts not too many people doing things. This is a place for humans being, not humans doing. Walk, look, listen and enjoy the silence.
In a few hours photographers will have their tripods up and pointed east, walkers will be walking and joggers will be running and all that goodness. This half hour is mine, and I like it very much.