Why Do Planners Overlook Manufactured Housing and Resident-Owned Communities as Sources of Affordable Housing and Climate Transformation?

Abstract

More Americans live in manufactured housing than in public and federally subsidized rental housing combined. Of the nearly 40,000 U.S. manufactured housing communities (MHCs), more than 1,000 are resident-owned communities (ROCs), a form of cooperative ownership. Yet planning research continues to neglect MHCs and ROCs, raising questions of classism and cultural bias. We address five common biases against MHCs and argue ROCs in particular deserve greater attention because they enable low-income people to improve their housing security in the face of financial and environmental vulnerabilities. Lessons from these efforts can help other alternative and collective housing providers do the same.

Keywords:

• climate change
• displacement
• housing cooperatives
• manufactured housing
• shared equity housing

Manufactured housing communities (MHCs),¹ called “America’s most invisible communities” by sociologist Esther Sullivan (2017), are critically understudied by planning and housing researchers. They are much less researched than other types of affordable housing (Table 1), even though more Americans live in manufactured housing than public housing and other U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)–subsidized rental housing combined (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). We argue that MHCs are an essential source of affordable housing that has been “hidden in plain sight” (Dabson, 2018) from many researchers, planning practitioners, and policymakers.² MHCs deserve greater research and policy attention for three linked reasons. First, MHCs are an essential part of the U.S. affordable housing sector. Second, MHC residents are particularly vulnerable to two contemporary planning challenges: financialization-driven displacement and climate change. Third, MHCs have introduced a novel form of alternative land tenure (the resident-owned community or ROC model) that holds promise for addressing these challenges across housing types.

Table 1 Literature review overview, 1980–2020.

	JAPA	JPER	HPD	Cityscape	Housing Studies	Total
Manufactured housing terms
Manufactured housing	2	0	5	1	0	8
Mobile home	1	0	3	2	0	6
Trailer home	0	0	0	0	0	0
Trailer park	0	0	0	0	0	0
Total	3	0	8	3	0	14
Other affordable housing terms
Public housing	43	6	101	62	113	325
Housing project	0	1	4	1	10	16
Subsidized housing	10	1	28	13	11	63
Section 8	2	0	37	14	5	58
LIHTC	3	3	21	6	5	38
Total	58	11	191	96	144	500

Note: Limited quantitative literature review comparing articles published between 1980 and 2020 focused on manufactured housing to other forms of affordable housing in leading U.S.-focused planning and housing journals (Journal of the American Planning Association [JAPA], Journal of Planning Education and Research [JPER], Housing Policy Debate [HPD], the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s flagship journal Cityscape, and Housing Studies). The review was conducted in July 2021 using Web of Science. The search results include any article that used the relevant term in any of the fields tracked by the database. LIHTC = Low Income Housing Tax Credit.

After describing the mismatch between the importance of MHCs as a source of affordable housing and the minimal treatment of the sector in housing and planning research, we illustrate this gap through a brief quantitative literature review. We then respond to five possible explanations for the marginalization of MHCs by researchers, including the perceptions that MHCs are substandard, characterized by exploitative tenure arrangements, predominantly rural, low density, and disconnected from their surroundings. We argue these biases do not justify the neglect of MHCs and that residents of MHCs face two especially troubling threats that deserve particular attention: tenure insecurity and climate change vulnerability. Given the prevalence of MHCs and the increasing urgency of these threats, more research is needed to address tenure and environmental hazard vulnerability for MHC residents. We close by discussing the ROC model of shared ownership and democratic self-governance, which, we argue, can help confront these threats. We demonstrate the lack of research on this model relative to other forms of shared equity housing and discuss its potential for driving broader transformative change.

MHCs Hidden in Plain Sight

Manufactured housing is a major source of affordable housing. According to data from the 2019 American Housing Survey (AHS), some 6,750,000 households live in manufactured housing, compared with roughly 4,500,000 households in public housing or receiving federal rental vouchers.³ Approximately 94,000 new manufactured homes were shipped in 2020 after shipments peaked at nearly 600,000 in 1973 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020). Manufactured housing is typically half the price per square foot of site-built housing (exclusive of land; U.S. Census Bureau, 2021). Approximately 38% of U.S. manufactured housing units are in one of nearly 40,000 MHCs (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020).

Since mobile homes first became widely available during post–World War II housing shortages, MHCs have become a significant source of naturally occurring affordable housing (Wallis, 1991). Even so, planning and housing researchers have shown relatively little interest. Manufactured housing has been the subject of far fewer published articles in leading U.S.-focused planning and housing journals than other forms of affordable housing provision, including public housing, subsidized housing, and low-income housing tax credits, even though MHCs predate many such programs (Table 1).

Given the prevalence of manufactured housing, what explains this lack of research attention? We address five common criticisms of manufactured housing that contribute to its academic neglect. We have individually and collectively heard these criticisms in our exchanges with other planning researchers, students, manufactured housing practitioners, and other housing planners and practitioners. We review and respond to each of these criticisms, citing the literature where possible. We argue that these characterizations should not justify a lack of research and policy attention because they are either partly false or no more true of MHCs than other widely studied housing types. To the extent that some of these characterizations are accurate, we argue that they justify more—rather than less—attention from researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

Criticism 1: Manufactured Housing Is Substandard

The most common criticism we have heard is that manufactured housing units and MHCs are substandard (Apgar et al., 2002; Beamish et al., 2001; Durst & Sullivan, 2019). It is true that poor-quality construction, energy inefficiency, and other problems characterized older mobile homes (Wallis, 1991). Although deficiencies with older units can cause serious problems, the quality of manufactured housing increased markedly following the 1976 adoption of federal building codes for the sector. Because manufactured housing is manufactured in relatively controlled confines, it is easier to control and inspect for quality compared with site-built housing. Nonetheless, stigma against these housing and community types persists (Beamish et al., 2001).

Many problems with mobile and manufactured housing arise not because of deficiencies in the units themselves but because of the circumstances of their installation and infrastructure provision. For instance, at least 10% of manufactured housing units are not anchored to an adequate foundation (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019), leaving them vulnerable to high winds and flood waters (Pearson et al., 1996). Some MHCs have their own infrastructural systems, including roads, sewers, water, and power distribution, whereas other informal MHCs have virtually no community infrastructure (Mukhija & Mason, 2015). Infrastructure conditions vary widely because some states subject MHCs to regular inspections and certification while others regulate more loosely. Planners in many communities have amplified these challenges through zoning ordinances that exclude MHCs from residential zones but permit them in areas that are poorly serviced and more subject to industrial and environmental hazards (Baker et al., 2014; Dawkins & Koebel, 2009; Pierce et al., 2018; Sullivan et al., 2022).

Although older mobile home units and lax oversight of MHCs can lead to dangerous conditions, there are significant opportunities to address these problems through planning, design, and regulation. Systematic research is needed to determine which planning controls, design strategies, and regulatory regimes will most effectively improve conditions.

Criticism 2: Manufactured Housing Communities Have Exploitative Tenure Arrangements

The oft-repeated critique that MHC residents’ “halfway homeownership” makes them subject to exploitative financial and tenure conditions has also been well documented (Sullivan, 2014, p. 474; see also Desmond, 2016; Sullivan, 2018). The most common tenure regime in MHCs is a land lease, where residents own their home but rent land from a landlord who also owns the infrastructure and shared facilities. This arrangement is ripe for exploitation and abuse. Despite being labeled mobile homes, it is often prohibitively expensive or impossible to move these units, leaving residents with little recourse if landlords raise rents, allow conditions to deteriorate, or close a community (Desmond, 2016; Sullivan, 2018). In addition, most states do not categorize manufactured housing as real estate but as chattel (personal) property, giving buyers access to fewer lenders, shorter loan terms, and higher interest rates (Freddie Mac, 2021; National Consumer Law Center, 2010). As chattel property, manufactured housing often does not appreciate, rendering it institutionally incompatible with the dominant U.S. housing policy regime, which promotes ownership as a means of wealth accumulation (MacTavish et al., 2006). Chattel property lenders are not required to provide foreclosure warnings, and residents are often not eligible for federal or state disaster aid for the loss of their homes. For instance, the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act protected mortgage holders, but not chattel loan holders, from losing their homes due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Bourke & Siegel, 2020). Furthermore, Fannie Mae significantly reduced its lending for manufactured housing following the 2007 subprime housing market crash, exacerbating the shortage of affordable financing available to residents.⁴

Thus, it is undeniably true that millions of MHC residents suffer under exploitative and precarious tenure regimes. This precarity, which can be seen as an extreme version of the vulnerability felt by other renters, merits much greater academic and policy attention.

Criticism 3: Manufactured Housing Is Not Located in Urban Areas

Another common rationale we hear for dismissing MHCs is the perception that they are not relevant to urban planning. It is true that manufactured housing dominates rural low-income housing in many U.S. areas and that it is comparatively uncommon in the downtown cores of the global cities that planners notoriously overstudy (Robinson, 2013), part of a broader anti-rural bias in planning scholarship (Hibbard & Frank, 2021). Some academic studies on MHCs explicitly focus on MHCs’ rurality (MacTavish, 2007; MacTavish & Salamon, 2009; Salamon & MacTavish, 2017). However, 61% of all manufactured housing units are located within a metropolitan area, and nearly 8% are in central city locations (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). A recent study of MHCs in selected Sun Belt cities found they were most commonly located in moderate-density areas near central business districts (Sullivan et al., 2022). Given that labor and housing markets extend well beyond urban cores to incorporate entire regions (Katz, 2000), MHCs provide much needed affordable housing in the broader labor market sheds of many cities, even if they are less common in the densest areas. As such, MHCs are relevant to many issues at the heart of planning and housing research.

Criticism 4: Manufactured Housing Is Low Density

Another common perception is that MHCs are a low-density form of settlement, as planning scholar Ed Goetz noted in a recent Public Radio story (Poole, 2021). In fact, MHCs are frequently denser than surrounding neighborhoods with single-family housing. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Visualizing Density project included MHCs in Arizona and Florida with densities of approximately 15 units per acre, on par with multifamily housing–dominated areas in Denver (CO) and Cleveland (OH; Campoli & MacLean, 2007). MHCs in Sunnyvale (CA) regularly achieve gross densities between 8 and 10 units per acre, whereas surrounding neighborhoods with single-family housing have approximately 6 units per acre. In many jurisdictions, minimum lot size regulations and other zoning restrictions force MHCs into lower density configurations or prohibit them altogether (Dawkins et al., 2011; Sullivan et al., 2022).

Criticism 5: Manufactured Housing Communities Are Disconnected From Their Surroundings

Morphological critiques of MHCs often center on their discontinuous and fragmented street networks, which isolate MHCs from their surroundings and render them less walkable. Planning scholars describe them as having “few street connections to the outside” and as “frequently concealed by fences or dense landscaping” (Wheeler, 2008, p. 407). Although there may be good reasons for preferring a more connected street network, this is no reason to ignore or marginalize MHCs; many widely studied neighborhood types are similarly isolating. Cul-de-sacs, gated communities, and other discontinuous street patterns have been the norm for most postwar-era U.S. residential development (Southworth & Owens, 1993). For many residents of MHCs, like residents of other postwar subdivisions, disconnected street networks are considered an asset rather than a liability, curtailing car traffic and limiting access (Sullivan, 2018). Furthermore, landscape scholars have argued that the design of these communities may promote connection, rather than isolation, among residents (Jackson, 1994; Leach, 1999). Researchers and practitioners who regard the morphological isolation of MHCs as problematic could deploy research on retrofitting suburbia (Dunham-Jones & Williamson, 2008) to improve connectivity while preserving characteristics that residents enjoy.

Real and Emerging Risks: Housing Insecurity and Climate Vulnerability

Although MHCs have long been an overlooked part of the U.S. housing landscape, it is more important than ever that practitioners and researchers focus on these communities, because they are sites of both vulnerability and potential transformation with respect to two of the greatest planning and housing challenges of this time: financialization-driven housing precarity and climate change.

Housing Insecurity

MHCs’ continued affordability has come under threat as they are sold or redeveloped, and new communities are banned in many jurisdictions (Sullivan, 2018). MHCs were once overwhelmingly owned by small operators, who often lived on or near the property (Wallis, 1991). Conditions for residents have grown increasingly precarious with the consolidation of MHC ownership. Although reliable data are scarce, observers have reported increasing acquisitions, closures, and redevelopments, especially in tight housing markets (Petosa et al., 2020). In 2020, the two largest U.S. MHC owners were both publicly traded real estate investment trusts, which together owned more than 288,000 home lots, more than the city of Boston’s (MA) entire housing stock (Petosa et al., 2020). Private equity firms, pension funds, and foreign government sovereign wealth funds have all become major MHC investors. MHCs have become acquisition targets for the same reasons that make residents precarious: MHC residents have little recourse and few alternatives when owners reduce services or increase rents or fees (Sullivan, 2018).

Climate Vulnerability

Along with their tenure precarity, residents of MHCs are vulnerable to many environmental hazards, including those associated with climate change. MHCs’ physical vulnerability stems from the poor quality of older mobile homes and their siting in hazard-exposed areas like floodplains (Baker et al., 2014; Sullivan et al., 2022) and fire-prone wildland urban interface zones (Gabbe et al., 2020), making them highly vulnerable to extreme heat, droughts, floods, and high wind (Pearson et al., 1996; Peterson, 2021; Rumbach et al., 2020). Self-operated infrastructure systems, especially in older communities, were often not built to high standards and have been increasingly stressed by deferred maintenance and extreme events. Interviews with residents and technical assistance providers revealed a range of acute and chronic infrastructural stresses, including water system failures in drought-stressed communities in Vermont, Oregon, and California and drainage systems overwhelmed by heavy rains in Texas and New Hampshire (personal interviews, 2020).

The physical exposure and sensitivity of MHC households to environmental stresses are especially problematic because residents of manufactured housing are also more likely to face socioeconomic challenges that can make it harder for them to prepare for, respond to, and recover from hazard events. Among other factors, manufactured housing residents are more likely to have low incomes, have disabilities, be 65 years and older, and have lower educational attainment than residents of site-built homes (Table 2). All of these characteristics—along with the prevalence of manufactured housing—are commonly included in indexes of social vulnerability (Cutter et al., 2003; Flanagan et al., 2018).

Table 2 Comparing social vulnerability characteristics between residents of manufactured housing and all other housing types.

Category	Manufactured housing households (%)	All other households (%)
People with disabilities	32.8	20.2
% Below 100% poverty level	23.9	13.3
% High school education or less	82.3	52.7
People 65 and older	29.1	26.2

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2019.

Responding to Vulnerabilities: The Transformative Potential of ROCs

As MHC residents and advocates confront tenure and environmental precarity without significant attention from policymakers, planners, and researchers, the MHC sector has become a venue for organizational innovation. In some regions, threats to the continued existence and affordability of MHCs have motivated efforts to preserve MHCs through acquisition by municipalities, nonprofit organizations, and community land trusts (Ehrenfeucht, 2018; Launder, 2020). One especially promising model is resident ownership, wherein residents collectively buy the land and infrastructure on which their homes and lives depend. A recent Freddie Mac report estimated that there are approximately 1,000 ROCs nationwide (Freddie Mac Multifamily, 2019). ROCs can take many forms, from market-rate, age-restricted retirement subdivisions in Florida to agricultural worker housing cooperatives in California. ROC USA, the leading proponent of resident ownership, is a network of more than 280 limited equity ROCs housing more than 18,000 households, approximately 50% more than the 12,000 households that own homes in all of the 289 U.S. community land trusts (Axel-Lute, 2021; Ehlenz, 2018).

ROC USA has grown quickly from its origins as a program of the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund in the 1980s. The widespread adoption of their model has been facilitated by a network of regional nonprofit technical assistance providers that use local expertise to guide communities from pre-acquisition organizing and due diligence through at least the first 10 years of cooperative ownership and self-governance. In addition to overseeing technical assistance and training for cooperative leaders, ROC USA operates a community development finance institution, ROC Capital, which bundles private, public, and philanthropic funding to provide low-cost loans to communities to purchase the land and infrastructure under their homes and to undertake any necessary capital improvements. The ROC USA model of shared ownership and governance leverages community members’ knowledge, skills, and commitment to identify and address upgrading priorities (Lamb et al., 2022). As one measure of the model’s success, over more than 30 years, no ROC USA community has ever defaulted on their debt or reverted to private ownership.

Although ROC USA has been effective in preserving affordability and giving low- and moderate-income MHC residents more agency over their housing (French et al., 2008; Ward et al., 2006), it has garnered little attention from researchers and practitioners relative to more widely celebrated forms of shared equity housing like community land trusts. Table 3 illustrates this disparity with results of relevant keyword searches in September 2021 using the Web of Science database.

Table 3 Search results for ROC and non-ROC shared equity housing research (1980–2020).

Search terms	Web of Science search results
Terms related to shared equity housing
Community land trust	47
Limited equity cooperative	2
Housing cooperative	82
Shared equity housing	2
Total	133
Terms related to the ROC model
Resident-owned communities	0
Resident-owned park	0
Manufactured housing cooperative	1
Resident-owned manufactured	0
Total	1

Through a collaborative research project with ROC USA, we are investigating how the model shapes responses to environmental stresses, including those associated with climate change. Our early research (Lamb et al., 2022) has suggested that the ROC USA model of cooperative ownership and self-governance could enable transformative adaptation, expanding “who has the power to act” in the face of climate change threats to low-income communities (Romero-Lankao et al., 2018, p. 754). Our interviews revealed numerous examples of ROC USA residents working with other public and private actors to take climate action, reducing hazard vulnerability and carbon emissions. ROC USA co-ops from New Hampshire to Minnesota to Texas are investing in collective infrastructure like storm shelters and improved drainage to reduce climate vulnerability (personal interviews, 2020). ROCs are also investing in onsite and offsite renewable energy generation to reduce energy costs and improve reliability (personal interview, 2021). However, our research also revealed how shared governance and ownership can inhibit adaptation by restricting access to financing and complicating decision making. With adequate support from network partners and public entities, the ROC model holds promise for delivering transformative change for residents, enabling collective action for vulnerability reduction and decarbonization. The model may also hold insights that can be applied to other forms of affordable housing, including multifamily housing cooperatives (personal interview, 2020; Rinde, 2021).

Conclusion

MHCs deserve far more attention from researchers and practitioners because they represent a significant component of U.S. affordable housing stock. They serve a diverse population of households that faces significant challenges. MHCs have existed longer than other more widely studied segments of the affordable housing sector. Although MHCs may not conform to conventional aesthetic or cultural expectations of urbanism, they are often denser than surrounding residential fabrics and generally satisfy the needs and desires of their residents. To the extent that planners, designers, and researchers object to the morphological fragmentation of MHCs, the quality of manufactured housing and MHC infrastructures, or the exploitative nature of MHC tenure, these should be reasons for more research and policy engagement, not excuses for continued marginalization.

Though planning researchers and practitioners have not, to date, paid adequate attention to the plight and potentials of MHCs, the ROC USA model suggests that this often-ignored form of housing may hold underappreciated promise for transforming precarious renters into collective owners, thereby enabling self-determination in the face climate hazards and other threats. But to play a role in realizing that promise, planning scholarship must move past the biases that we suspect are at the root of the neglect of MHCs. With more sustained attention, planning researchers and practitioners could identify strategies whereby public, philanthropic, and nonprofit actors could encourage the expansion of models like ROC USA’s. Research could help overcome lingering challenges within ROCs and other shared equity housing, including limited access to capital and technical assistance for community adaptation and other upgrades and limited participation and social fragmentation in community governance.

If MHCs and ROCs received adequate research and appropriate technical, policy, and implementation support, these models could expand and serve as platforms for equitable climate action. Significant progress in cutting carbon emissions and reducing hazard vulnerability cannot be achieved solely at the scale of individual households. Paralysis in climate and affordable housing policy also makes clear that these challenges cannot be addressed wholly by large-scale public actors. With greater research and policy attention, ROCs, alongside other forms of shared equity housing, could simultaneously stabilize precarious low-income communities and create pathways for community-scaled and community-based climate action.

Research Support

The Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT supported this research.

Acknowledgments

We thank JAPA’s editorial team and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. We also thank Stephanie Silva and Sarah Atkinson for their research assistance.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zachary Lamb

ZACHARY LAMB ([email protected]) is an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

Linda Shi

LINDA SHI ([email protected]) is an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University.

Jason Spicer

JASON SPICER ([email protected]) is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto.

Notes

1 There is considerable variation in the terminology used to refer to mobile homes and manufactured housing. We use manufactured housing community as the preferred label for communities that are colloquially referred to as trailer park or mobile home park. Manufactured housing is used to refer to factory-built homes that meet the 1976 federal standards set forth by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The term manufactured home differentiates homes built to this HUD Code from mobile homes built before such national standards and from modular homes, which comply with state and local building codes.

2 There is no reliable public source of data on the location, ownership, and characteristics of U.S. MHCs, forcing researchers and others to assemble information from federal data on manufactured housing more generally as well as disparate data on MHCs from state governments and private-sector sources.

3 In 2019, the AHS reported that 906,000 households live in HUD-assisted public housing, 2,184,000 households received Housing Choice Vouchers, and 1,410,000 households lived in HUD-assisted private multifamily projects. AHS does not publish estimates of the number of mobile home households that receive HUD rental assistance, but it reports that approximately 37,000 of the 1,694,000 households living in rented mobile homes (2.2%) self-report receiving government rental subsidies of some kind. For rental households of all building types, the proportion self-reporting receiving government rental subsidy is 6.5%.

4 Recognizing this, Fannie Mae adopted a policy in January 2021 to renew its research and assistance for underserved markets like manufactured housing (Fannie Mae, 2021).