Manufactured housing reform
Housers started as a blog about the reform of manufactured housing.
A nice home in a Woodland, California land-lease park.
Non-profits have done a lot to develop and advocate for affordable housing. For the most part, this does not include land-lease parks. That is a missed opportunity, because manufactured housing is the largest source of affordable housing in the country. In many rural areas, it accounts for the majority of home starts. There are plenty of reasons for that reluctance. Not the least of these are real and percieved notions about mobile homes. The financing can be bad, the industry has been forced to adopt codes to improve building quality, and many parks lack good infrastructure. Residents rarely enjoy the same consumer protections afforded to residents living in subdivisions of stick-built housing, particularly if their homes not classified as real property.
Children play in a mobile home park near Sanford, North Carolina.
Today, a number of non-profits have developed solutions for these issues. The challenge right now is to bring them to scale. The finance issues are being addressed by a few credit unions. The Opportunity Finance Network is developing ideas to enhance liquidity for lenders.
Co-operatives have become very successful in some very different contexts. That’s compelling, because it is a truth about real estate that everything is local. Co-ops work in places as diverse as coastal California, the outskirts of Reno, Nevada, the woods of New Hampshire, or among retirees in Florida.
Non-profits can successfully own parks, too. The State of Vermont has built out its preservation of affordable housing stock through partnerships with many local non-profits. Those groups acts as property managers and developers. The state provides some subsidies and technical assistance. In North Carolina, CRA-NC purchased a mobile home park in Yancey County (Burnsville) that has provided secure housing for about 12 families.
My book, This Is My Home (Carolina Academic Press, 2007) covers a lot of these issues in more depth. I encourage you to find a copy at the library, or you can buy it here.
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[...] residents.” (and one-third of all housing starts). “They are on the largest source of non-subsidized affordable housing in the state,” he [...]
[...] homes house 18 percent of the North Carolina residents. They are on the largest source of non-subsidized affordable housing in the state,” he added. These days, the sector makes one-third of all housing starts in [...]
The Progressive Pulse – Fisher Redefines North Carolina’s Housing Mission said this on April 9, 2009 at 1:08 pm |