Great post, thank you! It’s refreshing to read a calm, non-ad hominem correction of another person’s work. I subscribe to Slow Boring and hope this discussion continues.
Manufactured homes suffer from the same challenges as site-built homes, namely that the land acquisition costs are too high to allow easy access to the market.
In Washington, it’s difficult to put residential homes on greenfield sites due to the Growth Management Act that protects nature, resources, etc. No amount of permissive financing, easy access, or inducements to buy a manufactured home will change the fact that there is no land for you to site it.
Who cares if your home costs 50k, 100k, or 200k to build. If the lot costs $1M, then it’s all for nothing.
Sadly, where we cannot build out, we can also not build up.
Building any kind of house on vacant land requires the building of infrastructure (roads, sewer line extensions, stormwater management, etc.) That process is expensive and always made difficult by government. If a developer is going to go through all that work, they aren't going to do it for the cheapest possible homes. You need a more expensive home to justify a higher lot price to make the project worth the risk.
Also, minimum lot size and garage/off-street parking requirements are other regulations that work against the cost saving of trailers...if you can't increase density even with a smaller unit, and if you have to also provide a garage, there is little benefit to cheaper houses.
As a builder I have been saying it for years, we need more trailer homes. But left activists only want to talk about tiny homes, because they don't want to talk about kids and family.
Many manufactured homes, particularly in urban/suburban areas, are placed on rented land with short leases. That's why mortgages might be unavailable. These homeowners also risk being displaced if the land is sold. Being located on rented land isn't an inherent characteristic of manufactured homes, but, at least in the US outside rural areas, it's common practice.
Benjamin’s comment below is spot on, it’s all a function of land availability and land cost. The best way to reduce land costs (and to spread fixed development costs across a larger base of units or square footage) is to increase density per parcel. Which explains why manufactured housing is currently underutilized as a source of affordable housing in the path of growth: outside of mobile home parks, the product types offered by HUD factories today are geared towards low density single family housing.
HUD code was recently updated to address multi-unit (up to three) manufactured homes, but the glaring gap is that HUD code doesn’t cover two-story manufactured homes. There’s an Alternative Construction path but this adds significant costs, delay risks, and uncertainty to projects. As you can imagine, the venn diagram intersection of “density” and “single-story” development is very small, so HUD currently has limited appeal to both spec builders (~80% of homes) and infill homeowners. The exception to this is ADU’s which has provided a major boost to the HUD industry (see Villa Homes).
There are a couple other policy changes (current permissive zoning pertains to conventional single family not duplexes or townhomes, HUD steel chassis requirement increase floor to floor heights and/or require complex design/engineering) that could help. IMO a big reason isn't even policy, it's market dynamics. Existing manufactured housing companies aren't fully committed to this product type since it's so different from their bread and butter and have historically sold to consumers via dealers rather than to developers. Meanwhile, modular companies build two story all day long and are more than happy to take this business.
I would argue more for a scenario where houses are done on a large scale in situ. As others have mentioned, the lots and infrastructure are large parts of the cost and really, is it that much more efficient to build a cheapy framed house in a factory (and then causing traffic jams when shipping it, lol) than on site en masse? And I don't know why but manufactured homes always seem to look like crap. For lower cost we need massive projects on relatively inexpensive land. Daly City, CA comes to mind, yeah it was monotonous back in the day but it was a house with a yard and it didn't look blighted.
Learning curves. Between establishing logistical networks with fixed locations and doing the exact same thing over and over again a lot of efficiency can be found. There’s significantly more room for automation with factory construction than building in place, too.
But also, I look at Daly City and see what seems like super inefficient development so I’m not sure what’s being optimized for when you say they’re efficient. It would be great if that sort of SFH density were legal everywhere, but it’s like, *only* SFH construction
What do find about Daly City that is not so efficient --granted, I'm thinking of how it looked in the 70s, classic post WWII inexpensive tract housing.
We could open up the code to allow more dirt roads and habitation in pole barns too, but I think most of us value the prevailing standards, especially in town. Changing the name, the method of title and taxation, or the facade of a mobile home does not make it structurally similar to a traditional site-built home. The mobile home category is all about allowing a substandard (but decent) alternative to a small segment of the housing market. The wisdom of greatly expanding that segment is very questionable.
right. i've toured a lot of these homes because of the potential for building out on a rural lot that was family owned. they are garbage, mostly plastic and smelt like i would be suffering from inhaled VOCs for the first few years because everything that could be vinyl, was.
and they definitely aren't likely to be built to any kind of energy-saving standard for heating/cooling. quite the opposite, in fact.
that, plus the shady financing made it increasingly impossible to contemplate.
oh, my partner's father lived in a manufactured home from an earlier time. it was literally a styrofoam box built around 2x4s (you could have literally punctured the wall with a pumpkin carving knife). at the end of of its lifespan, it leaked so badly around the windows and built up moisture behind all of the wallpaper that it was a mold hazard. so if they want to go back to -those- kinds of standards, the quality would be even worse than those i looked at across 3 states. at that point, one might as well live in an rv.
The Texas House of Representatives passed a bill to allow manufactured housing in all single-family residential districts in the state and gave cities the right to require that the homes appraise out at or above the median value of the homes within 500 ft (https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/html/HB02970E.htm), but that bill died in the Texas Senate unfortunately.
That tells a story. Yes, the local Nimby element is likely the critical factor. Developers like to mandate standards to safeguard buyers interests. It's understandably a strong selling point. How many people get to be owner builders these days, on a block that enables them to start with three rooms and expand as required. It boils down to the extent of tolerance that is or is not mandated. The motivation for town planning schemes was all about excluding the undesirables. So, it's intolerance that is mandated rather than the other way round. Where nations like Singapore get to house better than 95% of the population, its in high rise with rents a proportion of incomes and a deliberate policy of accommodating all comers. They even go to the extent of making rents cheaper for the offspring who opt to live close to their parents. Same story in Vienna.
Great post, thank you! It’s refreshing to read a calm, non-ad hominem correction of another person’s work. I subscribe to Slow Boring and hope this discussion continues.
Manufactured homes suffer from the same challenges as site-built homes, namely that the land acquisition costs are too high to allow easy access to the market.
In Washington, it’s difficult to put residential homes on greenfield sites due to the Growth Management Act that protects nature, resources, etc. No amount of permissive financing, easy access, or inducements to buy a manufactured home will change the fact that there is no land for you to site it.
Who cares if your home costs 50k, 100k, or 200k to build. If the lot costs $1M, then it’s all for nothing.
Sadly, where we cannot build out, we can also not build up.
Building any kind of house on vacant land requires the building of infrastructure (roads, sewer line extensions, stormwater management, etc.) That process is expensive and always made difficult by government. If a developer is going to go through all that work, they aren't going to do it for the cheapest possible homes. You need a more expensive home to justify a higher lot price to make the project worth the risk.
Also, minimum lot size and garage/off-street parking requirements are other regulations that work against the cost saving of trailers...if you can't increase density even with a smaller unit, and if you have to also provide a garage, there is little benefit to cheaper houses.
d red ddfmf m Jim t r hi
As a builder I have been saying it for years, we need more trailer homes. But left activists only want to talk about tiny homes, because they don't want to talk about kids and family.
Many manufactured homes, particularly in urban/suburban areas, are placed on rented land with short leases. That's why mortgages might be unavailable. These homeowners also risk being displaced if the land is sold. Being located on rented land isn't an inherent characteristic of manufactured homes, but, at least in the US outside rural areas, it's common practice.
Benjamin’s comment below is spot on, it’s all a function of land availability and land cost. The best way to reduce land costs (and to spread fixed development costs across a larger base of units or square footage) is to increase density per parcel. Which explains why manufactured housing is currently underutilized as a source of affordable housing in the path of growth: outside of mobile home parks, the product types offered by HUD factories today are geared towards low density single family housing.
HUD code was recently updated to address multi-unit (up to three) manufactured homes, but the glaring gap is that HUD code doesn’t cover two-story manufactured homes. There’s an Alternative Construction path but this adds significant costs, delay risks, and uncertainty to projects. As you can imagine, the venn diagram intersection of “density” and “single-story” development is very small, so HUD currently has limited appeal to both spec builders (~80% of homes) and infill homeowners. The exception to this is ADU’s which has provided a major boost to the HUD industry (see Villa Homes).
There are a couple other policy changes (current permissive zoning pertains to conventional single family not duplexes or townhomes, HUD steel chassis requirement increase floor to floor heights and/or require complex design/engineering) that could help. IMO a big reason isn't even policy, it's market dynamics. Existing manufactured housing companies aren't fully committed to this product type since it's so different from their bread and butter and have historically sold to consumers via dealers rather than to developers. Meanwhile, modular companies build two story all day long and are more than happy to take this business.
Here’s an idea up here to watch. A catalogue of pre-approved designs that get special treatment https://globalnews.ca/news/10165452/strawberry-box-homes-canada-wartime-housing-strategy/
I would argue more for a scenario where houses are done on a large scale in situ. As others have mentioned, the lots and infrastructure are large parts of the cost and really, is it that much more efficient to build a cheapy framed house in a factory (and then causing traffic jams when shipping it, lol) than on site en masse? And I don't know why but manufactured homes always seem to look like crap. For lower cost we need massive projects on relatively inexpensive land. Daly City, CA comes to mind, yeah it was monotonous back in the day but it was a house with a yard and it didn't look blighted.
Learning curves. Between establishing logistical networks with fixed locations and doing the exact same thing over and over again a lot of efficiency can be found. There’s significantly more room for automation with factory construction than building in place, too.
But also, I look at Daly City and see what seems like super inefficient development so I’m not sure what’s being optimized for when you say they’re efficient. It would be great if that sort of SFH density were legal everywhere, but it’s like, *only* SFH construction
What do find about Daly City that is not so efficient --granted, I'm thinking of how it looked in the 70s, classic post WWII inexpensive tract housing.
Aren't these just subdivisions?
Yeah but with smaller efficient houses
We could open up the code to allow more dirt roads and habitation in pole barns too, but I think most of us value the prevailing standards, especially in town. Changing the name, the method of title and taxation, or the facade of a mobile home does not make it structurally similar to a traditional site-built home. The mobile home category is all about allowing a substandard (but decent) alternative to a small segment of the housing market. The wisdom of greatly expanding that segment is very questionable.
right. i've toured a lot of these homes because of the potential for building out on a rural lot that was family owned. they are garbage, mostly plastic and smelt like i would be suffering from inhaled VOCs for the first few years because everything that could be vinyl, was.
and they definitely aren't likely to be built to any kind of energy-saving standard for heating/cooling. quite the opposite, in fact.
that, plus the shady financing made it increasingly impossible to contemplate.
oh, my partner's father lived in a manufactured home from an earlier time. it was literally a styrofoam box built around 2x4s (you could have literally punctured the wall with a pumpkin carving knife). at the end of of its lifespan, it leaked so badly around the windows and built up moisture behind all of the wallpaper that it was a mold hazard. so if they want to go back to -those- kinds of standards, the quality would be even worse than those i looked at across 3 states. at that point, one might as well live in an rv.
One usually does not own the land in a trailer park so there is no real equity and
if the owner decides to sell !
Wow, a poorly researched article from Matty? Shocked I tell you, shocked!
Is the Arkansas spike from Katrina or other 2005 hurricane damage?
The Texas House of Representatives passed a bill to allow manufactured housing in all single-family residential districts in the state and gave cities the right to require that the homes appraise out at or above the median value of the homes within 500 ft (https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/html/HB02970E.htm), but that bill died in the Texas Senate unfortunately.
That tells a story. Yes, the local Nimby element is likely the critical factor. Developers like to mandate standards to safeguard buyers interests. It's understandably a strong selling point. How many people get to be owner builders these days, on a block that enables them to start with three rooms and expand as required. It boils down to the extent of tolerance that is or is not mandated. The motivation for town planning schemes was all about excluding the undesirables. So, it's intolerance that is mandated rather than the other way round. Where nations like Singapore get to house better than 95% of the population, its in high rise with rents a proportion of incomes and a deliberate policy of accommodating all comers. They even go to the extent of making rents cheaper for the offspring who opt to live close to their parents. Same story in Vienna.