Builders Tap Manufactured Homes to Increase Supply of Lower-Cost Housing

Across the country, the need to build more lower-cost single-family homes is growing. In many places, this demand could be filled by expanding the use of manufactured housing, which offers significant cost savings and quicker build times compared with similar sized site-built single-family homes. However, several barriers pose challenges to expanding the availability of these more modern types of mobile homes.

To provide insight on the challenges and effective solutions, The Pew Charitable Trusts commissioned a series of five case studies from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, featuring for-profit, nonprofit, and local government manufactured home developers. Key takeaways from the study, “Overcoming Barriers to Manufactured Housing: Promising Approaches From Five Case Studies,” include the importance of local zoning codes. Although some of the studied organizations chose to build only where construction of manufactured homes is already allowed, others informed local officials and residents about the many improvements made in recent years to manufactured home safety, quality, and appearance to help advance zoning restriction updates.

And in nearly all of the case studies, the homes built were on private land, owned by the homebuyer, and were titled as real estate like other single-family homes. As a result, the homes were eligible for mortgage financing, which can help keep buyers’ monthly costs low and provide robust consumer protections.

The Pew Charitable Trusts provided funding for this project, but Pew is not responsible for errors in this paper and does not necessarily endorse its findings or conclusions.