Old-timers in Detroit like to recall the 1950s and ’60s as a Golden Age of urban planning. Under Charles Blessing, the city’s charismatic head planner from 1953 to 1977, Detroit carried out a series of ambitious attempts to reshape its urban landscape. Sweeping aside a century’s worth of tenements and small commercial structures, it created the Mies van der Rohe–designed Lafayette Park residential development just east of downtown, a light industrial park west of downtown, and block after block of low-rise moderate-income housing on the north side. Edward Hustoles, a retired veteran planner of those years, recalls how Blessing enjoyed such status as Detroit’s visionary that over lunch at a nice restaurant he would sketch his plans all over the tablecloth; if a server complained, Blessing would roll it up and tell her to put it on his bill.

Times change. Blessing retired in the 1970s, and by then Detroit was mired in its long-agonizing slide into Rust Belt ruin. The twin scourges of deindustrialization and suburban sprawl, which hurt so many cities in the American heartland, hit Detroit particularly hard. Numerous factories, so modern when they were built in the early 20th century, looked obsolete by the 1950s and ’60s, and were mostly abandoned by the end of the 1980s. The new car-enabled culture of suburbia, aided and abetted by federal highway building and other measures, encouraged hundreds of thousands of residents to flee the city for Birmingham, Troy, and other outlying communities. The exodus was hastened by fraught race relations, which grew especially toxic after the 1967 civil disturbances. Without inhabitants, Detroit’s vast stock of small wood-frame worker housing moldered; arson, crack, metal stripping, blight, and other ills corroded entire neighborhoods, forcing the city to raze block after block of homes in the 1990s and 2000s—a trend accelerated by the 2007–2008 real estate crisis, which compounded a vicious cycle of property tax delinquency and foreclosure, decimating what remained of Detroit’s housing market. Today, the best estimates suggest that at least 24 square miles of Detroit’s 139-square-mile land area are empty, and another six to nine square miles have unoccupied buildings that need to come down. Add in municipal parks that the city no longer maintains and abandoned rights-of-way like old railroad lines, and 25 percent of Detroit—an area larger than Manhattan—is vacant.

By the 1990s, urban planning had become obsolescent as a focus and a guide. A series of mayors tended to latch onto whatever showcase projects came along—the much-maligned Renaissance Center in the 1970s, or casino gaming in the late 1990s. Detroit’s municipal planning department found a new role administering federal community development block grants, and, in recent years, the department had more accountants than planners. But in 2010, then-Mayor David Bing initiated a strategic attempt to address the problem of widespread vacancy and the burden it placed on municipal services and budgets. That effort culminated in 2013 with the publication of Detroit Future City, the 354-page comprehensive framework for how Detroit might strengthen and regrow its troubled neighborhoods and repurpose its empty lots and buildings over the coming decades. Advocating widespread “greening” strategies—including “productive landscapes” that would put vacant land to new use through reforestation, rainwater retention ponds, the installation of solar panels, and food production—Detroit Future City won praise as a visionary new way to think about older industrial cities and to include ordinary citizens in the conversation about their future. “In the annals of civic engagement and community planning, Detroit Future City is probably the most extensive community outreach and planning exercise that I’ve ever encountered,” said George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Origins and Essence

By 2010, three years before Detroit would file the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, the population had dwindled to 700,000 from its peak of 1.85 million in 1950. Then-Mayor David Bing needed to realign city services to account for the diminished tax base and thinning of the urban streetscape. His initial suggestion to reporters that he would move the few remaining inhabitants out of some of Detroit’s most abandoned “ghost” neighborhoods drew blistering comparisons to the urban renewal projects of the past and even hoots of “ethnic cleansing”; the idea was quickly shelved. Also that year, the mayor and top aides staged a series of community meetings called Detroit Works to elicit a dialogue with citizens about the need to rethink how the city should operate in the future. But residents had other ideas. The meetings quickly devolved into chaotic complaint sessions where hundreds of residents demanded better street lights, police protection, and other city services fast.

McCarthy, who was then with the Ford Foundation and a supporter of Detroit’s revitalization efforts, said leaders should have known better. “When you bring normal citizens into the planning process, they enter the exercise as if it’s a public meeting and the way to be heard is to shout the loudest,” he said. “If you’re sincere about civic engagement, you have to take the time to train citizens to be planners. You have to devote a significant amount of time and attention to get people to understand that planning is about making difficult decisions in a constrained environment.”

With funding from the Kresge Foundation and other sources, the city regrouped and hired teams of consultants, including nationally respected planning staffers such as Project Director Toni L. Griffin, professor and director of the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. Under Griffin’s leadership, they began to map out the document that would become Detroit Future City.

The group took pains to avoid the word “plan” when they presented it to the public. Unlike a conventional master plan, which basically creates a map of what uses will go where before the private sector comes in to fill it out with development, Detroit Future City is a strategic framework for thinking about different neighborhood types and how each might evolve given existing trends.

“We did not want to leave the city with static illustrative pictures of what their city could look like,” Griffin says. “There were already lots of those around. We wanted to leave the city with a tool that would enable people to manage change, because as you know Detroit is still very much in flux in terms of its governance, fiscal structures, city services, population loss, and ever-changing composition of land vacancy.”

The framework had to enable decision makers to act as that change was occurring over various periods of time. “It offers different decision-making structures that allow someone to say, if this is your condition today, here are the kinds of options you might think about to move that condition from A to B,” Griffin says. To simplify: If a neighborhood is showing a significant and growing level of vacancy but still retaining some useable housing and commercial stock, the vacant land there could be converted to food production or to a solar panel field to power local businesses. But a neighborhood with little vacancy and with much higher levels of density might plan infill development for its few vacant lots. Rather than suggesting that the corner of Woodward Avenue and 7 Mile Road ought to get a shopping center, the framework offers a series of examples of what might take place given certain neighborhood typologies. The mantra became “every neighborhood has a future, just not the same future.”

Detroit Future City’s greening strategies were particularly important and drew the most attention because of the huge amount of vacant land where development is not a realistic option and probably won’t be for many years to come; perhaps one-third of the entire city cries out for some new purpose and use. The more vacant spots on the map could be rendered productive by the installation of fields of energy-producing solar panels, reforestation, farming, or “blue infrastructure,” such as rainwater retention ponds, bioswales, and canals that provide water for agriculture and that redirect rainwater and snowmelt away from Detroit’s already overburdened combined sewer system. Almost all these uses presumably would be private endeavors but would require city permitting and perhaps other assistance, including zoning changes or partnerships with various philanthropic or nonprofit groups. “You need to have a greening strategy, so you can use this land in ways that, at a minimum, don’t drag down existing populated areas and, at a maximum, enhance the quality of life, economic productivity, and environmental quality for the people of Detroit,” says Alan Mallach, a Detroit Future City consultant, nonresident fellow of the Brookings Institution, and author of Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities, published by the Lincoln Institute.

But the plan also envisions significantly greater population densities in those areas of Detroit already undergoing a rebirth, such as the Greater Downtown area, where young professionals have sparked a recent residential boom and where companies led by Quicken Loans, which moved downtown in 2010, have filled up previously vacant office towers. It suggests that Detroit’s existing hospital and manufacturing corridors could and should see concentrated new investment to beef up job training opportunities and new residential and retail development in those nodes. Key employment districts could be linked by new public transit options, such as the M-1 Rail streetcar line now under construction along Woodward Avenue, the city’s main street, thanks to public-private financing. Construction began in mid-2014 on the $140-million, 3.3-mile line, which will connect downtown from Jefferson Avenue to the city’s New Center area, another hub of activity, running through the rapidly revitalizing Midtown district. The line is expected to be finished in late 2016. If voters approve a new property tax millage expected to be on the ballot in 2016, M-1 could be followed by a regionwide bus rapid transit system to be built out over the next several years.

Mallach describes Detroit Future City “as a reality check against what’s actually happening, against how you’re spending your money, where you’re making your investments, what you’re prioritizing, and so forth.”

“Detroit Future City offers a menu,” he adds. “It doesn’t say this site should become an urban farm; it lays out the options.”

Civic Engagement

Deciding what would happen where would be left to the political process—with neighbors, city leaders, and other stakeholders all taking part. Thus, public input would be critical to success.

In 2012, the Detroit Future City team hired Dan Pitera, a professor at the University of Detroit Mercy (UDM) School of Architecture, to design a new and better civic engagement strategy to harness and direct residents’ desire for change. Efforts ranged from informal chat sessions at a “roaming table,” designed by UDM architecture students and set up at various locations in town, to a series of meetings at community centers, where 100,000 residents engaged in discussions that informed the urban rehabilitation.

During this planning stage in 2012 and early 2013, a new walk-in office in the Eastern Market district allowed residents to meet staffers, see plans, take surveys, and the like. Those working at the office included staffers from UDM’s Detroit Collaborative Design Center, directed by Pitera, and the nonprofit Community Legal Resources. Pitera’s group also created a mobile phone app to encourage community involvement. And the team created 25 color posters keyed to city issues, such as vacant land or community gardens, for distribution by the thousands throughout the city.

During one Saturday morning meeting in 2012 at the Detroit Rescue Mission, some 50 residents got a peek at what various neighborhoods might become depending on current conditions and residents’ desires. Some of the attendees gave positive reviews. “The conversation is just what we need to get back to the real issues,” said Phillis Judkins, 65, of the North End district. And Larry Roberts, 70, who lives in Detroit’s Indian Village neighborhood, said the 2012 public meetings were more productive than the somewhat chaotic mass meetings Detroit Works held in the fall of 2010. “Today it looks like there are people with ideas that can move forward,” he said.

Some skepticism remained, of course, about how many of the good ideas would become policy in the cash-strapped city, and how many might ever be carried out. “If the city government buys into this plan and communicates to us what they’re going to do, I think it will work out all right,” Roberts said.

Under current Mayor Mike Duggan, who took office in 2014, a roster of neighborhood offices have opened to deal more closely with citizens and their concerns than previous administrations had done. The level of community involvement to date has been evidence that Detroiters have not given up on their neighborhoods, even in the hardest hit areas.

Rubber Hits the Road

Happily, concerns that Detroit Future City would sit on the shelf gathering dust like so many previous documents in Detroit seem unfounded. With Kresge’s financial backing and leadership, the Detroit Future City (DFC) Implementation Office was established as a nonprofit charged with realizing the plan’s visions and suggestions. Dan Kinkead, an architect who helped to write Detroit Future City, was appointed director of projects. The group now has a fixed location in Detroit’s New Center district and a staff of about 12, including staffers available through various fellowship programs underway in the city. Kenneth Cockrel, a former president of the Detroit City Council who briefly served as interim mayor after then-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick resigned in disgrace in 2008, was hired at the end of 2013 to be director of the implementation office.

In early 2015, the implementation office had multiple pilot projects underway in partnership with other organizations. These include:

Solar Fields. Working with Focus: HOPE, a nonprofit job training facility in the city, and a small start-up, the DFC team is planning to cover some 15 acres of vacant land with solar panels. Kinkead estimates that the field could produce five megawatts of energy—enough to power several hundred houses. Planners hope to start the project this year or next, but it was unclear how many people it might employ.

Rainwater Retention Ponds. On Detroit’s east side, the DFC staff is considering the creation of a series of rainwater retention ponds in a residential neighborhood to keep rainwater out of the sewer system. The neighborhood, known as Jefferson Village, had been targeted for new single-family housing some 15 years ago, but that project stalled for lack of funding, leaving dozens of vacant lots and little demand for them. So with funding from the local Erb Foundation, and consulting with the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department, the DFC team is targeting several dozen vacant lots for the treatment. They envision that nearby homeowners could see a rate reduction on their water bills, because the department will no longer have to build and maintain as much big-pipe infrastructure to clean up rainwater that mixes in with wastewater. If the effort proved successful, they would expand it citywide.

Roadside carbon buffers. With the nonprofit Greening of Detroit tree-planting organization, one of DFC’s recommendations—to plant trees as carbon buffers alongside major roads and highways—saw one of the city’s largest-ever tree-planting blitzes in late 2014 on Detroit’s west side near the Southfield Freeway, a major north-south connector. Volunteers planted some 300 trees in one day along a few blocks. When mature, they will absorb at least some of the carbon emissions from the freeway.

Trish Hubbell, a spokesperson for the Greening of Detroit, said that partnering with the DFC implementation team on such efforts raises the visibility of each project, which in turn helps with fundraising. And the DFC team brings a wealth of knowledge on land use issues to any effort.

“Their biggest value is that they have the framework, and so they help steer where things go,” Hubbell said. “The framework adds value to all the opportunities out there.”

The Urban Farming Controversy

One controversial land use the office has championed stems from a trend Detroit is already well-known for—urban agriculture. Over the past 15 years, Detroit has seen well over 1,000 small community gardens started, including such nationally recognized projects as Earthworks and D-Town Farm, each of which covers a few acres. But currently volunteers perform almost all the farming activity, and the food is consumed by neighbors, donated to food banks, or in a few cases sold at local farmers markets. Detroit has undertaken a lively debate in recent years over the possibility of expanding into large-scale for-profit agriculture. Projects like Hantz Farms and RecoveryPark have mapped ambitious plans to convert hundreds of acres to food production. But each effort remains relatively small scale at the moment, as the debate on the wisdom of large-scale farming continues.

Nevertheless, the DFC team seems committed to much greater food production inside the city, both on vacant land and in abandoned factories where hydroponic farming could take place. The DFC team, for example, is working with the RecoveryPark effort to plan a rainwater retention system to help water crops.

At the very least, farming inside the city could help some local food entrepreneurs grow their businesses, create some jobs, and strengthen the tax base, if only on a modest scale. Food production also helps knit communities together around a purposeful activity, raises nutrition awareness, and puts blighted vacant lots and factories to a productive new use. “Detroit has the opportunity to be the first globally food-secure city,” Kinkead said.

But city officials have yet to sign off on large-scale for-profit farming, fearing that nuisance problems including dust, noise, and odors, will get out of hand. Others question whether the tough economics of farming—back-breaking labor performed mostly by minimum-wage migrants—would ever produce the sort of revenue and jobs to justify the effort. McCarthy remains one of the skeptics. “I thought it was a bad idea to try to grow food,” he says. “The economics just aren’t there; the costs are prohibitive, given the fact that you don’t have to drive that far to get out into perfectly good farmland outside Detroit at one tenth the cost.” So the debate continues, with the DFC implementation team working toward greater use of Detroit’s vacant land for food production.

Consensus Building

Rather than ignoring Detroit Future City as the product of a previous administration, Mayor Duggan has publicly embraced it as his guide. His top aide for jobs and the economy refers to his well-worn copy of Detroit Future City as his “Bible” for reshaping the city.

Jean Redfield, CEO of NextEnergy, a Detroit nonprofit working toward a sustainable energy future for the city, keeps a copy of Detroit Future City on her desk. “I use it a lot to go back to specific language they use to talk about specific options,” she said. “I use some of the maps and statistics pretty regularly.” And NextEnergy teams up with the DFC implementation team in planning a variety of green-and-blue infrastructure projects. “Our paths cross pretty often,” she said. “Whenever there’s a Department of Energy or City of Detroit question or challenge around land use, energy infrastructure, street lighting, or solar projects, we’re often working side by side with the folks there.”

As mentioned, the implementation team acts more as a lead advisor to other agencies, such as Greening of Detroit or the city’s Water & Sewerage Department, than as a primary actor. DFC Implementation Director Kenneth Cockrel calls the team a “nongovernmental planning agency.” He explains, “We inform decision making, but we are not decisions makers. Ultimately, what’s in the framework is going to be implemented by the mayor and by city council if they so choose to buy into it. They’re the ones who are going to drive implementation.”

Continuing, Cockrel likens the implementation of Detroit Future City “to what happens when a book gets made into a movie. You don’t film the book word for word and page for page. Some stuff gets left out, other stuff winds up on screen. I think that’s ultimately probably going to be the approach that the Duggan administration will take.”

Like any new organization, the DFC team continues to refine its role and search for where it can contribute most. Kinkead agrees their role may best be captured in a paraphrase of the old BASF corporate slogan: the DFC team doesn’t do a lot of the innovative projects in Detroit; it just makes a lot of those projects better.

“We exist in a squishy world,” Kinkead says. “It’s a different kind of ballgame, but our ability to help others is how we do what we do.”

In early 2015, it seemed clear that many of the innovative ideas at the heart of Detroit Future City—greening strategies, energy production, trees as carbon buffers, new development targeted toward already dense districts—ideas that seemed far-fetched even in 2010, when then-Mayor Bing launched his Detroit Works effort, now approach mainstream status.

“Now, it’s not just the environmentalists or the climate change folk talking about carbon forests; it’s residents and the executive directors of community development corporations,” Griffin says. “Business leaders and philanthropists are talking about the importance of this. A broader spectrum of constituents talking about issues that aren’t necessarily central to their wheelhouse is a very important outcome of the work.”

Perhaps just as important is the widespread realization that Detroit needs to deliver municipal services in a different way, given the realities of the city’s financial woes and population loss. The city successfully emerged from bankruptcy in late 2014, but at best that gave Detroit some breathing room to begin to grow again. If and when growth resumes, the city has to guide it more smartly than in past periods of expansion, when development sprawled across the landscape in haphazard fashion.

The Road Ahead

One reason why the city and its people were ready for a document like Detroit Future City was the deep understanding that deindustrialization and suburban sprawl had led to Detroit’s problems. “Residents began to understand that they were effectively subsidizing the sprawl and disinvestment. They began to think about ways to change these systems to be more efficient,” Griffin says.

As this article was being prepared for publication, Detroit took another big step toward revitalizing its long-dormant planning activities. Mayor Duggan announced that he had recruited Maurice Cox—the highly regarded director of the Tulane City Center, a community-based design resource center for New Orleans, and associate dean for Community Engagement at the Tulane University School of Architecture—to serve as Detroit’s new director of planning. In New Orleans, Cox facilitates a wide range of partnerships among Tulane University, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, and the City of New Orleans. In Detroit, among other activities, he will help turn some of Detroit Future City’s general framework into specific planning recommendations.

If innovative planning is back in style, as it appears to be, it’s more decentralized, less focused on big projects, and more attuned to how conditions on the ground might demand different solutions in each neighborhood. And the number of voices heard in planning discussions is greater than ever before. Perhaps Detroit Future City’s final and most important contribution is that it has empowered neighborhoods and citizens as equal partners with high-level professional planners in deciding the future direction of the city.

Indeed, Detroit Future City launched a new age of planning, and it will look little or nothing like that of Blessing’s era. “Planning has certainly returned, but it’s fundamentally different from how it was 50 years ago,” says Kinkead. “In the 1950s and ’60s, the city’s broader planning objectives were often manifest from a single municipal government elite.”

“To move the city forward it takes everybody,” Kinkead says. “It’s not just Detroit Future City. It’s not just the government. It’s not just the business sector. It’s everybody working together.”

John Gallagher covers urban development issues for the Detroit Free Press. His books Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City and Revolution Detroit: Strategies for Urban Reinvention are available from Wayne State University Press.

References

Detroit Future City. 2012. Detroit Future City: 2012 Detroit Strategic Framework Plan. Detroit, MI: Inland Press.

Mallach, Alan and Lavea Brachman. 2013. Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Skidmore, Mark. 2014. “Will a Greenbelt Help to Shrink Detroit’s Wasteland?” Land Lines 26 (4): 8–17.

Liz Wood wanted to buy a house. It was 2006, she had been renting for A decade, and her monthly payments were getting high. She was 43 and steadily employed, earning $34,000 annually plus benefits as a family educator. She didn’t want anything fancy, just a place where she could “gather love and bring stability.” She would stay within her means.

Nonetheless, the math was tricky. Wood lives in Duvall, Washington, a town of roughly 7,500 in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. Steeped in lush forest, Duvall is about 30 miles from Seattle and a mere eight miles from the City of Redmond, the headquarters for Microsoft. The median income in Duvall is nearly twice that of the state of Washington, and homes in this area are expensive. In 2010, the median value of owner-occupied homes in Duvall was $373,500, compared to $262,100 for the state, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

With few options, Wood eventually decided on a used factory-built home (also known as manufactured housing) for $55,000 in Duvall Riverside Village, a four-acre community of 25 manufactured homes in the middle of downtown Duvall. “It’s amazing here,” she says. “I live on riverfront property, so when I walk out my door I see water, pine trees, and a walking trail that goes from my house to the next town. I wake up in the morning hearing birds. I know all my neighbors; I’m connected to my community. I’m a block from the police station. I feel safe.”

But it was still difficult. Wood owned her house, but not the land on which it sits. Instead, she rented the plot for $450 a month, plus water and utilities, as did the other residents of Duvall Riverside Village. As a result, Wood and her neighbors remained largely at the mercy of the property owner, their landlord, and forfeited much of the autonomy and security associated with more traditional home ownership models.

Their landlord prohibited garages, leaving residents limited storage options. He charged them $25 a month per additional car or adult beyond those registered at the time of move-in. He charged $5 a month for every pet and required dogs to be leashed at all times. There was a $5 monthly fee for every extra half-cord of firewood, which Wood needed to fuel her stove. Though he employed a groundskeeper, he didn’t install outdoor lights, nor did he maintain the community roads, which were pocked and cracked.

In 2012, Wood and her neighbors received a written notice that the owner was selling the land. Unlike many owners, who prefer to sell their properties to a developer, this landlord was open to selling to residents. He had agreed to host a meeting between the tenants, a real estate broker, and the Northwest Cooperative Development Center, a nonprofit that supports cooperatives. The parties discussed the possibility of establishing a nonprofit, resident-owned cooperative to purchase the property. In doing so, they would conserve the land for manufactured housing, continue living there as a community, and collectively manage it to guarantee a safe, affordable, high-quality experience.

The residents voted to go for it. The landlord had two demands. He wanted fair market value, and he wanted to complete the sale by the end of the year. It was already August. They had five months.

In addition to the collaboration with Northwest Cooperative Development Center, the residents also began working with ROC USA, a New Hampshire–based nonprofit organization that offers residents of manufactured housing communities a mix of technical assistance and affordable financing to purchase their rented land when it becomes available for sale. Since its establishment in 2008, ROC USA has successfully facilitated 80 of these transactions nationally and secured more than $175 million in financing for them.

ROC USA works with a network of eight regional affiliates, including the Northwest Cooperative Development Center. In Duvall, the nonprofits worked together with the residents to assess the economics of a possible deal and to confirm that the community was a good fit for resident ownership. Next, the organizations helped the residents to hire a third-party lawyer and establish their cooperative, which would operate as a democracy with residents elected into leadership positions by fellow residents. ROC USA assisted the residents to hire an independent engineer and conduct due diligence of the property; secure financing through ROC USA’s lending subsidiary, ROC USA Capital, to purchase the property and undertake critical repairs; and organize the real estate transfer.

On December 27 of that year, the newly formed cooperative bought the Duvall Riverside Village with $1.3 million in purchase financing from ROC USA Capital, granting Wood and her fellow home owners control over their living arrangements, and permanently preserving 25 affordable homes in a town where such housing stock is scarce.

The residents continue to pay $450 a month to rent the land, but now they vote to determine community rules, and use the rent to make improvements and to pay the community’s mortgage, taxes, and expenses.

“Now, you can have a garage if you want,” explains Wood, who is president of the Duvall residents’ cooperative and a ROC USA board member. “And we spent $35,000 to fix the roads. We don’t have to live in fear anymore, so people are willing to invest in their homes. We have annual meetings to vote in projects. We can lower the monthly rent if we are over-budgeting for things we don’t need. The bottom line is that we are in control of our own destiny.”

Upon completing the sale, ROC USA and the Northwest Cooperative Development Center have continued providing the residents with technical support to ensure smooth operations.

“If they had just lent us the money and said, ‘these are the guidelines, here’s what you need to do, have at it,’ we would have failed,” explains Wood. “But they are an ongoing resource. They help us with tough situations, or when we don’t know how to do something legally. The goal is for us to become independent and to be able to run our community like a business. Pay your bills, and your house can stay where it is. Period. Forever.”

Benefits

Across the United States, more than 18 million Americans live in factory-built homes, which represent 5 percent of the nation’s housing stock in metro areas, and 15 percent in rural communities. They range significantly in quality. Roughly 25 percent of today’s manufactured housing stock is the stereotyped, rickety trailers of the 1960s and early 1970s, produced before the federal government introduced quality controls in 1976. The remaining 75 percent complies with the federal standards, and includes charming, energy-efficient homes, indistinguishable to the untrained eye from their site-built counterparts. Though manufactured homes have long been cast aside as a housing choice of last resort, today’s models are robust, efficient, and inviting, with the potential to help alleviate the nation’s shortage of safe, affordable housing.

Modern manufactured homes cost approximately half as much as their site-built counterparts and can be built five times faster, making them a genuinely viable option for low-income consumers. The production process is less wasteful, and models that comply with the federal government’s Energy Star standards offer home owners meaningful energy savings. And they are durable. Whereas manufactured homes built prior to the 1976 regulations were made to be portable, like recreational vehicles, modern models are built with stronger materials and designed to be permanent. Today’s manufactured homes can sit on any foundation that would otherwise accommodate a site-built structure, creating the flexibility to use the housing in a wide range of geographies and environments.

“The manufactured housing stock is a critical component of the nation’s affordable housing,” says George McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “It easily outnumbers our subsidized stock two or three times in almost every market.”

Manufactured homes are cheaper to produce than site-built houses because of the manufacturing process. As Andrea Levere, president of the Corporation for Enterprise Development, writes in the Huffington Post, the “term ‘manufactured housing’ itself has less to do with quality and more to do with the production process, which is a derivative of Ford’s assembly lines. This model allows manufactured homes to be built in a more controlled work environment, translating into predictable costs, increased efficiencies, and reduced waste” (Levere 2013).

In 2013, a new, energy-efficient manufactured home cost $64,000, compared to $324,500 for a new, site-built one, according to the U.S. Census, though the price for the latter includes the land. Even after stripping out the land costs, manufactured homes are still significantly less expensive, averaging $44 per square foot, versus $94 per square foot for site-built homes. And they are unsubsidized, which is a boon given the extremely short supply of subsidized housing compared to demand. Currently, only one in four income-qualified families receives a housing subsidy according to the Bipartisan Policy Commission, leaving the remaining 75 percent in need of an affordable, unsubsidized alternative. By helping to fill that gap, manufactured housing can relieve some of the demand for subsidized housing that state and federal governments are struggling to supply in the face of shrinking budgets. “The majority of families who live in manufactured housing would qualify for subsidized housing, but instead they choose this less expensive and unsubsidized option,” says McCarthy.

The stock is also very versatile, argues McCarthy, who cites its role in housing people during the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. “Recovery workers got 17 manufactured homes on the ground in New Jersey within weeks of the hurricane—permanent homes for displaced renters, not the problematic ‘Katrina trailers.’ And they did it before most organizations even had a housing plan. This speaks to the efficiency and nimbleness of building manufactured housing. The production times are about 80 percent shorter than for site-built homes, making them the best housing option for disaster response.”

Nevertheless, manufactured housing often gets a bad rap, due largely to the widespread misperception that today’s models are the same as the earliest generations of mobile homes built prior to the introduction of quality control standards by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1976. Today, there are roughly 2 million of these pre-1976 homes; many are barely hanging together and house the nation’s most vulnerable populations, including the elderly and disabled. Though the pre-1976 stock is virtually unrelated to its present-day counterpart, these older, dilapidated dwellings dominate the general public perception of manufactured homes in the United States.

The housing stock’s reputation is further diminished by the vulnerabilities facing home owners who do not own the land on which they live. Roughly 3 million people live in one of the nation’s 50,000 manufactured housing communities, while another 3 million rent on private property. There are manufactured housing communities in every state in the country. Like Duvall Riverside Village, many of them are on prime real estate, and the landowners routinely receive purchase offers from developers.

Advocates working to improve the manufactured home ownership experience, and to promote the stock’s viability as affordable housing, are focusing on three critical areas of innovation: conserving mobile-home parks; replacing pre-1976 units with modern, energy-efficient homes; and increasing access to affordable financing for potential buyers, which is virtually unavailable in the current market and is imperative to building equity and preserving a home’s resale value.

Conserving Manufactured Housing Communities

The conversion of Duvall Riverside Village from a privately owned mobile home community to a resident-owned cooperative is not common. For every community available for purchase that is successfully preserved as affordable housing, there are many more that end up sold for redevelopment, displacing residents who may lack good alternatives.

“It’s not as simple as just moving the home,” says Ishbel Dickens, president of the National Manufactured Home Owners Association. “First, there’s the question of whether the home can even be moved. It may be too old or unstable to survive a move. And even if it can be moved, it’s expensive to do so, and very hard to find a space in another community. In most instances, when a park closes, the residents are probably going to lose the home and all their equity in it. In all likelihood, they will never own a home again. They’ll likely end up on a wait list for subsidized housing, or may even end up homeless.”

To some degree, it’s an accident of history that so many of today’s mobile home parks occupy plots of coveted real estate, says Paul Bradley, president of ROC USA. As he explains it, in the late 1950s and 1960s, Americans began to embrace transportable trailers and campers, in part because of a cultural shift toward outdoor recreation, and in part because post–World War II factories began producing them to utilize excess manufacturing capacity, making them widely available and affordable. As the units grew in popularity, they transitioned from temporary structures to permanent ones, and people began adding makeshift carports and sunrooms. At the time, urban planners accepted the evolution toward permanency. As they saw it, most of the trailers were on land that no one else was using in outer-circle developments. Why not let these campers stay for awhile, until the cities expanded to meet them, at which point the land would be redeveloped?

“These original communities were built with a plan to close them,” says Bradley. “Back then, no one contemplated the full implications of creating a housing stock for which home owners lacked control of the underlying land. No one anticipated that these communities would be full of low- and moderate-income home owners who spent their own money to buy these homes and had few alternatives. And that’s what we are still grappling with today. That lack of control of the land means that home owners live with a deep sense of insecurity and the feeling that it’s irrational to make investments in their properties because they won’t get it back. What’s the implication for home owners who cannot rationally argue for investing in their home? What does that mean for the housing stock? For neighborhoods?”

Short-sighted land use policies are not the only challenge to preserving manufactured housing communities. An equally onerous obstacle is the lack of legal protections afforded to residents. In 34 states and the District of Columbia, the landowner can sell the property without giving residents the opportunity to purchase it. In fact, in most states, the landowner doesn’t have to notify residents that the community is for sale; the landowner can wait until the property has been sold to inform residents of the transaction, suddenly leaving them in a tenuous position. Even the 16 states that require the owner of a manufactured housing community to provide residents advance notice of a sale do not necessarily afford tenants the necessary protections. “In most of the states with advance notice, there are so many limitations on the notice requirements that it is rarely of any use to residents,” says Carolyn Carter, director of advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center.

To better protect residents, advocates support legislative reforms to state laws and tax incentives for landowners who sell to residents. The most effective of these strategies are state laws requiring a landowner to give residents both advance notice of the sale—ideally 60 days—and the opportunity to purchase the property, argues Carter. According to her, there are six states with laws that “work on the ground and provide effective opportunities for residents to purchase their communities,” including New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Florida, Vermont, and Delaware. She says Oregon passed promising legislation in January 2015.

“In those states with effective notice and opportunity to purchase laws, resident ownership takes off,” Carter explains. Roughly 46 percent of the 80 communities that ROC USA supports are in either New Hampshire or Massachusetts—two small states with some of the nation’s strongest resident protections. There are an additional 89 resident-owned cooperatives in New Hampshire that predate ROC USA’s launch.

To understand the value of strong consumer laws for residents, consider the story of Ryder Woods, a 174-unit mobile home park in Milford, Connecticut, 11 miles south of New Haven, just off a major thoroughfare. Connecticut is one of 19 states that either offer tax incentives or provide residents “some” protections when a community is sold, but also contain “significant gaps,” according to Carter.

In 1998, Ryder Woods’ landowner sold the property to developers. He informed the residents via eviction notices, in violation of state laws requiring him both to give them advance notice of the pending sale and to provide them the right of first refusal to purchase the land. Ryder Woods had an active home owners association, and very quickly they organized protests and petitions and lobbied the state legislature to reverse the sale. Eventually, the local news picked up their story, at which point a Milford-based attorney volunteered her services to help them. As she dug into the case, she realized that the law was on the side of the residents and that the community needed more legal support than she alone could offer. She enlisted help from a friend and fellow attorney—a partner at a prominent, Hartford-based firm—who agreed to take the case pro bono and assigned it a team of attorneys. The case ended up going to trial, eventually making its way to the state’s highest court. Uninterested in the unfolding legal headache, the original buyer resold the property to a second developer.

Four years after the original sale, the courts ruled in favor of the residents. In an unprecedented deal, and as required as part of the settlement, the second developer purchased a new piece of land a mile from the original parcel and completely rebuilt the community there. The developer purchased 174 new mobile homes and sold them to the residents at significantly reduced prices with more favorable mortgage terms than any available in the conventional financing market. He built a community center and a pond, complete with swans. And, as required by their agreement, he provided the residents the opportunity to form a cooperative and buy the land, which they did in 2009 with $5.4 million in purchase financing from ROC USA Capital. They closed on their purchase in the offices of the Hartford firm, which had continued to volunteer its services to the residents through the sale’s completion. Today, there is a Walmart on the land that housed the original Ryder Woods community.

“Sometimes, when we look back, we think it was crazy. We chartered a bus, went to Hartford, spoke to the legislature, and just fought it. We stuck together and won against two big-time, billion-dollar developers,” explains Lynn Nugent, 68, a part-time merchandise associate at Sears, and one of the residents who helped organize the campaign, along with her husband, a retired locksmith. “Now I always say, ‘Somebody else used to own us, and now we own ourselves.’”

Improving Access to Quality, Affordable Manufactured Homes

Unlike the residents of Ryder Woods, many owners of manufactured homes struggle to secure a quality unit with affordable financing. Here again, legislation is a primary culprit. Under federal law, manufactured homes are considered personal property, like a car or a boat, opposed to the real property designation assigned to traditional homes. Consequently, buyers cannot access mortgage loans. Instead, financing is available in the form of personal “chattel” loans. More expensive than mortgage loans, they average an additional 50 to 500 basis points and provide fewer consumer protections. More than 70 percent of purchase loans for manufactured homes are these higher-cost loans, which are considered a proxy for subprime products.

“This second-tier status is one of the biggest limitations to increasing the stock of permanently affordable manufactured homes,” says McCarthy. “It makes financing the homes more challenging and expensive than it should be, and it diminishes the homes’ wealth-building potential because it reduces effective demand for existing units.”

While the dream fix would be to change federal titling laws, such revisions are not forthcoming. Instead, Next Step, a Kentucky-based nonprofit organization, has established “Manufactured Housing Done Right (MHDR).” This innovative strategy works to make high-quality, affordable manufactured homes—and financing—available to low- and moderate-income consumers through a combination of energy-efficient homes, home buyer education, and affordable financing. Here’s how it works.

First, Next Step gives low-income buyers access to high-quality manufactured homes. The organization created a portfolio of models that are both robust and affordable. Each Next Step home meets or exceeds Energy Star standards, reducing utility costs for the home owner and shrinking the environmental footprint. According to Next Step, testing has shown these homes to be 30 percent more efficient than a baseline code home and 10 to 15 percent more efficient than a baseline Energy Star home. On average, this results in $1,800 in energy savings each year for every pre-1976 mobile home replacement and $360 each year for every new home placement.

Additionally, Next Step homes are “value engineered to ensure affordability while upholding quality standards.” They are installed on permanent foundations, providing for greater structural support against wind and reducing settling issues. The homes contain high-quality flooring and insulation, which helps to increase durability and reduce energy costs. And because water is the number one problem for foundations, Next Step homes contain additional safeguards to protect against moisture.

Improving Access to Sustainable Financing

Next Step also makes sure the home buyers can secure sustainable, affordable financing. “One of the problems facing the industry is that the capital markets don’t participate in a big way,” explains Stacey Epperson, CEO of Next Step. “The secondary market is not there in any meaningful way, so there are very few lenders in this marketplace and very few options for buyers. Our solution is to prepare our borrowers for home ownership, and then bring them good loans.”

Next Step works with a mix of nonprofit and for-profit lenders, vetted by the organization, to provide safe, reasonably priced financing. In return, Next Step reduces the lenders’ risk. The homes are designed to meet the lenders’ requirements, and the home buyers receive comprehensive financial education so that they are equipped to succeed as home buyers. Consequently, Next Step home buyers not only secure a better initial mortgage, but also have the capacity to build equity and obtain a good resale price for the home should they decide to sell it one day.

Importantly, each Next Step home is placed on a permanent foundation in order to qualify the home owner for certain government-backed mortgage programs, which are less expensive than a chattel product. Next Step estimates it has saved its 173 home buyers approximately $16.1 million in interest payments.

“Right now, close to 75 percent of all financing for manufactured housing is going out as chattel. But 70 percent of new manufactured homes are going out on private land where, in many cases, the home could be put on a permanent foundation, and the owner could get a mortgage with a lower interest rate and a longer term,” says Epperson.

The MHDR model is innovative in part because it is scalable. Next Step trains and relies on a membership network of nonprofit organizations to implement the model in their respective communities. Next Step sells the homes to members at competitive prices, and then member organizations oversee the process of identifying and educating buyers, assisting them to secure the loan, and managing the installation.

“The way the industry works, there has never really been a way for a nonprofit to buy a manufactured home at wholesale prices. That’s what we’ve engineered, and that’s what makes these homes a lot more affordable than if the nonprofit or home owner tried to buy them on their own,” explains Kevin Clayton, president and CEO of Clayton Homes, one of the nation’s largest producers of manufactured housing, and one of Next Step’s long-time supporters.

“The Next Step program works because it sets people up for success,” says Clayton. “Next Step takes them through home ownership counseling, and supports home owners if they have a hardship down the road. They get to buy the house for a lot less than they otherwise could have, build equity in the home, and have a low monthly loan payment and energy costs.”

Cyndee Curtis, a Next Step home owner, agrees. Curtis was 27, single, and pregnant when she purchased a used, 1971 Fleetwood mobile home for $5,000 in 2001. She put it on the lot she owned just outside the town of Great Falls, Montana.

“I didn’t have money, I didn’t have a degree, and I didn’t have choices,” says Curtis. “The old steel septic tank was a ticking time bomb, with rust holes. The carpet was worn through, the linoleum underneath had burn spots on it, and the ceiling leaked where an addition had been added. Every year, I would buy construction books, go to Home Depot, and ask how to fix that leak. And every year I ended up there by myself, trying to fix it. There was mold on the doorway from that leak, and I had a newborn in there.”

In 2005, Curtis went back to school for two years, obtained her nursing degree, and began working as a licensed practical nurse, earning $28,500 a year. “I figured now I am earning a livable wage and can explore my options,” says the single mother of two. “I wanted something that my kids could grow up in and be proud of, and to make the most of owning the lot I lived on.”

But her credit was poor, and eventually she ended up at NeighborWorks Montana, a nonprofit Next Step Network member that told her about the Next Step program. Over the next two and a half years, Curtis worked with the staff of NeighborWorks Montana to repair her credit. With their assistance, she secured a mortgage and purchased a Next Step home for $102,000, which included not only the house but also the removal, disposal, and replacement of her old septic system. Because the Next Step home is on a permanent foundation that meets certain qualifications—and because of Curtis’s improved credit history, income, and geography—she qualified for a mortgage from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development program, which was significantly less expensive than the more common chattel products. Additionally, whereas Curtis’s previous mobile home was titled like a car, her Next Step home is deeded like a site-built house. Consequently, a future buyer will also be eligible to apply for a traditional mortgage.

Curtis says her Next Step home has provided her significant energy savings. “I have 400 square feet more now than I had previously. I went from having one bathroom to two. And still both my gas and power bills have been cut by about two-thirds.”

She continues. “My house is a thousand percent better than what I lived in before. If a person goes inside my house, they can’t tell it’s a manufactured home. It has nice doorways, nice walls that are textured. It looks like any new home you would want to live in.”

“Sometimes people think they have to suffer with poor housing conditions. I know how it is, and I want them to know that if you put in some hard work, you can make a difference for yourself and your family.”

Loren Berlin is a writer and communications consultant based in Greater Chicago.

References

Levere, Andrea. 2013. “Hurricane Sandy and the Merits of Manufactured Housing.” Huffington Post. January 8. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrea-levere/hurricane-sandy-manufactured-housing_b_2426797.html

Boulder, Colorado, has developed a national reputation for having dealt creatively with growth management issues. The city has developed a 27,000-acre greenbelt, a system for controlling the rate of population growth by limiting building permits, and a defined urban growth boundary managed in cooperation with Boulder County. Boulder’s approach to urban growth boundaries, called the service area concept, offers important lessons for controlling sprawl, preserving rural land uses outside the city, and extending urban services in a rational manner.

Located 27 miles northwest of Denver at the base of the Rocky Mountains, Boulder is a home-rule city of approximately 96,000 people. It is the Boulder County seat, the home of the University of Colorado, and a regional employment center with approximately 86,000 jobs. Its strong economy is founded on the university, federal laboratories, regional and local retail, and a dynamic industrial sector concentrated in the high tech industry and business services.

Colorado has no statewide, mandated planning program. Statutory and home-rule cities and counties are granted land use planning and regulatory powers directly by the state. The Denver Regional Council of Governments engages in general planning, clearinghouse, and federal funding allocation activities, but there is no real, effective regional planning effort. As a result, sprawling development, undifferentiated between cities and unincorporated areas of counties, is typical along most of Colorado’s Front Range.

In the decade of the 1950s, Boulder’s population grew from 25,000 to 37,000 and during the 1960s it grew by a whopping 29,000 to reach 66,000. Some initial efforts to manage this growth included the “Blue Line,” a citizen-initiated amendment to Boulder’s charter in 1959 that restricted the extension of city water service above an elevation of 5,750 feet. It was later extended by ordinance to sewer service. While a few exceptions have been granted at the ballot box, the effect of this measure was to limit the city from extending water service to properties along the mountain backdrop. Property owners can still develop in the county, but at much lower densities than is typical in the city and only with individual water and septic systems.

Another important growth management program began in 1967, when Boulder became the first city in the United States to pass a tax specifically dedicated to preserve open space. This open space system forms the outer extent of the Boulder Valley, a joint planning area between the city and county.

Boulder’s Service Area Concept

A concern that unwanted development was continuing to take place outside city limits in the county, sometimes with city water and sewer service, led to the implementation of Boulder’s urban growth boundary. In 1970 the city and county adopted a joint comprehensive plan that defined the intended geographic extent of city expansion into the plains. This plan was further refined in 1978 to limit the city from extending water and sewer services outside city service area boundaries and to limit the county from approving new subdivisions that would need “urban” levels of services and facilities.

What specifically does the service area boundary do? It defines that part of the Boulder Valley planning area where the City of Boulder either already provides a full range of urban services to annexed properties or will provide services upon annexation. Land outside the service area boundary remains in the county at rural densities until the city and county jointly agree to bring the property into the service area. Land can also be “moved” out of the service area.

The 1978 plan, thus, protected the city against development just outside its boundaries that would put demands on city services without the ability to collect taxes to finance those services. It was also aimed at controlling sprawl, protecting sensitive environmental areas and rural land uses, and planning, financing and providing urban services in a more rational way. By adopting the plan through an intergovernmental agreement, both the city and county gained better control over urban development and service provision, while accomplishing many other conservation objectives. This approach owes much to the phased growth control ordinance pioneered in 1969 by the Township of Ramapo, New York.

What Are the Benefits?

• The service area concept creates an identifiable urban/rural edge. Unlike many cities that have either sprawled into the countryside or facilitated leapfrog development, Boulder has created a real edge between urban and rural development.
• It provides for the rational extension of urban services. The definition of areas where services are to be provided (along with initial designations of land use) allows a direct link between land use planning and infrastructure planning. Parks, recreation, police, fire, transportation, water, sewer and flood control service providers can develop their master plans knowing where services are to be extended, over what time frame, and for what types of land uses.
• It helps preserve rural lands outside the city. Boulder’s service area policy has sent a clear signal to the land markets that land outside of Boulder’s service area is not likely to be urbanized in the near future. This has lessened land speculation for urban development purposes and facilitated the acquisition of open space.
• It helps focus development within the city. Through redevelopment of underutilized areas and infill development, the city has been able to capitalize on existing public investments in infrastructure.
• It eliminates competition from the county for retail development and the loss of associated tax revenues.
• It provides both flexibility and certainty to the planning process. As the community experiences change over time, land can be added to or deleted from the service area, and property owners inside and outside the service area can act accordingly.

What Are the Pitfalls?

• Boulder’s region encompasses the whole county. Therefore, the city’s surging job growth and limitations on residential growth have had a significant impact on housing demand in adjoining communities. The most striking example is the nearby town of Superior. In 1990 the population of Superior was 255; in 1996 it was 3,377. It has practically no jobs and no sales tax base. This regional imbalance between jobs and housing has created tremendous problems with traffic congestion, lack of affordable housing and school facility needs.
• Getting a hold on sprawl is only half the equation. What happens within the urban service area is the other. In Boulder’s initial planning efforts, there was a clear expression of a preference for infill and redevelopment over sprawl. Since there is no requirement that a certain amount of land be contained within its service area (such as the 20-year required land supply within Oregon’s urban growth boundaries), Boulder does not have to make a trade-off between expansion versus infill and redevelopment. However, it is increasingly difficult to convince specific neighborhoods and the community as a whole that additional density is in their best interests. The community can choose to not expand the service area, maintain current densities and simply not grow.

Is that good or bad? On the good side, it has allowed Boulder to determine its own ideal city size, with consideration of how much congestion is tolerable, what sized city leads to a high quality of life, and what is sustainable over time. On the bad size, it holds Boulder back from capturing some of the benefits that additional development could bring, such as more affordable housing and less dependence on the automobile by building mixed use, transit-oriented neighborhood centers.

There is no real ending to this story. Land use planning is a major fixation for Boulder, and these issues are continuously analyzed, discussed, and often hotly debated. Nevertheless, Boulder has maintained a central vision of a compact city with a clear identity in the midst of a rural area. The growth management techniques used in Boulder may vary from those used by other cities, and they may be changed from time to time to meet local conditions, but the vision has remained intact.

Peter Pollock, AICP, is the director of the Community Planning Division for the City of Boulder, Colorado. This year he is a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute. This article is based in part on his presentation of the Fourth Annual David R. Fullmer Lecture, “Tools and Techniques for Managing Growth in the Boulder Region,” at the Institute in October 1997.