Building on the discussions and insights from the 2026 Innovations in Manufactured and Modular Homes (I’m HOME) Annual Conference in Detroit, this follow-up webinar will revisit the themes that generated the most interest among attendees: state-level progress on zoning and land use reform, the titling and financing changes needed to expand mortgage access, the preservation of existing manufactured housing communities, and the growing role of modular and other factory-built housing in state and local affordable housing strategies. The 2026 conference broadened the program beyond manufactured housing for the first time, and this webinar will highlight what that expansion revealed about where the field is heading.

Through a series of fireside-style conversations, leaders from across the I’m HOME Network will reflect on what they heard in Detroit and what comes next. Panelists will discuss how states are responding to rising demand and persistent regulatory barriers, what the new “State Policy Playbook for Manufactured Homes” means for legislative strategy in the coming session, and what practitioners took away from the conference visit to Detroit’s North Corktown neighborhood, where local partners are using factory-built housing to support affordability, revitalization, and long-term community stability. The webinar will also touch on findings from the companion convening on land contracts and alternative financing, which examined the credit gaps that push buyers of lower-cost homes outside the traditional mortgage market.

The webinar is designed to make the conference’s content available to the much larger audience that could not travel to Detroit, and to give attendees a structured opportunity to revisit the material and act on it. It will create space for both policy discussion and practical takeaways. It is intended for anyone working on or affected by manufactured and modular housing, including manufactured housing residents and homeowners, state and local policymakers, lenders, realtors, developers, nonprofit housing practitioners, researchers, and advocates working to improve housing access, stability, affordability, and sustainability.

Heirs property is created when a landowner dies without a will, meaning all their heirs hold the property collectively as “tenants in common.” Over the course of generations, this property becomes one with a “tangled title,” whereby the legal ownership becomes difficult to nearly impossible to prove, even if families have lived on the land their entire lives for generations.

In 2025, the Lincoln Institute commissioned three case studies on the intersection of heirs property and disaster preparedness. These case studies focused on how this unstable form of ownership makes residents vulnerable to disasters and has excluded them from relief programs, and what responses have been taken to include them. The three papers examine the lead-up and community-based strategies to work with heirs property owners in three different instances—one focusing on Louisiana after hurricane Katrina, one in an unincorporated peripheral “freedom colony” in Texas, and one comparing the different strategies taken in rural and urban Texas.

In this 90-minute webinar, each group will present their findings. A discussant from the Climigration Network will provide higher-level commentary and situate the papers in the larger context of disaster relief and preparedness.

Speakers

Ariadna Reyes-Sánchez, Assistant Professor, The University of Texas at Arlington
Malini Roy, Assistant Professor, The University of Texas at Arlington
Maria Nishat Tasnim, Graduate Research Assistant, Texas A&M University
Marla Nelson, Professor, University of New Orleans
Laura Tuggle, Executive Director, Southeast Louisiana Legal Services
Ifeyinwa Davis, Program Director, Louisiana Appleseed
Kelly Main, Founder and Executive director, Buy-In

More than 1.2 billion people currently live in informal settlements worldwide, and that number is projected to grow to three billion by 2050. Conventional responses—individualized titling and top-down upgrading programs—too often deliver public investment straight into the hands of speculators, displacing the very residents they were meant to help.

The International Center for Community Land Trusts, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) invite you to a conversation on the community land trust as a tool for transforming self-built informal settlements without displacing the people who live there. The session previews the upcoming policy brief, “Community Land Trusts: A Tool to Transform Informal Settlements to the Benefit of Resident Communities,” ahead of its publication. Drawing on the Caño Martín Peña CLT in Puerto Rico and emerging initiatives elsewhere in the Global South, this policy brief provides an overview of how CLTs can secure tenure and enable upgrading of informal settlements, and describes both the benefits to and challenges of implementation.

Speakers will bring legal, institutional, and on-the-ground perspectives to the conversation. The discussion is designed for public officials, CLT practitioners, community activists, and researchers working on land tenure and informal settlements around the world. The event will be conducted in English, with live captions available in 60+ languages to support accessibility.

Speakers

Enrique Silva, Chief Program Officer, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (US)
Francesca Lionetti, Associate Expert, Housing Rights, Diversity and Inclusion, UN-Habitat (Germany, Kenya)
María E. Hernández-Torrales, Attorney, Community Economic Development Law Clinic, University of Puerto Rico; founding member, Caño Martín Peña CLT (Puerto Rico)
Ricardo Carneiro, Architect and Researcher, Estúdio Periférico; co-leading the Cova de Moura CLT effort
Tarcyla Fidalgo, Lawyer; Favela CLT Project Coordinator, Catalytic Communities; Program Lead, Global South CLT Initiative, International Center for CLTs; lead author of the policy brief (Brazil)