En ocasiones, se considera que la zonificación es un elemento atemporal de las políticas de suelo y la planificación. Y lo es. La zonificación se originó en Asia hace más de tres milenios. En aquella época, se usaba para designar los usos del suelo más allá de las murallas de las ciudades o para separar a las personas por castas. La práctica se adoptó más recientemente en los Estados Unidos con fines similares. En el s. XXI, es uno de los mayores impedimentos para la sostenibilidad de las ciudades estadounidenses.

Hace varios años que expreso mi opinión sobre el control hiperlocal del suelo. Hace una década, en un panel con Nic Retsinas, entonces director del Joint Center for Housing Studies de Harvard, opiné que el gobierno local y los controles del uso del suelo eran “dinosaurios” que hacían casi imposible coordinar la planificación del transporte regional y los esfuerzos en materia de vivienda asequible. Nic nos recordó a mí y a los asistentes que había fuerzas políticas y económicas poderosas que se interponían con firmeza en el camino hacia la reforma de las políticas de suelo. También señaló que los dinosaurios vivieron millones de años antes de extinguirse, y que se extinguieron debido a la colisión de un asteroide con la Tierra, no a causa de la selección natural.

Pero ahora, el mundo de las políticas de suelo presenta algo casi tan raro como un asteroide que cambiará el planeta: el acuerdo bipartidista. Numerosos estados azules, rojos y púrpuras aprobaron leyes para impedir la zonificación local y así avanzar en objetivos políticos esenciales, o están contemplando la posibilidad de hacerlo. ¿Por qué se dio este cambio repentino? Porque muchos gestores de políticas ahora entienden que la crisis nacional de la vivienda asequible no puede abordarse sin cambios estructurales en las reglas. Otros gestores de políticas saben que no podemos abordar una de las manifestaciones más negativas de la zonificación (la segregación espacial por raza y clase) sin una acción afirmativa agresiva.

Si bien hay un acuerdo bipartidista sobre la necesidad de una reforma, las motivaciones de los gestores de políticas son muy diferentes. Los partidarios de la derecha argumentan que la crisis de la vivienda es producto del exceso de regulaciones que ahogan la producción de viviendas. Estos críticos creen que la reforma de la zonificación desatará fuerzas del mercado que harán frente a la crisis de la vivienda y acelerarán la producción de unidades nuevas. Los partidarios de la izquierda argumentan que no podemos construir viviendas asequibles en los lugares que más lo necesitan, debido a las políticas de suelo que excluyeron a las personas por motivos de raza e ingresos durante generaciones, como el tamaño mínimo de las parcelas y la prohibición de las viviendas multifamiliares. Según ellos, la reforma de la zonificación posibilitará la construcción de viviendas asequibles en lugares que presentan “grandes oportunidades”, con buenas escuelas y trabajos decentes.

El poder del Estado para impedir la zonificación local no es nuevo. En 1969, Massachusetts aprobó el Capítulo 40B, una medida que le permite al Estado anular la zonificación local y aprobar desarrollos multifamiliares de ingresos mixtos en jurisdicciones con pocas viviendas asequibles. Aunque contribuyó a fomentar el desarrollo de viviendas asequibles en algunos suburbios adinerados, no supuso un cambio significativo y pocos estados se plantearon seguir su ejemplo, hasta hace muy poco.

Ahora, unos diez estados están dispuestos a impedir la zonificación local a fin de permitir el desarrollo de múltiples unidades de vivienda en lotes que actualmente están zonificados para casas unifamiliares. Por ejemplo, en Connecticut, Nebraska, Utah, Oregón, Maryland, California y Washington, se permite añadir unidades accesorias (ADU, por su sigla en inglés) a los lotes unifamiliares; en Virginia, Utah, Nebraska, Washington y Maryland, se permite la construcción de “viviendas intermedias”, es decir, casas adosadas para entre dos y cuatro familias, en lotes destinados a viviendas unifamiliares; y en Oregón, California, Virginia, Maine y Washington, se impide por completo que los gobiernos locales prohíban la construcción de viviendas multifamiliares en parcelas unifamiliares. Recientemente, Massachusetts y California también ordenaron la recalificación en comunidades con mayor acceso a servicios de transporte. Está claro que el control local sobre el uso del suelo ya no es algo sacrosanto.

Si bien la zonificación es una práctica milenaria, tiene menos de un siglo en la mayor parte de los Estados Unidos. Los estados comenzaron a otorgarles a los municipios el poder de definir el uso del suelo en la década de 1920, en función de la Ley de Habilitación de Zonificación Estatal Estándar dictada por el Departamento de Comercio en 1923. Pero los estados también pueden dar marcha atrás una vez que otorgan derechos. A veces, resulta necesario que los niveles más altos de gobierno pasen por alto las decisiones de los niveles más bajos, a fin de fomentar el bienestar general o abordar cuestiones externas negativas que son producto de acciones no coordinadas de estos niveles más bajos de gobierno. Muchas veces, los esfuerzos estatales para desestimar a los gobiernos locales no son bienintencionados; por ejemplo, cuando los gestores de políticas estatales restringen los impuestos a la propiedad inmobiliaria para congraciarse con los votantes. En el caso de la zonificación, la necesidad de que el estado actúe está claramente justificada.

Deberíamos celebrar el hecho de que estamos yendo en la dirección correcta y que se está generando la voluntad política para abordar un desafío que, hasta hace poco, se consideraba imposible. Pero aún nos queda mucho por aprender sobre la zonificación. Cada estado, y en muchos casos cada jurisdicción dentro de él, desarrolló sus propias convenciones de zonificación, lo que hace que sea muy difícil comparar las prácticas. También hace que sea casi imposible comprender las implicaciones de las decisiones de zonificación sobre el valor del suelo y los patrones de desarrollo, o cómo la reforma de la zonificación podría abordar desafíos grandes, como la crisis de la vivienda, la desigualdad espacial o la expansión urbana descontrolada. Esto también está cambiando.

El año pasado, un pequeño equipo de visionarios en la Universidad Cornell, liderados por la profesora Sara Bronin, crearon un mapa de zonificación para el estado de Connecticut. Mediante hojas de cálculo, mapas y sistemas de información geográfica, el equipo documentó de manera increíblemente detallada las prácticas de zonificación de 180 jurisdicciones con 2.622 distritos de zonificación. Asombrosamente, esto requirió la revisión de más de 30.000 páginas de texto en las que se describían las prácticas de zonificación de un solo estado.

Esta tarea hercúlea aparentemente no fue un desafío lo suficientemente grande para este intrépido grupo de investigadores. Recientemente, el equipo de Cornell emprendió un esfuerzo para crear un Mapa de zonificación nacional. Ahora, con una metodología probada en el campo tras la creación del Mapa de zonificación de Connecticut, se propusieron recopilar, con ayuda del público, datos de zonificación del resto de país mediante los mismos métodos. Hasta ahora, participan equipos autoorganizados de 12 estados. Cuando logren crear el mapa nacional (y el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo hará todo lo posible para que esto suceda), comenzará una nueva era para los académicos de políticas de suelo. Los debates sobre los costos, los beneficios y las consecuencias de la reforma de la zonificación tendrán sustento en datos reales.

La reforma de la zonificación por sí sola no es suficiente para resolver la crisis nacional de la vivienda, pero es necesaria. Es importante que contemos con más información sobre las prácticas de zonificación actuales y los posibles beneficios de las prácticas de zonificación mejoradas para abordar los problemas generados durante décadas de malas prácticas. Un siglo de control local, descentralizado y aislado del suelo produjo niveles inaceptables de segregación racial y económica, una expansión urbana descontrolada que contribuyó a la crisis climática y una crisis de vivienda asequible casi inexpugnable. Mediante la alineación sin precedentes de la voluntad política con las herramientas y conocimientos nuevos, las soluciones posibles a esta triple amenaza están más cerca que nunca. 

Crédito de la imagen: Mapa de Zonificación Nacional

Despite the engaging warmth in his voice, Jim Bennett is not what you’d call a people person. “I’m basically asocial, even though I worked retail—or maybe because I worked retail for so long,” he quips. It’s late fall when we speak, so he’s bracing for the chaotic social cyclone that is a big family Thanksgiving; his wife, Kathryn, is decidedly more enthusiastic about hosting everyone for dinner.

The couple certainly has room to entertain in the home they bought three years ago. The open kitchen and dining area is roughly 13 feet by 30 feet, and easily fits a pair of full-size tables. “We have 16 to 20 people over for Thanksgiving, and it’s not crowded,” Bennett says. What’s remarkable is that all that space—the big, blank canvas upon which the Bennetts plan to paint their golden years—was created on a factory floor, trucked up the highway, and now sits in a 55-and-over manufactured home community called Woodland Estates, about 50 miles northwest of Boston. With its open layout, spacious primary bedroom, office space, and two bathrooms, one with a roll-in shower, theirs is not the “mobile home” of yore.

Yet it was mobility, of a different sort, that inspired the couple to design and purchase the house. Bennett, 64, has been living with multiple sclerosis for over 20 years, and knows that he’s likely to face increasing difficulty getting around. “We were living in a 100-year-old, two-story home,” he says, and they needed a more practical setup.

Manufactured homes are perfectly suited to single-level living, almost by definition. And at Woodland Estates, the new homes are built with accessibility in mind. The Bennetts looked at some accessible apartments, but the rents were higher than the monthly installments they would end up paying on their home loan. “It just made so much sense in the long run with what I might have coming at me,” Bennett says—and he acknowledges that he’s even beginning to enjoy the sense of community he and his wife have found in their new neighborhood.

Increasingly, the Bennetts have company—and not just of the social variety. Homebuyers, local officials, and even the White House are coming to the same conclusion they did: manufactured housing can make a lot of sense, for a lot of people, and in a lot of places.

When it comes to manufactured housing, people tend to dwell on the “manufactured” part. That modest modifier carries with it a lot of cultural cargo and historical stigma. But as the home affordability crisis worsens, spreading from coastal cities to middle America, proponents of the industry say we ought to be focused on the second half of the phrase—because manufactured housing is, well, housing.

While outdated misperceptions of manufactured homes linger in the popular imagination—in the form of images of hurricane-battered mobile homes or poorly maintained trailer parks—the reality is that most modern manufactured homes, built to strict federal standards that supersede local building codes, are energy efficient, made of high-quality materials, and designed to be affordable. Although many are placed in dedicated communities like Woodland Estates, about half are on privately owned land, from rural areas to suburban subdivisions.

“We see manufactured housing as an important component to addressing the larger U.S. affordable housing crisis,” says Jim Gray, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

That’s one reason the Lincoln Institute now convenes the Innovations in Manufactured Homes (I’m HOME) Network, which for 20 years has been working with nonprofits, the private sector, and government agencies “to solve problems that are keeping manufactured housing from reaching its potential in the market,” says Gray, who led the Duty to Serve program at the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) before joining the Lincoln Institute.

Some 22 million Americans, most of whom earn less than $40,000 a year, already live in manufactured homes, making them the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the country. The Housing Supply Action Plan released by the White House in May mentions manufactured housing several times, identifying it as one of a few housing types that “directly meet identified local needs . . . [and are] not sufficiently provided by the market.”

It’s almost literally an off-the-shelf solution, one that can provide safe, sustainable housing for millions of Americans and help combat our affordable housing crisis.

An Urgent Need for Affordable Housing

The United States does not have enough affordable housing for everyone who needs it. And that’s partly due to “severe underbuilding” of smaller, entry-level homes, the kind that would appeal to downsizing retirees or first-time homebuyers.

From 1976 to 1979, as baby boomers were entering their twenties and thirties, the construction of entry-level, single-family houses averaged 418,000 a year, and represented more than a third of all new homes built, according to a report by government-sponsored mortgage entity Freddie Mac. In the 2010s, as a similarly sized generational cohort of millennials entered their homebuying years, U.S. builders averaged just 55,000 starter homes per year, and their share of the new construction market fell to a 50-year low of around 7 percent.

That’s a market need that manufactured housing is well positioned to fill. New site-built homes tend to be quite large, averaging over 2,400 square feet for the past decade, but the average manufactured home is under 1,500 square feet, according to U.S. Census data.

That smaller size, coupled with lower production costs, helps manufactured homes deliver a one-two punch on pricing, says Rachel Siegel, senior officer on the home financing research team at the Pew Charitable Trusts. “Manufactured housing is a lot less expensive per square foot than a site-built home,” Siegel says. “So you have two benefits there in terms of affordability.”

Stacey Epperson, founder and chief executive of Next Step—a nonprofit member of the I’m HOME Network that helps families purchase high-quality, Energy Star–rated manufactured homes—says its homes can cost 20 percent less to build, per square foot, than site-built counterparts. (Editor’s note: Lincoln Institute CEO George W. McCarthy is a member of the Next Step board.)

These homes are typically multi-section homes with a site-built look, Epperson says; when you factor in the array of sizes and styles available, the savings can be even greater. According to the Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI 2022), factory-built homes cost an average of $72 per square foot industrywide, compared to $143 per square foot for site-built homes.

Some of the reasons for the savings are obvious—there are no weather delays inside a factory, for example, so labor, materials, and carrying costs are all more predictable. Efficiencies of scale bring down supply costs, too. “If I’m the largest manufacturer, Clayton Homes, building 25,000 to 30,000 homes a year,” Epperson says, “my purchasing power is far more than the guy in the pickup truck building 100 homes a year.”

And there are other savings when it comes to materials. Compared to the dumpster full of wood trimmings and drywall scraps left over from a typical site-built home, building a house in a factory generates almost no waste. Even conscientious homebuilders squander a staggering amount of resources during construction: a new 1,600-square-foot home can generate up to 6,720 pounds of construction waste and still earn green building credits toward LEED certification. Meanwhile, Epperson says, “the waste on a Next Step home can fit into a single trash can.” That’s good for the environment and the homebuyer, who doesn’t have to pay for all those unused materials.

At a time when Americans need housing relief fast, manufactured homes also offer a speed advantage. Between the lack of weather disruptions, the ability to extend the workday through rotating shifts, and the streamlined designs and federal standards—which were put in place by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1976 and revised in the 1990s—homebuilding goes faster in a factory: once production is underway, a manufactured house can be completed in just three weeks. While a home is being assembled on the factory floor, on-site crews can do things like grade the lot for the house and lay utility connections, further hastening the overall pace of construction.

The manufactured housing industry built nearly 106,000 homes in 2021, a 15-year high. Demand for the houses is growing, and Epperson says homebuilders are capable of producing far more. But for manufactured housing to truly take off, this sector and those advocating for it must address thorny challenges related to financing, land tenure, and zoning.

Using Auto Loans to Buy Houses

Despite the relative affordability of manufactured housing, financing can be a big hurdle for would-be homebuyers. About three quarters of manufactured homes are titled as personal property, not real estate, and therefore aren’t eligible for a mortgage. That leaves buyers relying on personal property (or “chattel”) loans, which are more akin to auto loans than to mortgages, and tend to come with higher interest rates, shorter loan terms, and fewer consumer protections.

And even those loans can be surprisingly difficult to obtain.

“Our research has found that denial rates [on manufactured home loans] are astronomically high,” Siegel says. About 7 percent of completed mortgage applications for traditional site-built homes get denied, she says, but the rejection rate for manufactured home loans is nearly eight times that, at 54 percent. Even mortgages for manufactured homes classified as real property—meaning, in most states, that they’re placed on a permanent foundation on owned land and titled as real estate—are denied 40 percent of the time.

That’s a big obstacle to getting people into a house, Siegel says. The average price of a new manufactured home, excluding land, transportation, and other setup costs, was $124,900 in May 2022, according to the most recent Census data. That’s less expensive than a typical house, but it’s not exactly pocket change.

So when buyers are denied adequate financing, they may be forced to continue renting, seek out riskier loans, or pay cash for an older, lower-quality mobile home (see sidebar). Even for those who do qualify, personal property loans offer far less protection than mortgages. “When someone defaults on their loan in a real estate situation, there’s a pretty detailed foreclosure process that is designed to take some time so that residents have a chance to refinance or make other arrangements,” Gray explains. “But with personal property and chattel lending, there’s no foreclosure protection, and it’s often as easy as repossessing a car to take someone’s home away from them.”

Manufactured, Mobile, or Modular?

When it comes to factory-built housing, the term “mobile home” is commonly used and widely recognized. But in fact, it’s one of several industry-specific terms:

Mobile home refers to manufactured houses built before the mid-1970s. These structures, also known as trailers, were designed to be portable and were frequently made of substandard materials. In 1976, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) adopted standards to improve their quality and durability, codifying factors including the materials used and the ability to withstand wind, rain, and snow.

Manufactured housing refers to structures built after 1976 that meet HUD’s strict federal standards, which were updated in the 1990s. Like mobile homes, today’s manufactured homes are fitted with a metal chassis that allows them to be transported to their ultimate destination, where they can be placed on a temporary or permanent foundation. Manufactured housing is exempt from local building codes.

Modular homes also begin in factories, but they are not built on a chassis. Their components are assembled on-site and are attached to a permanent foundation. Modular homes are built to state and local building codes, not federal standards.

The Lincoln Institute and other members of the I’m HOME Network have pushed for Freddie Mac and its fellow federal mortgage entity Fannie Mae to play a bigger role in the manufactured housing market, for both real estate and chattel loans. While Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac purchase some 62 percent of residential mortgages in the United States, they back less than a quarter of manufactured home mortgages. Such loans are still a tiny fraction of their business: they purchased 169,411 manufactured home mortgages in 2021, up 50 percent from 2017, according to mortgage data firm Recursion. But at $20.2 billion, those loans represented less than 1 percent of their $2.63 trillion in overall mortgage financing in 2021, according to the Urban Institute.

They are also virtually absent from the chattel loan market, leaving it anemic and uncompetitive. “Currently, neither Fannie Mae nor Freddie Mac is actually doing anything with the personal property loan space,” Siegel says. “Even though they’re working on providing more mortgages in this market, they’re still not even dipping their toes into a pilot for personal property loans.”

Increasing their participation in both markets, Gray says, “will tend to create more national standards, and national standards will help drive competition and terms that are more favorable to consumers.” Siegel agrees, noting that manufactured home loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration through federal financing entity Ginnie Mae are denied far less often than conventional loans.

“This reinforces how important federally backed loan programs are as a source of financing for manufactured housing,” she says. The FHA does have a personal property loan designed for manufactured homes, called Title I, but it’s woefully out of date. While the FHA’s Title II mortgage program for single-family homes is updated annually, the loan terms and other requirements for Title I haven’t been revised since 2008, rendering the loans uncompetitive, Siegel says. Ginnie Mae backed more than 2,500 Title I manufactured home loans in 2009, totaling nearly $115 million, but only three such loans were issued in all of 2021, for a total of $101,500, across the entire country.

To its credit, the FHA is making an effort to resurrect the nearly defunct Title I program; both the Pew Charitable Trusts and the I’m HOME Network have submitted public comments with suggested improvements, such as better aligning Title I and Title II loans where sensible. “The current HUD leadership has really made a big priority of revising Title I and making it an effective program,” Gray says. “That’s definitely an important effort that is a complement to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac getting into the market.”

Getting Grounded

Financing a manufactured home is the first challenge, but figuring out where to put it can be just as vexing. Roughly half of manufactured-home owners also own the land on which their house sits, but millions more do not. Instead, in addition to purchasing their home, they might lease a pad in a manufactured housing community, where monthly rent includes the use of the land beneath their house and basic services such as water, road maintenance, and trash pickup.

For decades, this has typically been a reliable, relatively affordable arrangement. But in recent years, corporate investors have discovered that such communities can be lucrative cash generators. “The number of investors looking for mobile home parks to purchase is unprecedented,” says Paul Bradley, president of New Hampshire–based ROC USA, a nonprofit member of the I’m HOME Network that helps communities form cooperatives to purchase the land beneath their homes. From 2010 to 2020, he notes, mobile home parks represented “the highest returning of all real estate asset classes—offices, commercial, industrial, storage units, parking garages, you name it—with a 22 percent annual compounded return.”

The investor playbook is simple: Purchase a park and then raise the rents. While annual lot rent increases averaged 4.2 percent nationwide in 2021, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, residents from Michigan to California to Iowa have reported rent hikes of 10 to 15 percent, amounting to hundreds of dollars a month, after investors took over their parks.

The promise of that kind of profit has attracted a broad mix of investors to manufactured housing communities, from real estate investment trusts (REITs) to private equity firms to the sovereign wealth funds of foreign nations—like that of Singapore, which in 2017 invested nearly $1.5 billion to gain a majority ownership stake in 178 U.S. manufactured home communities.

In a typical rental market, tenants have enough options to keep rent hikes somewhat in check. But a manufactured home community isn’t a typical market. Despite the old moniker, a mobile home isn’t very “mobile”—it can cost upwards of $10,000 to move one. That can leave captive park residents under new ownership facing an impossible choice: either pay the jacked-up rents, spend thousands of dollars to relocate, or abandon their investment and home altogether.

This makes residents living on leased land particularly vulnerable, but there are simple and effective ways to stabilize these situations, Gray says. “Of course, the best solution is when people can own the land under their unit,” he says. In a manufactured home community, that takes some legwork, but it can be done. ROC USA has helped 303 communities in 21 states buy the land in their neighborhoods. Resident-owned communities can then elect their own boards and vote on everything from rent increases to community improvements.

The ROC USA model offers residents support in organizing a cooperative, as well as forgivable due diligence financing, so the newly formed co-op can hire a lawyer, engineer, and other professionals before making an informed offer. Their now tried-and-true approach creates a limited equity cooperative, which permanently preserves the community for affordable housing while allowing individual homeowners to build equity in their homes.

“We’re essentially helping low-income homeowners compete with deep-pocketed investors,” says Bradley. Six states have legislation that gives mobile home community residents the right of first refusal if their park’s owner decides to sell, Bradley says, allowing them time (albeit not a whole lot of it) to organize a cooperative, make a counteroffer, and secure financing. Colorado was the most recent to pass such legislation, joining Oregon, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

States can help in other ways, too, such as by ensuring certain minimum site-lease protections for residents of manufactured home communities, Gray says. Manufactured-home owners who rent space lack the full rights of a landowner, and they also enjoy fewer protections than a typical apartment tenant in most places. So under the FHFA’s Duty to Serve rule, enacted in 2016, anyone buying a manufactured housing community with Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac financing for the most part now offers some basic site-lease protections to its residents as a condition of their loan.

The protections include 30 days’ notice before a rent increase and the right to post a for-sale sign outside your unit—“things that most people would take for granted,” Gray says. But including them “has become maybe one of the biggest success stories of the Duty to Serve program thus far,” he says. States and localities need to expand upon those tenant protections, he adds, putting manufactured-home owners on equal footing with other tenants.

Zoning for Change

Next Step generally works with affordable housing developers who subdivide a parcel of land, install homes on permanent foundations, and sell the lots to individual buyers. The organization’s motto is “manufactured housing done right,” and Epperson believes land ownership is a crucial piece of that puzzle. “We want to work in an ecosystem where there are realtors, lenders, housing counselors, and affordable housing developers, just as there are for site-built homes,” she says.

There’s a demonstrated appetite for that kind of housing. Next Step partnered with IKEA to conduct a survey of first-time homebuyers and found that 45 percent of millennials would be open to buying a manufactured home. “That was more than we expected,” Epperson says, speculating that the attraction to tiny houses in popular culture may be shifting attitudes.

However, that enlightened perspective isn’t always shared among zoning officials, nor the general population of residents they serve. “In most places, we find that the local zoning code prohibits new manufactured housing, and that’s where we start from,” Epperson says. Because of outdated perceptions of the industry, she says, “it takes a lot of education, and we’ve seen different results.”

Some municipalities will permit a one-time variance for manufactured housing construction, she says, while others open up their zoning rules to allow more going forward. City officials in Hagerstown, Maryland, approved Next Step’s latest project in 2021, a 69-acre workforce housing development of 241 manufactured homes called Kilpatrick Woods. In 2022, Oakland, California, passed an ordinance allowing manufactured housing on any residential-zoned lot in the city.

In other places, it’s been more difficult to break through: “We’ve seen some cities that just can’t do it with the pressure they’re getting from not-in-my-backyard opponents,” Epperson says. Even in places like Oregon, which passed a statewide law in 2022 that puts manufactured housing on equal footing with site-built housing, she says, “you still have to do a lot of education with public officials to get everybody on the same page, even though it’s the law.”

The prominent inclusion of manufactured housing in the Housing Supply Action Plan released by the White House has added momentum to that effort, Epperson says. “We have more traction to help make change than we’ve ever had before,” she says, and cities are becoming more open to manufactured housing. The positive response is “’still relatively small for the size of the problem, but it’s better than I’ve seen in the last 15 years.”

Missed Perceptions

In a way, all these challenges come back to people’s perceptions—and misconceptions—of an industry that has evolved faster than public understanding. The fact is, many manufactured homes are nearly indistinguishable from their site-built brethren, and are constructed just as well or better. And research shows that when they are sited on owned land, these houses appreciate at roughly the same rate as site-built houses (Freddie Mac 2019).

“We say ‘a home is a home,’ so we’re out to change the image of manufactured housing,” Epperson says. That includes building Energy Star-rated homes that save homeowners at least 30 percent in utility costs compared to those of traditional homes. “We want to make sure that families can not only get into their home, but stay in their home long term, and that means controlling maintenance and operating costs,” Epperson says. “We have a vision that this could be the most sustainable and energy-efficient home in the marketplace, and the best way to deliver a zero-energy-ready home.”

Gray says today’s manufactured housing is also more durable than the poor-quality, pre-1976 mobile homes that tend to appear in the media after extreme weather events like hurricanes. “Contemporary manufactured housing is extremely strong and, I would argue, is even more resilient and better able to withstand storms than site-built housing.”

Buyers seem to be increasingly recognizing those benefits, whether they’ve had their curiosity piqued by a tiny-house show on HGTV, or they’re weary of house hunting in a ruthlessly scarce and competitive real estate market. Shipments of manufactured homes doubled between 2011 and 2021, increasing 12 percent between 2020 and 2021 alone (U.S. Department of Commerce 2022).

“There’s a huge demand for manufactured homes,” says JoAnne Hamberg, a real estate broker who sold her first mobile home to a local cable executive back in the 1980s and is now the owner and manager of Woodland Estates, the Boston-area community Jim and Kathryn Bennett now call home.

Hamberg says her brokerage, which specializes in manufactured homes, has a waiting list of buyers. “We get single professionals, young married couples, retirees, snowbirds, empty nesters—you name it,” she says. And the reason is simple: “People are realizing that manufactured homes are a great housing option.”

About the I’m HOME Network

The Innovations in Manufactured Homes (I’m HOME) Network was founded in 2005 to shift the public perception of manufactured housing, change public policy, and improve industry practices. The network, launched by Prosperity Now (formerly CFED), includes homeowners, advocates, academics, policy makers, lenders, manufacturers, developers, and others who, together, can effect change in the private sector and at all levels of government. In March 2022, the Lincoln Institute assumed stewardship of the I’m HOME Network. Convening the I’m HOME Network is an element of the Lincoln Institute’s larger effort to address the housing affordability crisis as part of its goal to reduce poverty and spatial inequality.

Jon Gorey is a staff writer for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: A Next Step manufactured home in San Bernardino, California. Credit: Next Step.

Where should new multifamily housing go? This is a fundamental question facing 175 communities across eastern Massachusetts as they work to implement a new law intended to address the region’s housing shortage. The law requires cities and towns served by Greater Boston’s public transit agency, the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority), to enact zoning that allows multifamily housing near transit.  

If history is any indication, communities will seek to locate new housing away from existing residential neighborhoods. In recent decades, the largest portion of new housing in Greater Boston has been built in isolated areas on municipal and metropolitan peripheries. As an example, the town of Wellesley approved the construction of a 262-unit complex called The Nines—separated from almost all of the town by Interstate 95 and located on a spit of land tucked between the highway, state Route 9, and the Charles River. The towns of Needham and Stoneham permitted similar “across the interstate” developments, and other examples abound. 

The next largest portion of residential permitting has come in commercial areas.  As “smart growth” caught on in the new millennium, many cities and towns added one or two small- or medium-sized multifamily buildings to their downtowns. These properties are very close to residential neighborhoods, but not right in them. Zoning for mixed-use developments along decaying strip mall corridors has also been gaining support. Thus, we see projects on Newton’s Needham Street, Bedford’s Great Road, Salem’s Highland Avenue, Swampscott’s Vinnin Square, and many other less-than-loved “stroads.”  

For many communities, preserving the status quo of existing neighborhoods has been an explicit priority, even as the housing crunch has intensified. A few years ago, the city of Weymouth rezoned a commercial corridor for mixed-use multifamily housing, drawing the zoning district surgically to avoid development near existing residential neighborhoods. Wellesley’s 2018 Draft Unified Plan explains that participants in public meetings saw commercial, office, and industrial areas as the most acceptable locations for multifamily housing; not residential districts. In fact, my review of local master plans across 100 cities and towns showed no movement to upzone residential neighborhoods, other than by allowing accessory dwelling units (ADUs), which appear to have relatively popular support.  

Given the political resistance to changing residential neighborhoods, developing housing in other areas is not without merit. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council, the regional planning agency, recently analyzed more than 3,000 strip malls and shopping centers across Greater Boston, and estimated that such sites could accommodate 124,000 new homes. Between those areas and various office parks and industrial lands, Greater Boston could raise enough residential towers and townhouses to end bidding wars, giving renters and buyers the upper hand, without changing existing residential neighborhoods.   

However, the strategy of rezoning exclusively commercial and industrial areas assumes that the only goal is housing production. Metropolitan growth policy also needs to consider transportation, the environment, local economies, quality of life, and equity.  

The transit-oriented development (TOD) paradigm at the heart of Massachusetts’s new MBTA Communities Zoning Law imagines a region defined by a network of walkable, dense hubs that are well-connected by roads, walkways, bike lanes, bus lanes, train lines, and ferry routes. Under this scenario, people will spend less time in traffic; convenient region-wide mobility will be accessible to all residents, including those without cars; carbon emissions will go down; more people will have access to the region’s best opportunities; and our collective well-being and resilience will improve.  

One of Greater Boston’s most prominent strengths is that it was built as a network of urban villages well connected by trains and streetcars before automobiles began dominating urban design. The framework for the vision of well-connected “great neighborhoods” is already on the ground. The metropolitan area is crisscrossed with village centers and downtowns that contain pharmacies, libraries, restaurants, cafes, civic institutions, schools, playgrounds, public greens, quirky shops, and transit stops.  

If we write off as unchangeable all residential neighborhoods adjacent to these great hubs, then we make it harder to achieve the combined goals of an abundance of housing and sustainable, equitable settlement patterns. There is great demand in Greater Boston for “missing middle” housing that fits between single family-houses-with-yards and bigger apartment/condo complexes. For development of smaller scale multifamily housing to serve many people and make a difference in the market, it has to be allowed in more places.  

The project to create more housing in the Boston area will involve a combination of strategies, including significantly more building on main streets and the currently car-oriented corridors that radiate out from them; continued building on some isolated parcels on municipal edges; and incremental increases in density near connected, walkable hubs—i.e., in existing residential neighborhoods. Significant development on isolated parcels and strip mall corridors should be accompanied by infrastructure redesign to create connected, walkable hubs.   

As they consider different development scenarios that meet the requirements of the MBTA Communities zoning law, leaders and residents will need to weigh the politics and pros and cons of dense zoning in commercial and industrial areas, against zoning for small-scale multifamily housing in neighborhoods. Their deliberations will be part of a larger national debate about how regions should grow. 

Many people will be anxious about the possibility of multifamily development next to their homes. They’ll worry about traffic and parking, property values, architecture, noise, privacy, and all sorts of things. But we could just as well associate new housing with the chocolate chip cookies the future residents might bake for block parties, the leadership they might take on local issues, and the purple pansies they might plant out front in big happy planters. We could think of the joy, stability, and safety that new neighbors will gain in, and contribute to, our neighborhoods.  

Humans are perhaps wired to protect against threats more than to revel in visions of possibility, but we are also well equipped to plan ahead, together. We should plan for a just and sustainable future with abundant housing in wonderful, connected neighborhoods—and reform local zoning accordingly. 

Amy Dain is an independent consultant in public policy research and writing. Her focus is on urban and suburban planning and housing policy. She has conducted research for the Lincoln Institute on zoning and approval processes for multifamily housing in the Greater Boston area. 

Image: Construction in downtown Lynn, Massachusetts. Credit: Amy Dain.

Zoning may not be something most people think about every day. But behind the scenes, local land use rules have been blocking affordable housing, hindering climate action, and exacerbating racial segregation, according to advocates for reform.

In this episode of the Land Matters podcast, city planner M. Nolan Gray, author of the recent book Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, and Sara Bronin, professor at Cornell University and founder of the National Zoning Atlas, talk about how zoning can be tweaked for better outcomes.

This conversation comes at a time when at least 10 states are moving forward to modify zoning at the local level—to remove restrictions on multifamily housing development near transit stations, for example. The rationale is that there’s not nearly enough affordable housing, and local land use regulations skew toward single-family homes on large lots, which are inevitably more expensive. That’s just one example of the kind of overhaul being proposed.

“I would argue that zoning is the most significant regulatory power of local government because it [not only] governs where we can put housing and factories and parks and shops . . . but it actually has significant impacts on the economy, and even I think the very structure of our society,” said Bronin, who has been a leader in a zoning reform effort called Desegregate Connecticut.

Why all the attention to zoning now? Gray, who has been active in the organization California YIMBY (Yes in My Back Yard), says many Americans are frustrated with the lack of affordable housing, and have been motivated to understand the factors behind that shortage.

“There’s a huge appetite from across the political spectrum for reform ideas here,” he said, as the affordability crisis intensifies not only in California but throughout the country.

The reform measures have included eliminating single-family-only zoning, clearing the path for modest increases in density where it is currently not allowed; lifting prohibitions on accessory dwelling units, such as carriage houses or apartments over garages; and reducing or eliminating excessive requirements to build parking at new developments, which drive up construction costs.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
 

Further Reading

Cancel Zoning: If We Want to Fix the Housing Affordability Crisis, Segregation, and Sprawl, Zoning Must Go (The Atlantic)

National Zoning Atlas (Cornell University)

President’s Message: Zoning’s Asteroid Moment (Land Lines)

Shifting Gears: Why Communities Are Eliminating Off-Street Parking Requirements—and What Comes Next (Land Lines)

Zoning Reform Creates New Model for Smart Growth in Walla Walla, Washington (Planning)

Zoning Rules! The Economics of Land Use Regulation (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)
 

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.