Louisville Officials Looking Towards Manufactured Homes to Solve City’s Housing Crisis

LOUISVILLE, KY. The recent Louisville Manufactured Home Show at the Expo Center came hoping to offer solutions to one of Louisville’s biggest problems: housing.

Organizers believe the developers behind these homes could be the answer to create more affordable housing in the city.

For the most part, the city agrees. Marilyn Harris, the director of Metro Louisville’s Office of Housing and Community Development, said these kinds of homes are easy, less expensive, and generally need less space.

The city’s land bank is full of hundreds of properties forgotten or abandoned and now owned by the city. Those are a few of the lots Harris would like to see some of these manufactured houses to start.

“A lot of citizens say, ‘there’s lots of land, you just have to build on it,” Harris said. “There is a lot of land. You have to get developers who want to build on that land. The city doesn’t actually build houses, that’s not what we do. We don’t ever want to be in that position. We are the financial catalyst to make those things happen.”

Mayor Craig Greenburg wants to create 15,000 housing options across the city, and Harris said manufactured homes can be a part of that. 

She sees the homes as ‘build to buy,’ saying single-family home ownership is needed across the city.

Harris said they’re now asking developers to build on five of those land bank lots to see how it would work out large scale. Those lots are currently listed as low as $1 on Metro’s website.

SOURCE: (WAVE)