Manufactured Homes May Well be the Solution to America’s Housing Crisis
Nationwide, there’s an estimated shortage of about 3.8 million housing units. The shortfall has many causes, Including, escalating inflationary home building material costs and high mortgage interest rates.
The shortage of affordable housing also can somewhat date back to a construction slowdown that began in 2008 during the Great Recession and never fully regained the momentum to meet present-day needs.
Manufactured homes today hold the key to essential, less expensive, high quality, easily accessed home ownership. Many housing experts see factory-built homes as an effective way of meeting current housing needs, especially in rural areas.
“The importance of manufactured housing for addressing our current affordability crisis is just immense, because manufactured housing is half the cost to build of traditional, site-built construction,” said Esther Sullivan, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado Denver and the author of “Manufactured Insecurity,” a book that examines challenges faced by residents of American mobile home parks. “I’m not trying to say its perfect…but there’s just a lot of opportunity to capitalize on the cost savings that come from factory production.”
The techniques used in factory-built are the difference between $72 and $140 square foot in construction costs, said Leslie Gooch, Chief Executive officer of the Manufactured Housing Institute, though some of those estimates, as with all construction, may have increased recently because of inflation and supply chain issues.
Cheaper doesn’t mean its shoddier, Gooch said. Factory-built homes are constructed on an assembly line with the precision and quality that comes from a controlled building environment, she said. They also must meet the national construction and safety standards of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has building inspectors on site in factories.
“Sometimes people have preconceived notions about what a manufactured home is,” she said. “That notion is not what’s being produced today.”
Manufactured homes are factory-built structures built after 1976 to HUD codes. Before that, they were called mobile homes or trailers, terms no longer a part of federal law or common usage. Manufactured homes are delivered in one piece, unlike modular housing, which is also mostly built in a factory, but assembled from multiple components on site and subject to local building codes.
