As the housing market prices out more and more Americans, federal lawmakers are taking a closer look at manufactured housing as a more affordable supply-side alternative to a traditional stick-built home.
Nevertheless, misconceptions about new manufactured housing communities — that they are dilapidated, ugly, or unsafe — continue to beleaguer a segment of the single-family, detached housing market that is currently home to 7.2 million U.S. households.
Legislators in both parties increasingly see manufactured homes as a crucial way to boost housing affordability. The Affordable HOMES Act, which the U.S. House of Representatives passed last week, is part of that vision.
The legislation, largely aimed at boosting and streamlining manufactured housing development, would remove regulatory burdens. For example, it would give HUD sole authority over manufactured housing energy efficiency standards and eliminate overlapping oversight by the Department of Energy. Lawmakers claim that reducing such red tape could lower manufactured housing prices by up to $10,000 per unit.
The Manufactured Housing Institute reports that new manufactured homes sell for less than a third of the price of site-built homes. The relative affordability of such homes is clearly something that lawmakers in Washington have taken notice of.
Gene Kim, Executive VP of CRE Strategies at Ascent Developer Solutions (AscentDS), told The Builder’s Daily that manufactured housing can and should play a major role in boosting housing affordability. AscentDS, a private lending and institutional debt platform backed by Elliott Investment Management L.P, serving single-family, homebuilder, and multifamily developers, recently announced an expansion to provide financing to manufactured housing developers.
However, persistent misconceptions and longstanding stigmas about manufactured housing communities continue to weigh on the industry, and sometimes make obtaining local approval difficult.
Misperceptions continue to hamper manufactured housing
There is still a major NIMBY effect impacting manufactured housing. While new manufactured communities are typically built to higher safety standards and increasingly feature high-quality housing, many people still associate those properties with outdated, higher–risk mobile home parks.
A recent brief from the National Association of Home Builders notes:
“Manufactured homes are a specific type of factory-built housing that adheres to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) Manufactured Home Construction and Safety Standards code. To qualify, a manufactured home must be a ‘movable dwelling, 8 feet or more wide and 40 feet or more long, constructed on a permanent chassis.’”
Among local concerns are commonly held assumptions that manufactured communities reduce neighboring property values and negatively affect an area’s aesthetics, crime rates, and additional infrastructure costs. AscentDS’s Kim said these views are often misguided.
“When people say mobile home parks, a lot of times, their mind jumps to a 1960s trailer park. But the communities delivered today are of much higher quality. It’s almost necessary to have a separate asset class and asset theme category, because the quality is so high, both in the community overall and the quality of the homes,” he explained.
Still, prevalent NIMBY activists can make it difficult to entitle manufactured housing, meaning new manufactured communities tend to be on the larger side, Kim noted.
“If you’re able to secure those entitlements, they’re going to be for larger-sized communities, north of two, three, four hundred sites.”
There is also a common misconception that manufactured housing doesn’t appreciate in value as much as stick-built housing. This can sometimes create a negative perception that dissuades some people from buying into such communities.
Data from the Census’s 2025 Manufactured Housing Survey runs counter to that view, however. Between 2000 and Q2 2025, typical selling prices of manufactured homes and site-built homes appreciated at nearly the same rate.
Geographic distribution of manufactured homes
Manufactured housing makes up about 5.4% of all housing stock nationally, according to a December Storage Cafe report. However, there are wide differences depending on the state. New Mexico (15%), Mississippi (14%), West Virginia (13%), Alabama (12%), and Louisiana (12%) have the highest number of manufactured homes as a share of total housing stock.
All of those states have high levels of rural poverty and rank in the bottom ten for median household income. This shouldn’t be surprising, since manufactured homes are a critical housing option for families living in certain rural areas or small towns. Nearly 55% of manufactured homes are located in rural areas, in comparison to less than 25% of single-family houses.
“While most manufactured home residents (53%) live in rural areas, single-family residents are mostly concentrated (67%) in urbanized areas — defined as territories with a population of 50,000 or more. In comparison, only 33% of manufactured home residents reside in urbanized areas. Residents of both manufactured and single-family homes are less common in urban clusters — areas with populations between 2,500 and 50,000 — comprising just 13% and 9%, respectively.”
Sun Belt markets like Texas, Florida, and Arizona are big hotspots for manufactured housing right now, due to strong population growth and permissive zoning. Overall, the South continues to dominate the national housing market, as the region accounted for nearly 70% of new homes sold in October.
