Anerica has a housing shortage. Many different solutions are being offered. During my initial assignment to the Navy Supply School in Athens, GA, the only available housing on arrival was a trailer home.
My wife who was seven months pregnant and I lived there for several months until base housing became available. Little did we know that we occupied, albeit briefly, an example of America’s housing creativity from WWII as explained in An Unexpected Idea for Preserving America’s Mobile Homes.
This ability of trailers to quickly mobilize wherever and whenever needed was again on display following the passage of the GI Bill. Look at aerial photos of postwar college campuses; chances are you’ll see rows and rows of trailers nearby, providing on-demand housing to new students and their families.
Today there are over 21 million manufactured housing homes. Some are temporary, but most are permanent residences.
Home to 21 Million Americans
Recently the digital journal Next City posted a long article about how manufactured housing/mobile homes could become an integral part of solving America’s housing shortage. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Punctuating the country is an unknown world of mobile home parks that are often seen but rarely recognized. These communities are everywhere: scattered along highways, in urban crannies in California, Florida, and the Sunbelt, on exurban territory from the Northeast to the Pacific Northwest, next to factories, farmland, mines and military bases. Blink and you’ll miss them. The National Register of Historic Places certainly has.
There is not a single mobile home or mobile home park in the National Register — a glaring omission that, if addressed, challenges the preservation field to join the fight for affordable housing.
Over the last hundred years, mobile homes have housed millions as and where needed. Today, they are home to 21 million people, or about one in every 16 Americans. They are legitimate and permanent parts of the American landscape. Even so, city officials, historians and preservation professionals have largely disregarded mobile homes, and their residents, as aberrations.
A Role for Credit Unions?
The article provides the history of the transitiion from “trailer” to mobile homes to manufactured housing and notes:
The truth is, mobile homes are not very different from the average suburban home. The vast majority do not move once they are sited, nor do their residents. Some 71% of mobile home residents own their homes, higher than the national homeownership rate for all forms of housing. The biggest difference is their affordability: On average, a new site-built home costs four times as much as a new “manufactured” home.
These manufactured home estates have become an attractive investment for private equity:
In recent years, some of the largest private equity firms, including Blackstone, Apollo Global Management, and The Carlyle Group, are making big “recession-proof” bets on mobile home parks. Between 2014 to 2022, investors purchased 800,000 lots, representing nearly 20% of all mobile homes — double the rate of private equity ownership of apartment units.
Some credit unions have been active in leding to this sector for years. Credit Human in San Antonio developed a national speciality with manufactured housing sellers for financing these purchases. They report holding 22,329 loans totaling $1.459 billlion at yearend 2024. These loans however, are different from the standard site-built, stand alone residence..
What is unique to mobile homes is that they are still classified as “chattel,” or moveable personal property — such as a car — rather than real estate. This means that not only do mobile homes decrease in value over time, but that residents, even those who own their home outright, must still pay rent on the land underneath.
And the private equity trend has brought new problems besides the traditional challenges of zoning and site ownership:
By increasing both lending and rental rates, investment firms are squeezing the vulnerable at every turn. As private equity moves in, costs and delayed repairs pile up. Parks purchased by investors have seen rents and fees balloon. Evictions have increased, as has wholesale destruction to make room for redevelopment. . .
One solution the article referenced is cooperative ownership. However, the Next City article proposes putting long term mobile home locations on the National Register of Historical Places. The idea in brief:
To potentially be listed in the National Register of Historic Places, properties must meet certain criteria, including historic significance to a time at least 50 years in the past. Given their contributions to mid-century American history, the argument for the significance of older mobile home parks is easy to make.
But the designation is not easy to achieve. In the meantime credit unions can help sustain this housing option by financing and supporting the traditional buying and selling process that underwrites all home ownership.
The immediate opportunity would be to visit the mobile home sites in your community, talk with local dealers (if any) and become familiar with the financial needs of the residents. It is a national need with local markets-a perfect fit for credit union solutions.
I’d be interested in examples from credit unions that have experience serving these members and their communities.