We like to denigrate manufactured housing, but new units are better for the environment.
This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
About 22 million Americans live in mobile homes or manufactured housing, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and as the housing crisis continues to worsen in places like Arizona, California, and New York, that number could go up.
But for some, mobile homes conjure up an image of rusting metal units in weed-choked lots, an unfair stereotype that has real consequences — advocates argue that mobile homes are not only a housing fix but could also help with the climate crisis.
According to Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, mobile homes are a good solution with a bad reputation.
It’s unfair, he said, because the residents of mobile homes are often hampered by restrictive zoning laws that make it hard to upgrade maintenance and care of the structures. These zoning laws also have put communities at risk for climate-related disasters, which explains why so many mobile home parks are in floodplains.
“It’s not the home itself that often makes mobile homes vulnerable,” said Rumbach. “It’s actually the fact that we sort of stuck the poor away in these places that makes them vulnerable.”
A report by the Niskanen Center, a nonprofit public policy organization, echoes Rumbach’s research. The report found that mobile homes have consistently been an affordable and underutilized solution that meets the housing needs of low- and moderate-income people.
Newer models can also be a low-carbon solution as these prefabricated homes, which are built in large pieces for easy assembly, can include things like heat pumps and solar panels, in contrast to older models that relied on propane or natural gas. Older models can also be eligible for retrofits to make them more energy efficient and climate-friendly.
“They’re a pretty terrific solution,” said Rumbach. “Unfortunately, by law, in many places in the country [mobile homes] are not allowed to be placed anymore because there is such a cultural stigma.”
The Eastern Coachella Valley in California is one place where mobile home parks and residents have been consistently overlooked by public officials. People in the majority Latino area grapple with getting access to necessities like electricity and clean water. Arsenic was found in the water supply and is a persistent issue.
But despite that, there is also an incredible sense of community among the residents of informal mobile home parks in the area, according to Jovana Morales-Tilgren, a housing policy coordinator at Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability, a California nonprofit focusing on underserved rural communities.
The parks were originally built for migrant farmworkers and today they operate without a permit, which means federal agencies and local governments don’t have official recognition that they exist. So if there’s a disaster, that makes it harder to get federal relief, and if there is a municipal upgrade, it doesn’t happen in those communities.
“They do have a lot more issues than regular mobile home parks,” said Morales-Tilgren. “Many of them don’t have weatherization, insulation. Many were built more than 20, 30, 40 years ago. And so they do have a lot of issues.”
Mobile homes can be roughly categorized into two sections: older homes that predate the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s rules in 1976, and newer, prefabricated homes that often are greener, more efficient, and better functioning than some traditional homes.
When Tropical Storm Hilary hit Southern California last month, residents in the unpermitted mobile home parks were trapped, because a power outage meant that residents had to sleep in their cars to get access to air conditioning.
“[Mobile homes] are not equipped to handle those extreme weather events,” said Morales-Tilgren.
This is especially an issue because a large portion of people that live in the area are low-income people of color who are undocumented, according to Morales-Tilgren. Consequently, people lack access to resources needed to recover from large flooding events like the kind that Hilary brought.
Another key issue: Mobile home parks, both permitted and unpermitted, are reliant on their own infrastructure. In other types of housing, such as apartments or single family homes, a municipality is usually in charge of providing electricity, water, sewage, and tree maintenance. But in mobile home parks, residents are reliant on owners to provide those services.
In addition, once extreme weather happens, residents are often caught in the grip of the confusing bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. While mobile home parks can vary wildly, the main distinction that the agency makes is whether or not people own or rent the land underneath the home.
A 2021 study published in the journal Frontiers found that there are numerous barriers to accessing resources, such as money from FEMA, for vulnerable populations in the wake of a flood-related disaster. Affordable housing units were affected more, and often the number of units did not bounce back to pre-disaster levels.
Additionally, mobile home residents are often at risk of being evicted in the aftermath of disasters that might displace them from their homes. This can fuel housing instability because mobile homes tend to be located in climate-vulnerable areas like floodplains, according to Rumbach.
“Around the country, you see a disproportionate amount of mobile homes located in hazardous areas,” said Rumbach. “The demand is being driven by a segment of the housing market that’s looking for lower costs. And as a result, you see a lot of manufactured housing being placed into relatively climate-vulnerable places, because that land tends to be a little bit less valuable.”
On the other side of the country, though, mobile home owners in Ithaca, New York, have been the beneficiaries of a pilot project aimed at retrofitting mobile homes in the area to be more climate-friendly.
I grew up in a mobile home and while it was fine they do have issues. They are terrible shelter from tornados or hurricanes and they drop in value like cars so are a bad investment. In a normal home the value generally stays the same or grows with or more than inflation. Mobile homes drop in value because few want to live in a used mobile home for whatever resson.
My father has been in the mobile home business my entire life, my grandma has lived in a mobile home since I was born as well. I’ve been around a ton of them for decades. They aren’t as durable as traditional homes. They end up abandoned after 20-30 years with the floors, ceiling and walls crumbling. They have horrible resale for a reason.
Once you consider the poor financial state of buying one vs a traditional site built home and the durability issues. They aren’t a good decision, for about any reason. Anyone who lives in, or drives through a rural area regularly can tell you how many decrepit mobile homes there are just abandoned and rotting out there. They end up in landfills. That’s not green.
This was what I was wondering. My only experience with them was demolishing one that a retired couple used in the summers. Over one winter (while they were away in the south), the snow completely flattened one end of it.
The roof “trusses” were made from 1x1” with thin sheet metal plates between them. The insulation was atrocious. And the bottom couple feet of most of the walls was just rot.
Unless this article is actually talking about mobile tiny houses (which cost way more per square foot than most permanent housing, and require significant lifestyle choices to manage), they are setting many people up for failure.
I wasn’t going to argue with the basis of the article, but ya they’re made like shit in my experience and I have no idea how they’d possibly be more energy efficient. They may very well be talking about tiny homes. Traditional mobile homes are horrible shit box construction.
Mobile homes are disposable homes. This isn’t a socioeconomic thing, or a race or color thing. They are designed to fall apart and often have proprietary sizing and measurements so that you have to go back to the manufacturer for repair parts. Square head screws. Plumbing sizes off by a few mm so you have to buy from manufactured resellers only. Phrases like “structural siding” are a thing. Non standard window sizes held in place by clips. Any energy savings or “green” build is lost due to poor insulation and overstressing systems that are likely too small to cover the space requested.
Manufactured homes being a solution to anything is a sad state of affairs for the US. I get that it’s neat to put up dense housing quickly, but we should be looking at modular apartment buildings and modular homes, which is a completely different category of housing that is more structurally sound than many stick built homes.
The only time that you buy a mobile home is when you are getting a lot of land with it, and then immediately you plan on where the actual house is going to be built.
