Urban Studies

Manufactured housing (MH) provides a key source of affordable housing in the United States and elsewhere, including in Canada and Australia. In this editors’ introduction, we argue that MH and manufactured home communities (MHCs) deserve more attention from researchers, planners, and policy makers because they are home to millions of people and because they provide a lens through which to understand critical contemporary issues in the study of housing and urban settlements more broadly. We provide an overview, define key terms, and describe the scale, and some advantages and disadvantages of manufactured housing. The introduction also defines manufactured home communities (also commonly called by other names, including “mobile home parks” and “trailer parks”) and describes their broad diversity. We introduce the articles in the special issue, summarizing key areas of concern that shape housing affordability, security, and equity for residents of MH and MHCs. These include: (1) regulation and location of manufactured housing; (2) housing tenure, ownership, and finance; (3) resident experience, social relations, and politics in manufactured home communities; and (4) hazards and climate change. This introduction and the other articles in this issue make the case that manufactured housing should be repositioned from the margins to the center of scholarship on housing and urbanism because the challenges facing manufactured housing residents, from financialization and tenure insecurity to heightened climate change vulnerability, are relevant and revelatory for research in other marginalized communities and housing types around the world.

Mobile homes can be produced in high volumes at a lower cost than traditional stick-built single-family dwellings but face regulatory, financial, and perceptual barriers to more widespread market penetration. This research relies on data from a sample of US cities and counties to examine the influence of local land use regulations on the concentration of new mobile homes among all new homes added over two 10-year time spans. In contrast to previous studies, this study relies on a nationwide sample of jurisdictions, employs more precise measures of mobile home placements and local land use regulations, and addresses the endogeneity of mobile home restrictions. I find that regulatory restrictions on mobile homes and urban containment boundaries both limit the concentration of new mobile homes. Furthermore, the impact of mobile home restrictions is much larger when accounting for the endogeneity of mobile home restrictions. These findings suggest that land use regulatory reform can play an important role in local affordable housing strategies geared towards expanding the supply of mobile homes.

Manufactured housing is the largest source of unsubsidised affordable housing in the United States, but the extent of this affordability varies considerably depending upon whether residents own or lease the land on which the unit sits. To date, there have been relatively few analyses of variation across the different contexts in which manufactured homes are located, including in manufactured home parks and on individual plots in residential subdivisions. This is due in part to the limited data on the location of these different community types. In this study, we leverage data from a variety of sources to examine the various contexts in which manufactured housing is sited and differences in the characteristics of dwelling units and their tenure and legal status across these contexts. To do so, we combine parcel-level records documenting land use classifications across 19 counties in Texas, 5.4 million building footprints from Microsoft and OpenStreetMap, manufactured home sales records from the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs and registries of parks and subdivisions from the Department of Homeland Security and the Texas Office of the Attorney General, respectively. Using this dataset, we examine variation in the various types of neighbourhoods in which manufactured housing is common and examine the coverage of the state and federal registries of these communities, illustrating that a substantial number of parks and subdivisions are not currently documented in these registries and thus are likely not receiving sufficient government support, including for infrastructure and housing investment or emergency management response.

Communities in the U.S. face an intensifying housing affordability crisis driven in part by rising construction costs, skilled labor shortages, and stagnant productivity in the building industry. Many researchers and policymakers point to industrialized construction (IC)—the application of manufacturing methods to the building sector—as a framework for expanding production and reducing costs. The history of IC in the U.S. is marked by ambitious efforts with mixed results, including manufactured “HUD Code” homes as well as resurgent investment from private capital in recent decades. Countries like Sweden, on the other hand, have successfully integrated IC methods into their national housing strategy. This commentary traces the parallel tracks of the manufactured housing and IC sector in the U.S., contrasted with Sweden’s long trajectory towards a mature IC ecosystem. Four key takeaways stand out for the U.S. housing market: the value of the “triple helix model” for coordination between government, academia, and industry; the importance of strategic government interventions that do not “choose winners”; the effectiveness of building code harmonization in unlocking scale; and the potential to vertically integrate key business functions within a company to optimize the benefits of IC. Ultimately, this commentary highlights areas for synergistic and systemic shifts in the public and private sector to leverage IC methods as a part of the solution to the U.S. housing crisis.

This article examines how home and land tenure shapes manufactured home (MH) residents’ access to financing and consumer protections. Three tenure categories are explored: homeowners who own both home and land (own–own), homeowners who do not own land – often paying to rent it (own–rent) and home renters who also rent their land (rent–rent). A new nationally representative US survey sheds light on the characteristics of these residents, with a focus on metropolitan compared with non-metropolitan locations, landownership, house titling, the type of home financing used by borrowers and financial stability. This survey provides detail previously unavailable in other data. Results show that US MH buyers are much less likely to use mortgages compared with site-built home buyers. Instead, MH owners who currently have a loan for their home are more likely to use home-only (‘personal property’ or ‘chattel’ loans) or contract financing arrangements such as rent-to-own, seller financing or contract for deed. Mortgages have the strongest consumer protections, so use of these alternatives leaves buyers more at risk of eviction, foreclosure and financial instability. Challenges with access to mortgage financing and robust consumer protections are especially acute for MH owners in metropolitan areas because they are more likely to rent their land. However, local-, state- and federal-level policy updates can improve access to safe and affordable homeownership, and for renters, policymakers can mandate formal lease agreements to improve housing stability.

Residents of manufactured home parks (MHPs) generally own their homes but not the land on which those homes are located and, as a result, face unique and costly risks of eviction. The most commonly studied and understood pathway to eviction is one in which failure to pay rent puts households at risk of removal. Another pathway occurs when entire developments are shuttered, resulting in mass displacement. Residents of MHPs are at risk of both forms of eviction. Overall, we know little about the prevalence and correlates of either form of eviction from MHPs, and more generally little about landlords’ actions – buying, selling and governing communities – that drive evictions. We bring together multiple administrative datasets to track MHP eviction patterns across the state of Florida between 2012 and 2022. Annually, 6500 eviction cases were filed against MHP residents, with roughly one in three cases originating from just 100 parks. Beyond these individual eviction cases, mass displacements were responsible for the permanent loss of over 6000 out of 293,000 registered MHP lots. This highlights the importance of tracking displacement that happens outside of eviction courts, often under the banner of resale and redevelopment, especially in light of corporate and private equity investment in MHPs in recent years.

Global South scholars emphasize the importance of informal settlements in the urban lives of disadvantaged residents. In a similar vein, scholars in the Global North highlight the significance and potential of manufactured homes and manufactured housing communities to provide affordable housing. Although manufactured housing communities and informal housing settlements differ in many ways, they share a history of being ignored as crucial avenues for addressing housing affordability and social mobility challenges. Residents of manufactured housing communities and informal settlements also face the challenge of precarious security of tenure. This Global South-influenced review aims to unsettle narrow assumptions about policy needs in manufactured housing communities and to offer alternative ways to support residents with precarious tenure through heterodox policy approaches. In addition to examining the key similarities, the review discusses the attempts to address the insecure housing tenure of residents of informal settlements in the Global South and their potential lessons for new urban possibilities in the Global North. The Global South experience shows how a narrow debate over tenure in informal settlements, particularly through the legalization of individual land titles, has been successfully broadened into a richer, complementary set of policy alternatives that includes de jure property rights, de facto property rights, perceptions of tenure security, and building legitimacy. The experience is particularly relevant for improving living conditions and strengthening tenure in the Global North’s informal manufactured housing communities. It also offers lessons for formal manufactured housing communities, including land-lease parks.

Manufactured home parks serve diverse populations in the United States, with a significant number of these communities enabling low- and fixed-income households to acquire unsubsidized affordable housing. Solutions to affordable housing scarcity tend to concentrate on increasing the housing stock, while few measures are in place to protect the manufactured home parks that have been an important source of long-term affordable housing. The goal is to produce physical structures with little attention to cultivating the social relations that make a functional community. In this article I analyze ethnographic data collected in Syringa, a manufactured home park that housed low-income service workers, people with disabilities, and retirees on fixed incomes. Findings reveal that Syringa was both a space of “disorder” and a place where people felt safe, understood, and supported. I use the analytical lens of social reproduction theory to foreground how manufactured home communities’ care networks can help neighbors with limited resources have access to services, emotional support, and dignity.

Scholarly debates about a right to the city in the Global North have largely neglected the potential role of housing type and tenure in shaping displacement risk and socio-demographic disparities therein. Yet, past scholarship demonstrates that mobile home residents face a heighted risk of dispossession relative to residents of other dwelling types. Leveraging microdata from Canada’s 2021 Census of Population, I elucidate who would lose their right to the city if urban mobile home residents were displaced. First, I use latent class analysis to identify two distinct clusters of urban mobile home residents, each containing approximately 50% of Canada’s urban mobile home population, but whose socio-demographic characteristics differ along key dimensions of social vulnerability. Next, I conduct a series of logistic regression models to simulate between-cluster variation in the likelihood of displacement if mobile home dispossession were to occur. Results demonstrate significant variation in the likelihood of displacement across clusters, suggesting that the urban mobile home residents at the greatest risk of displacement are lower-income, white, older adults who are not in the labor force and who live alone. By bringing scholarly debates about a right to the city into conversation with the literature on mobile homes, I underscore the key role of dwelling type and tenure in shaping urban citizenship in Canada.

Social scientists have documented the harm associated with manufactured home community (MHC) redevelopment, however, relatively few studies consider the extent to which popular sociocultural beliefs about “trailers” and “trailer parks” shape policy decisions in ways that exacerbate, rather than alleviate the challenges they face. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over a period of 28 months (2011–2016), we present a case study of a community mapping project in Lincoln, Nebraska to examine the influence of dominant cultural beliefs that consider MHCs to be inherently poor, unsafe, and unhealthy on housing policy and programs. Our analysis reveals three key dynamics: (1) data were often interpreted in ways that confirmed preexisting biases among non-MHC stakeholders; (2) there was a sizable disconnect between the lived experiences of MHC residents and the assumptions embedded in broader policy and service systems; and (3) prevailing narratives framed the long-term decline of MHCs as inevitable, rather than the result of under regulation, systemic disinvestment, and corporate malpractice. This case study highlights how well-intentioned policy initiatives driven by objective data can unintentionally reproduce the disparities they aim to address when they are shaped by unexamined sociocultural beliefs and biases.

This commentary draws on comparative insights from fieldwork on migrant labor camps in the US and informal settlements in India to argue that manufactured housing communities (MHCs) are central to understanding urban marginality in North America. It does so by using three conceptual frameworks: infrastructural violence, territorialized stigma, and enclosure. Infrastructural violence manifests through MHCs’ segregation into hazard-prone geographies and substandard infrastructural networks, and through regulatory abandonment that produces preventable suffering among residents. Territorialized stigma links place-based degradation to negative stereotypes about “trailer trash,” creating administrative neglect and blocking governmental responsiveness to resident needs. Finally, the dialectic of commoning and enclosure reveals how MHCs enable collective land uses and informal economies essential to social reproduction yet face growing threats from corporate consolidation. Private equity investors benefit from regulatory constraints on new construction and immobile tenants to densify, gentrify, and standardize communities under the guise of improvement, squeezing common land uses into privatized and aestheticized landscapes. Taken together, these frameworks show MHCs to be contested sites of peripheral urbanization that demand more explicit theorization in urban studies.

Extreme heat kills more Americans than any other weather hazard. Residents of manufactured housing – in both urban and rural settings – are more likely than those in other housing types to need medical attention due to heat exposure at home. This study thus examines the drivers of residential thermal disparities for manufactured housing residents across the US. We use data from the 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey and 2021 American Housing Survey to more holistically assess thermal disparities for manufactured housing residents than previous studies. We do this by examining four potential drivers of thermal disparities: air conditioning (AC) access, AC functional use, cooling costs and underlying physical housing deficiencies that hinder cooling. Through a combination of descriptive statistics and multivariate regression modelling, we identify a connected but ranging set of drivers. First, manufactured housing residents have less central AC access and a much higher likelihood of AC equipment breakdowns. Around 10% of manufactured housing AC units break down in a given year, more than twice the frequency in other housing types. Second, while results are mixed regarding differences in cooling costs per square foot, households in manufactured housing experience the highest cooling costs as a share of their annual income of all major housing types. Lastly, manufactured housing has a greater combination of inadequate insulation and other physical deficiencies than other housing types. We discuss the implications of these concerning findings for policy and future research.

This article explores the role of land cover in relation to housing type and tenure in shaping exposure to extreme urban heat, focusing on residents of mobile and manufactured housing (MH). We hypothesize that MH residents will experience greater exposure to extreme heat than those living in other housing types due to lower levels of proximate vegetation. This hypothesis is based on the unique property relations and tenure regimes that characterize MH, which may disincentivize investments in planting and maintaining trees and vegetation in arid environments. To test this hypothesis, we compare the amount of vegetation on properties across housing types, within-type tenure arrangements and between three urbanized areas in Arizona with different levels of exposure to extreme heat. To conduct this comparison, we combine multispectral land cover data for 1.7 million parcels with tax assessor data and building footprints to measure land cover at a high resolution. We find that MH units have significantly less vegetation than single-family residential properties, and that MH units in MH parks have less vegetation than those on individual lots. We conclude that municipalities should promote (e.g. through incentives or other policy interventions) the planting of more vegetation around MH units where there is a risk of extreme heat exposure. Future research can expand this analysis with a closer examination of how municipal ordinances and policies affect land cover by housing type and tenure.