In past issues, I have frequently bemoaned our cultural affinity for simple solutions to complex problems and reminded readers that there is no easy fix for the housing affordability crisis. But in the spirit of New Year’s resolutions—and recognizing that it’s easy to pillory “flavor of the month” solutions and harder to put forth viable alternatives—I’ll take a stab at describing an approach to housing that I think can be effective.

Complex problems need to be attacked on multiple fronts. To confront the affordable housing crisis, we need to do three things, at a minimum. First, we must defend and preserve our current stock of affordable housing. Second, we must identify and fix systemic problems that impede our ability to produce new housing. Third, we need to identify and cultivate new opportunities, incentives, and approaches that expand our productive potential and facilitate production.

We need to build a portfolio of solutions with multiple policies in each of these categories. The most recent issue of Land Lines documents a few ways policy makers are doing that. It includes a feature on the increasing calls for zoning reform at the state level—and local resistance to those calls—by Anthony Flint. Loren Berlin offers a story on a heroic undertaking by the Port of Cincinnati to keep the city’s single-family housing stock available for purchase by local families and out of the hands of outside investors. Jon Gorey examines efforts to preserve and expand manufactured housing, a mostly overlooked but critical component of the nation’s affordable housing supply. For my part, I’ll offer a contribution to the third category, a land-centric approach with great potential to expand production: adaptive reuse of commercial buildings.

According to the commerce industry organization ICSC, there are 115,857 shopping centers in the United States. This includes 1,220 large malls (with an average of around 900,000 square feet of retail space and 70 acres of land); 68,936 strip malls (averaging 13,000 feet of retail space and two acres of land); and thousands of other discount centers, factory outlets, and neighborhood centers (accounting for more than 4 billion square feet of retail space and 400,000 acres of land). Even before the pandemic, a significant share of these centers was imperiled by online retail. Real estate insiders have long predicted that one-quarter of large U.S. malls were at risk of closing, and the pandemic only accelerated this decline. Although vacant malls became convenient sites for mass COVID testing and vaccinations, insiders began to predict that more than one-third of large malls would be vacant or abandoned in the next few years.

Crisis and opportunity are frequent bedfellows. The retail crisis offers what might be our best opportunity to solve the housing crisis. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the toughest housing markets in the country, Peter Calthorpe estimates that we could build a quarter of a million new housing units by repurposing underutilized retail space along a single roadway—El Camino Real—that runs some 40 miles from San Jose to San Francisco through 16 municipalities. This would help alleviate the severe housing shortage in the region, and it would create sufficient residential density to support public transit, contributing to state and national efforts to mitigate the climate crisis. And the residential growth might generate sufficient foot traffic to support multiple commercial uses. With this three-fer, the big question is, why hasn’t redevelopment of El Camino Real already begun? Mostly because of multiple manmade, complicating factors.

As I’ve noted before, redevelopment is much harder than development on greenfield sites. One needs to undo whatever had been done on the site, while orienting multiple stakeholders with different interests toward a shared vision. To make matters worse, there are significant manmade roadblocks. First, adverse fiscal incentives interfere with jurisdictions’ willingness to consider changing land uses. Commercial property generates a big share of local revenue, not only through property taxes, but also through the local share of the sales tax and other fees and charges. Residential redevelopment might replace only a small share of the lost revenue. Second, redevelopment projects are difficult to finance. New visionary projects might excite developers; they signal uncertainty and risk for lenders and underwriters. Third, redeveloping a commercial corridor into residential or mixed-use requires zoning changes, which are notoriously fraught. In the case of El Camino Real, 16 zoning boards would need to approve rezoning for the project to proceed. While it might not require unanimous participation among all 16 cities and towns, a critical mass would be needed for the redevelopment to manifest its potential.

Just because it is hard does not mean redeveloping commercial properties into higher-density, mixed-use developments cannot be done. Each of the noted obstacles can be overcome, and all have been overcome in other places. For example, one of the largest development projects in the country, the Tysons Partnership in Tysons, Virginia, is redeveloping a 2,700+-acre commercial district into a transit-friendly, mixed-use development. The project has been underway for more than a decade and already includes 11 multifamily residential buildings. The Partnership plans to quadruple the residential population of the formerly prototypical “edge city,” which housed around 25,000 people but employed around 125,000. They are leveraging four new stops on the Silver Line of the Washington Metro to become the urban center of Fairfax County, hoping to become the poster child for the “new new urbanism.”

In Memphis, a Sears distribution center that was abandoned for almost three decades was redeveloped into a “vertical urban village” called Crosstown Concourse. The 10-story building on 16 acres of land now hosts a charter school, a performing arts center, more than 600,000 square feet of commercial space, and 270 apartments. It is already catalyzing new development in the neighborhoods that surround it.

Outside of Seattle, developers are building a new anchor tenant for the suburban Alderwood Mall—300 apartments with underground parking. This will compensate for the loss of their former anchor, Sears; provide much-needed housing in a hugely stressed housing market; and provide a base of consumers to shop in the remaining stores in the struggling mall.

Although they might not be as lengthy as El Camino Real, there are hundreds and hundreds of underutilized commercial corridors across the country. If we could redevelop them as medium-density, mixed-use developments, we could put a huge dent in the current national housing deficit. There is also no shortage of abandoned or underutilized commercial buildings like Sears Crosstown; half-vacant commercial districts like Tysons; and struggling or abandoned megamalls like Alderwood that offer similar prime opportunities for redevelopment.

By my very conservative estimates, if we redevelop 20 percent of these commercial sites to low- to medium-density mixed-use standards (10 homes per acre), we could add 1.1 million new housing units and preserve millions of square feet of commercial space with a better shot at vibrancy. If we redevelop 25 percent of the sites at 15 homes per acre, we could add 2.1 million housing units. And if we could redevelop 30 percent of the sites at 20 homes per acre, we could add 3.4 million new housing units.

This is not a technical challenge. We cracked the code on adaptive reuse decades ago. We need to simplify the process to facilitate scaled redevelopment and establish new, more effective public-private partnerships to get it done. The public sector needs to step up to de-risk projects through accelerated permitting, co-financing, and smart financial incentives. The private sector needs to quit trying to build on virgin land and find more creative ways to redevelop obsolete sites. If you want to visualize the kinds of developments that are possible, look no further than Julie Campoli’s masterpiece Made for Walking, published by the Lincoln Institute in 2012. With thousands of sites to choose from, we can establish how to produce and reproduce the kinds of neighborhoods described in the book and reduce the perceived risks of development with each successful project.

The beleaguered commercial sector offers most of the elements needed to address our current housing crisis. It has land that is already served by basic infrastructure—water, sewer, power—and that is usually accessible to transit or otherwise surrounded by parking. It often sits in prime locations. By mixing uses, we offer two huge benefits for the commercial side: workers and customers. But the societal benefits are even more profound. So let’s pursue this strategy, along with single-family zoning reform and affordable housing preservation, and see if we can resolve the national housing crisis once and for all.

George W. McCarthy is president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

Image: A crowd gathers for the opening of Crosstown Concourse, a former Sears distribution center in Memphis, Tennessee, that was redeveloped into a mixed-use space containing a charter school, retail space, apartments, and a performing arts center. Credit: Crosstown Concourse.

Statewide measures to change zoning at the local level have passed or are under consideration in several states. The aim is to allow a range of more affordable housing options and to create more equitable and sustainable communities. Opposition based on the tradition of local control over land use has been building, however. Find out more about current reform efforts below, and read our article The State of Local Zoning to learn more about the history of zoning and the reasons behind the push for reform.

Arizona. State representatives César Chávez (D) and Steve Kaiser (R) introduced a bill in 2022 allowing multifamily housing or increased single-family-home density on land zoned for agriculture or single-family homes. Following fierce opposition, the proposal was rewritten to establish a committee to study housing supply.

California. In 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom (D) signed a bill eliminating parking requirements near transit and legalizing mixed-income multifamily housing in all commercial areas. That followed the statewide legalization of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in 2016, and a 2021 measure allowing property owners to split a single-family home or lot into duplexes or fourplexes. Opponents have vowed to reverse that law through a ballot initiative.

Connecticut. A sweeping reform bill passed in 2021 forbids local zoning that caps the number of multifamily housing units or discriminates against lower-income residents, in a state where 90 percent of land is reserved for single-family homes as of right. The package also legalizes ADUs, caps minimum parking requirements, enforces affordable housing targets, and eliminates the terms “character,” “overcrowding of land,” and “undue concentration of population” as the legal basis for zoning regulations.

Maine. A package introduced in early 2022 would have created a state oversight board with the power to override local decisions about critical housing projects; it also would have eliminated caps on growth instituted by municipalities citing “overcrowding.” Those provisions were removed, leaving a law that allows ADUs on land zoned for single-family homes.

Maryland. A 2020 bill to increase housing density in higher-income areas that have a concentration of jobs and access to transit failed to progress, as did another measure requiring municipalities to allow ADUs. Baltimore has considered ending single-family-only zoning on its own.

Massachusetts. Under the MBTA Communities law passed in 2021 and signed by Governor Charlie Baker (R), multifamily housing at a density of 15 units per acre must be allowed by right near transit stations, or state funding for infrastructure and other projects will be withheld. Several communities have challenged the policy, and some have indicated willingness to forgo the funding rather than comply.

Montana. In late 2022, a housing task force appointed by Governor Greg Gianforte (R) recommended opening areas zoned for single-family homes to duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes, and overhauling other restrictive local zoning regulations. The head of the organization representing Montana cities and towns called the effort “straight out of California.” The legislature is expected to consider related proposals this year.

Nebraska. A bill introduced in 2020 and intended to ban single-family-only zoning and allow fourplexes was replaced by a measure that requires only that cities and towns show they are working toward affordable housing.

North Carolina. Bipartisan legislation in 2021 called for allowing duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and townhomes in any residential zoning district with water and sewer service, and allowing ADUs. That proposal stalled after opposition from local jurisdictions.

Oregon. The first state in the country to ban single-family-only zoning, Oregon enacted a law in 2019 that requires most cities with populations over 1,000 to allow duplexes, and requires municipalities of 25,000 or more to allow townhouses, triplexes, and fourplexes.

Utah. A measure passed in 2022 leverages state funding for local zoning reform that makes it easier to build middle-income housing and transit-oriented development. In late 2022, the state legislature was also considering withholding state funds for communities that lack a housing master plan, and overriding local zoning and hearings processes to allow landowners to build affordable housing.

Virginia. Governor Glenn Youngkin (R), who has been critical of NIMBYism, released a plan in November that recommends linking state funding to local housing plans and investigating comprehensive zoning reform.

Washington. Legislation under consideration would allow greater density at transit stations and permit two-, three-, and four-family homes in areas now zoned for single-family homes.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor to Land Lines.

Image: Accessory dwelling unit in Seattle. Credit: Sightline Institute via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

Making the case that antiquated rules governing development in the United States are driving up housing prices amid a growing affordability crisis, advocates for statewide zoning reform are seeking to build on recent successes from California to Connecticut. But statewide mandates are encountering resistance from those defending local control of land use, a system that has prevailed for a century.

While the rule changes being implemented or considered are at a technical level previously only familiar to urban planning professionals, they could have an outsized impact—and not just on the availability of housing. Zoning, its critics say, has also locked in racial segregation and perpetuated environmentally unsustainable land use patterns.

The changes in question include banning single-family-only zoning; allowing multifamily housing in more places, including adjacent to transit stops; reducing or eliminating costly minimum parking requirements; and lifting prohibitions on accessory dwelling units (ADUs).

Efforts to reform zoning have gained momentum in part because the issue is surprisingly bipartisan, attracting supporters ranging from free market conservatives who favor streamlining government regulation to progressives concerned about homelessness and seeking to right racial wrongs.

Not only blue states along the coasts, but others regarded as red, such as Utah, are engaged in some type of zoning reform. In Virginia, Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin has been speaking out against NIMBYism, the “not in my backyard” opposition by established residents to new housing development. To address the rising costs residents face, he said shortly after taking office in 2022, “we must tackle the root causes: unnecessary regulation, overburdensome and inefficient local governments, restrictive zoning policies, and an ideology of fighting tooth and nail against any new development.”

The biggest driver of reform has been the lack of affordable housing, which is wreaking havoc with local economies. Home prices rose more than 20 percent nationwide from March 2021 to March 2022. In June 2022, Realtor.com reported that rents in the country’s 50 largest metro areas had jumped 26.6 percent since 2019, the latest in a string of record increases. According to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, 30 percent of all U.S. households had unaffordable rent or mortgage payments in 2020, defined as exceeding 30 percent of monthly household income; a growing number of Americans spend half their income on housing. Workers often can’t live near their places of employment; outright homelessness is increasingly visible.

“Even people who are the beneficiaries of the California housing crisis, maybe folks who bought a home a few decades ago [and have seen their home values appreciate], they’re finding that their adult children can’t live within two or three hours of them. They’re finding that if they want to retire, they probably have to leave the state,” said M. Nolan Gray, author of Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. Whether in California or Utah, Gray said, residents are confronting similar “housing affordability issues that are affecting the middle class—and they’re looking for solutions.”

Still, the effort to apply new standards statewide is facing fierce political opposition at the local level, where land use decisions have historically been made, and where the right to set zoning has been heavily guarded since higher levels of government granted that power a century ago. The resistance warns against “imperialistic rezoning from state capitals,” in the words of one critic, framing the mandates aimed at increasing housing supply as inappropriate state preemption.

Responding to those who oppose any change in local regulations for development, state lawmakers have watered down statewide reform efforts by adding opt-outs or removing penalties for noncompliance. In some cases, the stirrings of reform have been shut down entirely. In Nebraska, a bill requiring municipalities with over 5,000 residents to allow fourplexes and other “missing middle” housing was replaced by a measure requiring only evidence that local jurisdictions were working on creating more affordable housing. (See our state-by-state guide to recent reforms in a dozen states.)

In Massachusetts, the program known as MBTA Communities—signed by Republican Governor Charlie Baker in 2021—requires cities and towns to allow multifamily housing near transit stations by right, with a minimum density of 15 units per acre. But many communities have challenged that mandate—and have indicated they are prepared to do without the state funding that will be withheld if they don’t comply.

If the key to any public policy reform lies in implementation, that may be especially true with something as entrenched as local control over land use. States intent on reform must convince localities that changing zoning in targeted ways is achievable and will be beneficial. Technical assistance and education, facilitated by state agencies and nonprofit organizations, will help, said Massachusetts-based researcher Amy Dain, who has conducted research for the Lincoln Institute and has documented how suburban communities around Boston have erected a “paper wall” of bureaucracy that hobbles attempts by developers to build multifamily housing.

In the case of the MBTA Communities act, she said, “the state is giving cities and towns lots of flexibility in deciding how to draw districts [of greater density] and how to write the requirements. It’s at the local level that the sites for transit-oriented multifamily housing development are selected and the dimensional requirements for new housing are established.”

The success of statewide zoning reform in the future may well hinge on the promise of that kind of state-local collaboration.

THOUGH MANY CITIES have been masterfully planned and designed over the centuries, zoning is a 20th century phenomenon. The need for a framework of rules and regulations emerged as a reaction to explosive growth in U.S. cities after the turn of the century, concurrent with industrialization and the growth of manufacturing; massive immigration; and advances in technology, particularly in the transportation sector, including the streetcar, subway, and automobile.

The call for zoning was part of a progressive campaign to relieve congestion and to improve living conditions and public health—to make sure a tannery was not located right next door to a rooming house, for example. But it was also designed to control where immigrants and people of color could live. The first U.S. cities to create zoning included New York City and Berkeley, California, both circa 1916.

In 1923, the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act provided model legislation states could adapt to grant municipalities the power to dictate land uses. Drafted by a Department of Commerce committee that had been assembled by Herbert Hoover and included Frederick Law Olmsted, the enabling act was adopted by all 50 states. The landmark 1926 Supreme Court case Euclid vs. Ambler Realty, which saw a realty company sue for the right to develop land across several newly implemented zoning districts in an Ohio town, affirmed that zoning was a local responsibility, and indeed a police power to reduce conflicts and improve public health.

The result was that more than 30,000 local governments developed their own regulation of land uses and structures, including allowable height, bulk, floor-to-area ratios, lot sizes, and setbacks. A common approach was separating commercial, industrial, and residential uses, designating parcels by category in multicolored zoning maps that are still in use to this day. On the residential side, zones for single-family homes, often on large lots, were most prevalent; areas set aside for multifamily housing, including even two-family structures, were much smaller, if they existed at all.

Although communities used similar approaches, zoning became a highly decentralized system in which each jurisdiction developed particular rules in complicated formats. “Even for an expert, these zoning codes can be hard to read, and it’s nearly impossible to compare them to each other,” said Cornell University law professor Sara Bronin, who was part of a major zoning reform effort in Connecticut and is now leading the development of the National Zoning Atlas. That crowdsourced project is working to create a user-friendly, interactive zoning map of each state in the country.

ABOUT THE NATIONAL ZONING ATLAS

When Sara Bronin, now a Cornell University professor, first got involved in zoning reform in Connecticut, a clear need emerged: identifying what, exactly, the local land use regulations were in the state’s 169 cities and towns. Finding the answer took reviewing 2,622 zoning districts and more than 30,000 pages of text, and using spreadsheets, maps, and geographic information systems to organize everything. That exercise inspired Bronin and her small team of collaborators to launch a more ambitious project: documenting local zoning practices in all 50 states to create a National Zoning Atlas.

The aim of this crowdsourced project is to translate and standardize the country’s zoning codes, building an interactive online map that’s easy for the public to use and understand. The National Zoning Atlas seeks to help broaden participation in land use decisions, identify opportunities for zoning reform, and narrow an information gap that currently favors land speculators, institutional investors, and homeowners over socioeconomically disadvantaged groups. It will also illuminate regional and statewide trends and provide a resource for national planning efforts related to housing production, transportation infrastructure, and climate change.

A growing collaborative of researchers is currently working in 14 states, from New Hampshire to Hawaii. The team welcomes collaborators from all states. To learn more, visit www.zoningatlas.org.

The intensely local nature of zoning created another attribute that has helped effectively lock the rules in place: significant constituencies of established residents who refer to the rules to block new development. Zoning—as well as environmental regulations and, in some cases, historic preservation restrictions—was used as a shield in separated-use suburbs dominated by single-family zoning and in cities, where residents grew wary of redevelopment in tightly knit neighborhoods. Through the 1960s and 1970s, local neighborhood organizations grew stronger using veto power over a wide variety of redevelopment proposals, said Jacob Anbinder, who is writing a dissertation at Harvard about local control and community organizing.

The combination of complicated rules and staunch defenders made the system seem impenetrable. But some of the first challenges to the notion that zoning was sacrosanct—suggestions that local land use regulations had become calcified and obsolete—began emerging about 25 years ago, primarily on an environmental basis.

The smart growth and New Urbanism movements contended that the separation of uses was fostering environmentally damaging car dependence and had made mixed-use, walkable living arrangements essentially illegal.

“If you look at historical prezoning neighborhoods, the standard would be that you would have life’s daily necessities within walking distance,” said Gray. “You might have a corner grocery, you might have a corner barbershop, you might have a corner medical office, or at least cities could achieve densities such that transit would actually work. There was density high enough to be able to take a bus or even to take a train.

“Zoning makes all of that very difficult,” he said. “It really privileges the most environmentally inefficient land use patterns. It’s clear, when you look at the data, that many Americans actually want to live in an apartment, in a walkable neighborhood where they might not have a car—and zoning, in many cases, criminalizes that.”

In what might be described as an initial and more subtle attempt to get communities to reassess their zoning, planner promoting alternatives to sprawl introduced the idea of the “form-based code,” which reoriented zoning around the composition and massing of buildings, instead of focusing on the use and activities that go on inside. Others tried to help small and midsized cities make incremental adjustments that enabled more urban landscapes. “Meeting local governments where they are” was the mantra for the Project for Code Reform initiative launched by the Congress for the New Urbanism in 2016, said Lynn Richards, who was president of the organization at the time. “It was not intended as a full audit, but rather identifying the biggest little change a community could make to improve the regulatory environment in that place,” she said, adding that incremental changes were instituted in Michigan, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin.

For the most part, however, the status quo remained, even as public awareness of the role of zoning in perpetuating racial segregation grew, adding to concerns about its impact. Historical and demographic research around the country illustrated the damaging and lasting impacts of land use decisions in places from Los Angeles to Manchester, New Hampshire. Local governments that had been handed the responsibility of overseeing land use had failed to ensure equitable and sustainable communities, according to this critique, and were showing no signs of changing their ways.

“A century of decentralized and isolated local control of land produced unacceptable levels of racial and economic segregation, urban sprawl that contributed to the climate crisis, and an almost unassailable housing crisis,” wrote Lincoln Institute President George W. McCarthy in an essay in the October 2022 issue of Land Lines. “It is sometimes necessary for higher levels of government to supersede the decisions of lower levels of government to promote general welfare or address negative externalities that are artifacts of uncoordinated actions at lower levels.”

A FEW CITIES, including Minneapolis and Portland, have been in the vanguard, taking steps to ban single-family-only zoning, for example. A framework of incentives and penalties encouraging denser and more inclusive development has also been floated at the federal level under the Obama and Biden administrations.

The rationale for statewide standards, however, has become increasingly clear: to eliminate the patchwork of different policies and regulations within metropolitan regions. Some communities might allow ADUs, for example, while others prohibit them. A more uniform regulatory regime would level the playing field, reflecting actual homebuying and renting aspirations and making it possible to develop a responsive regional approach to issues like the current affordability crisis.

The zoning reform measures that have passed or are under consideration range from relatively small tweaks, such as legalizing ADUs or eliminating minimum parking requirements, to more significant preemptions that allow multifamily housing, whether two-, three-, or four-family townhomes or larger apartment buildings, in areas zoned exclusively for single-family homes.

California has been a leader, first legalizing ADUs statewide, then allowing duplexes and lot splits in single-family zones, and mixed-income multifamily housing in all commercial areas, while also eliminating minimum parking requirements at transit stations. Connecticut is close behind, with requirements that cities and towns “affirmatively further fair housing” in their zoning, promote diverse housing options, legalize ADUs, and cap minimum parking requirements. The state’s newly adopted guidelines also prevent towns from enacting zoning that discriminates by income, caps the amount of multifamily housing in a community, or charges unreasonable or different fees for multifamily affordable housing.

An additional notable feature in Connecticut is the removal of the terms “character,” “overcrowding of land,” and “undue concentration of population” from state law as legal bases for zoning regulations. In their place, the bill allows towns to consider only the “physical site characteristics” of a district.

Reformers aspire to dig deeper on the issue of process, which has been shown to hinder and discourage new development by making it prohibitively costly. Recommendations include a “shot clock” limiting the length of the permitting process, and exemptions from lengthy review for small or mid-sized projects that clearly don’t have a major environmental impact.

OTHER STATES MULLING ZONING REFORM have included elements from the California and Connecticut reforms. But a pattern has emerged in which lawmakers propose tough measures—disallowing single-family-only zoning, for example—and then, in the face of opposition, prescribe milder reforms, such as lifting prohibitions on renting out carriage houses or apartments over garages.

Lawmakers appear to be responding to a predictable backlash against state mandates, which is premised on the basis that jurisdictions should not be subjected to blanket requirements that don’t fully consider local conditions.

Aaron Renn, a conservative urban analyst and contributing editor for City Journal, said he is “generally supportive of zoning liberalization as a tool to address housing supply shortages,” but is wary of putting states in control of local land use decisions because of the perceived risk that it will lead to one-size-fits-all policies. He expressed concern that state-level advocates of reform “argue that in most cases the upzoning won’t mean wholesale replacement of single-family homes with apartment buildings, but they won’t countenance any limits,” like putting a cap on the number of fourplexes in a neighborhood, and he worries that terms like “transit corridor” aren’t clearly defined.

Kimberly Fiorello, a Republican state representative for the Connecticut towns of Stamford and Greenwich, put it more bluntly, warning against the zoning reform package that was ultimately adopted by the state.

“Handing over local zoning control to ‘experts’ in Hartford should be an affront to anyone who believes in self-government and the right to private property,” she wrote in 2020, when zoning reform efforts led by state officials and the nonprofit coalition Desegregate Connecticut began gaining momentum. Fiorello and other Republicans even called at one point for a state constitutional amendment “to permit municipalities to enact and enforce zoning restrictions without regional or state interference.”

Preemption, in this case overriding local government, has been established as precedent in the area of housing and withstood legal challenges. In Massachusetts, Chapter 40B overrides local zoning to fast-track projects if 25 percent of the proposed units are affordable, in communities where the affordable housing stock is less than 10 percent. The landmark Mount Laurel case, first decided by the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1975, similarly required cities and towns to add their “fair share” of affordable housing as a priority that trumps local land use restrictions. In California, municipalities that don’t meet affordable housing goals are subject to the “builder’s remedy,” wherein developers can propose any housing project and it is automatically approved.

States pursuing meaningful reform thus must strike a balance between forcing compliance through penalties and other means, and supporting cities and towns more gently through the implementation process, assuring them they remain in control as they open up to more housing.

“Zoning has endured because it is embraced by local communities and local people. Planners should work to hold on to that enthusiasm, to give local communities local control, while supporting the myriad efforts to address the shortcomings of zoning in its current form,” said Harvey M. Jacobs, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands.

“Do localities need a nudge? Yes. Will they like it? No,” said Jacobs, who has conducted research with the Lincoln Institute on public policy and property rights. He predicts “somewhat of a cat-and-mouse game, between state-imposed standards and local implementation.”

IN THE MEANTIME, cities are acting on their own, with or without state mandates. The list of places approving reforms is growing, from communitywide upzoning in Walla Walla, Washington, to the approval of ADUs and elimination of parking requirements in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently joined the growing list of communities doing away with parking minimums.

Advocates are hoping to build on that momentum, relying in part on data analysis following implementation. Understandably, since this wave of reform efforts is relatively recent, there are few studies that show changes in zoning directly result in more housing affordability or other desirable outcomes.

An analysis of rents for freshly authorized ADUs by the Southern California Association of Governments showed the small-scale housing in five Los Angeles–area counties was affordable to those earning 80 percent of area median income and lower—although in many cases no rent was charged at all, as family members moved in to relieve overcrowding. “That’s essentially affordable housing production at scale and at no cost to the taxpayer,” said Gray, the Arbitrary Lines author. “That’s all just because of removing some of these zoning barriers to ADUs.”

Two working papers by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University determined that zoning that allows multifamily housing is associated with substantially larger population shares of Black and Hispanic residents than zoning for single-family housing—a combined nine percent higher in Greater Boston, and 21 percent in the Twin Cities metro area.

Bronin, who is leading the National Zoning Atlas effort at Cornell, said research she is about to publish found that simply eliminating minimum parking requirements could enable the creation of thousands of additional units of housing in 15 Connecticut cities. The greatest potential was in Bridgeport, the state’s largest city, which eliminated its minimum parking requirements for housing in 2022. “We’re hopeful that will unlock new investment in Bridgeport, which is pretty close to New York City and, like several of the large Connecticut cities, is struggling economically—but that one single reform has a lot of promise for the creation of new housing, which in turn will drive down prices,” Bronin said.

Though there are conflicting studies, some research suggests that increasing housing supply, even at the high end, can ultimately have a downward impact on rents and home prices. The growing consensus among policy makers and economists is that adding different types of housing across a broad region will be beneficial in the long run.

In that sense, those clamoring for even incremental zoning reform are faced with a challenge akin to climate change, which would continue even if all emissions could be halted tomorrow. Market conditions won’t change quickly, but acting now, the argument goes, will set the stage for a less disastrous lack of affordability in the future.

The case can be made on the basis of that long-term economic viability, said Dain, referring to the Massachusetts mandate for upzoning in areas around transit stations. “This isn’t really a technical change, it’s a major adaptive effort for the whole region—to make sure people will all have homes and that the region grows in a sustainable, resilient way.”

Bronin agrees that modifying rules established long ago can lead to big-picture payoffs—even as that is a complicated message to convey, since zoning has for such a long time remained unseen in the background.

“Zoning is the most significant regulatory power of local government,” she said. “It not only governs where we can put housing and factories and parks and shops—it actually has significant impacts on the economy, and even, I think, the very structure of our society.” Recalling the multiyear reform effort in Connecticut, she noted that “when we started . . . we knew that there was a place in the public conversation for zoning and the time was right to link reform of our outdated zoning laws with much better social and economic outcomes that would be beneficial to Connecticut as a whole.

“I think we surprised people in the traction that it gained and the allies that it gained,” she said, noting that Connecticut is known as “the land of steady habits.” Because that culture ultimately opened up to change, she said, she has hope for the reform attempts underway in other places: “I’m pretty optimistic about these efforts.”

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor to Land Lines.

Image: A protester urges Connecticut lawmakers to “keep zoning local” in 2021, shortly before the state passed comprehensive zoning reform legislation. Credit: Kassi Jackson, Hartford Courant/Tribune News Service.

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 Land Matters Podcast: The Quest for Zoning Zen

En ocasiones, se considera que la zonificación es un elemento atemporal de las políticas de suelo y la planificación. Y lo es. La zonificación se originó en Asia hace más de tres milenios. En aquella época, se usaba para designar los usos del suelo más allá de las murallas de las ciudades o para separar a las personas por castas. La práctica se adoptó más recientemente en los Estados Unidos con fines similares. En el s. XXI, es uno de los mayores impedimentos para la sostenibilidad de las ciudades estadounidenses.

Hace varios años que expreso mi opinión sobre el control hiperlocal del suelo. Hace una década, en un panel con Nic Retsinas, entonces director del Joint Center for Housing Studies de Harvard, opiné que el gobierno local y los controles del uso del suelo eran “dinosaurios” que hacían casi imposible coordinar la planificación del transporte regional y los esfuerzos en materia de vivienda asequible. Nic nos recordó a mí y a los asistentes que había fuerzas políticas y económicas poderosas que se interponían con firmeza en el camino hacia la reforma de las políticas de suelo. También señaló que los dinosaurios vivieron millones de años antes de extinguirse, y que se extinguieron debido a la colisión de un asteroide con la Tierra, no a causa de la selección natural.

Pero ahora, el mundo de las políticas de suelo presenta algo casi tan raro como un asteroide que cambiará el planeta: el acuerdo bipartidista. Numerosos estados azules, rojos y púrpuras aprobaron leyes para impedir la zonificación local y así avanzar en objetivos políticos esenciales, o están contemplando la posibilidad de hacerlo. ¿Por qué se dio este cambio repentino? Porque muchos gestores de políticas ahora entienden que la crisis nacional de la vivienda asequible no puede abordarse sin cambios estructurales en las reglas. Otros gestores de políticas saben que no podemos abordar una de las manifestaciones más negativas de la zonificación (la segregación espacial por raza y clase) sin una acción afirmativa agresiva.

Si bien hay un acuerdo bipartidista sobre la necesidad de una reforma, las motivaciones de los gestores de políticas son muy diferentes. Los partidarios de la derecha argumentan que la crisis de la vivienda es producto del exceso de regulaciones que ahogan la producción de viviendas. Estos críticos creen que la reforma de la zonificación desatará fuerzas del mercado que harán frente a la crisis de la vivienda y acelerarán la producción de unidades nuevas. Los partidarios de la izquierda argumentan que no podemos construir viviendas asequibles en los lugares que más lo necesitan, debido a las políticas de suelo que excluyeron a las personas por motivos de raza e ingresos durante generaciones, como el tamaño mínimo de las parcelas y la prohibición de las viviendas multifamiliares. Según ellos, la reforma de la zonificación posibilitará la construcción de viviendas asequibles en lugares que presentan “grandes oportunidades”, con buenas escuelas y trabajos decentes.

El poder del Estado para impedir la zonificación local no es nuevo. En 1969, Massachusetts aprobó el Capítulo 40B, una medida que le permite al Estado anular la zonificación local y aprobar desarrollos multifamiliares de ingresos mixtos en jurisdicciones con pocas viviendas asequibles. Aunque contribuyó a fomentar el desarrollo de viviendas asequibles en algunos suburbios adinerados, no supuso un cambio significativo y pocos estados se plantearon seguir su ejemplo, hasta hace muy poco.

Ahora, unos diez estados están dispuestos a impedir la zonificación local a fin de permitir el desarrollo de múltiples unidades de vivienda en lotes que actualmente están zonificados para casas unifamiliares. Por ejemplo, en Connecticut, Nebraska, Utah, Oregón, Maryland, California y Washington, se permite añadir unidades accesorias (ADU, por su sigla en inglés) a los lotes unifamiliares; en Virginia, Utah, Nebraska, Washington y Maryland, se permite la construcción de “viviendas intermedias”, es decir, casas adosadas para entre dos y cuatro familias, en lotes destinados a viviendas unifamiliares; y en Oregón, California, Virginia, Maine y Washington, se impide por completo que los gobiernos locales prohíban la construcción de viviendas multifamiliares en parcelas unifamiliares. Recientemente, Massachusetts y California también ordenaron la recalificación en comunidades con mayor acceso a servicios de transporte. Está claro que el control local sobre el uso del suelo ya no es algo sacrosanto.

Si bien la zonificación es una práctica milenaria, tiene menos de un siglo en la mayor parte de los Estados Unidos. Los estados comenzaron a otorgarles a los municipios el poder de definir el uso del suelo en la década de 1920, en función de la Ley de Habilitación de Zonificación Estatal Estándar dictada por el Departamento de Comercio en 1923. Pero los estados también pueden dar marcha atrás una vez que otorgan derechos. A veces, resulta necesario que los niveles más altos de gobierno pasen por alto las decisiones de los niveles más bajos, a fin de fomentar el bienestar general o abordar cuestiones externas negativas que son producto de acciones no coordinadas de estos niveles más bajos de gobierno. Muchas veces, los esfuerzos estatales para desestimar a los gobiernos locales no son bienintencionados; por ejemplo, cuando los gestores de políticas estatales restringen los impuestos a la propiedad inmobiliaria para congraciarse con los votantes. En el caso de la zonificación, la necesidad de que el estado actúe está claramente justificada.

Deberíamos celebrar el hecho de que estamos yendo en la dirección correcta y que se está generando la voluntad política para abordar un desafío que, hasta hace poco, se consideraba imposible. Pero aún nos queda mucho por aprender sobre la zonificación. Cada estado, y en muchos casos cada jurisdicción dentro de él, desarrolló sus propias convenciones de zonificación, lo que hace que sea muy difícil comparar las prácticas. También hace que sea casi imposible comprender las implicaciones de las decisiones de zonificación sobre el valor del suelo y los patrones de desarrollo, o cómo la reforma de la zonificación podría abordar desafíos grandes, como la crisis de la vivienda, la desigualdad espacial o la expansión urbana descontrolada. Esto también está cambiando.

El año pasado, un pequeño equipo de visionarios en la Universidad Cornell, liderados por la profesora Sara Bronin, crearon un mapa de zonificación para el estado de Connecticut. Mediante hojas de cálculo, mapas y sistemas de información geográfica, el equipo documentó de manera increíblemente detallada las prácticas de zonificación de 180 jurisdicciones con 2.622 distritos de zonificación. Asombrosamente, esto requirió la revisión de más de 30.000 páginas de texto en las que se describían las prácticas de zonificación de un solo estado.

Esta tarea hercúlea aparentemente no fue un desafío lo suficientemente grande para este intrépido grupo de investigadores. Recientemente, el equipo de Cornell emprendió un esfuerzo para crear un Mapa de zonificación nacional. Ahora, con una metodología probada en el campo tras la creación del Mapa de zonificación de Connecticut, se propusieron recopilar, con ayuda del público, datos de zonificación del resto de país mediante los mismos métodos. Hasta ahora, participan equipos autoorganizados de 12 estados. Cuando logren crear el mapa nacional (y el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo hará todo lo posible para que esto suceda), comenzará una nueva era para los académicos de políticas de suelo. Los debates sobre los costos, los beneficios y las consecuencias de la reforma de la zonificación tendrán sustento en datos reales.

La reforma de la zonificación por sí sola no es suficiente para resolver la crisis nacional de la vivienda, pero es necesaria. Es importante que contemos con más información sobre las prácticas de zonificación actuales y los posibles beneficios de las prácticas de zonificación mejoradas para abordar los problemas generados durante décadas de malas prácticas. Un siglo de control local, descentralizado y aislado del suelo produjo niveles inaceptables de segregación racial y económica, una expansión urbana descontrolada que contribuyó a la crisis climática y una crisis de vivienda asequible casi inexpugnable. Mediante la alineación sin precedentes de la voluntad política con las herramientas y conocimientos nuevos, las soluciones posibles a esta triple amenaza están más cerca que nunca. 

Crédito de la imagen: Mapa de Zonificación Nacional

Despite the engaging warmth in his voice, Jim Bennett is not what you’d call a people person. “I’m basically asocial, even though I worked retail—or maybe because I worked retail for so long,” he quips. It’s late fall when we speak, so he’s bracing for the chaotic social cyclone that is a big family Thanksgiving; his wife, Kathryn, is decidedly more enthusiastic about hosting everyone for dinner.

The couple certainly has room to entertain in the home they bought three years ago. The open kitchen and dining area is roughly 13 feet by 30 feet, and easily fits a pair of full-size tables. “We have 16 to 20 people over for Thanksgiving, and it’s not crowded,” Bennett says. What’s remarkable is that all that space—the big, blank canvas upon which the Bennetts plan to paint their golden years—was created on a factory floor, trucked up the highway, and now sits in a 55-and-over manufactured home community called Woodland Estates, about 50 miles northwest of Boston. With its open layout, spacious primary bedroom, office space, and two bathrooms, one with a roll-in shower, theirs is not the “mobile home” of yore.

Yet it was mobility, of a different sort, that inspired the couple to design and purchase the house. Bennett, 64, has been living with multiple sclerosis for over 20 years, and knows that he’s likely to face increasing difficulty getting around. “We were living in a 100-year-old, two-story home,” he says, and they needed a more practical setup.

Manufactured homes are perfectly suited to single-level living, almost by definition. And at Woodland Estates, the new homes are built with accessibility in mind. The Bennetts looked at some accessible apartments, but the rents were higher than the monthly installments they would end up paying on their home loan. “It just made so much sense in the long run with what I might have coming at me,” Bennett says—and he acknowledges that he’s even beginning to enjoy the sense of community he and his wife have found in their new neighborhood.

Increasingly, the Bennetts have company—and not just of the social variety. Homebuyers, local officials, and even the White House are coming to the same conclusion they did: manufactured housing can make a lot of sense, for a lot of people, and in a lot of places.

When it comes to manufactured housing, people tend to dwell on the “manufactured” part. That modest modifier carries with it a lot of cultural cargo and historical stigma. But as the home affordability crisis worsens, spreading from coastal cities to middle America, proponents of the industry say we ought to be focused on the second half of the phrase—because manufactured housing is, well, housing.

While outdated misperceptions of manufactured homes linger in the popular imagination—in the form of images of hurricane-battered mobile homes or poorly maintained trailer parks—the reality is that most modern manufactured homes, built to strict federal standards that supersede local building codes, are energy efficient, made of high-quality materials, and designed to be affordable. Although many are placed in dedicated communities like Woodland Estates, about half are on privately owned land, from rural areas to suburban subdivisions.

“We see manufactured housing as an important component to addressing the larger U.S. affordable housing crisis,” says Jim Gray, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

That’s one reason the Lincoln Institute now convenes the Innovations in Manufactured Homes (I’m HOME) Network, which for 20 years has been working with nonprofits, the private sector, and government agencies “to solve problems that are keeping manufactured housing from reaching its potential in the market,” says Gray, who led the Duty to Serve program at the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) before joining the Lincoln Institute.

Some 22 million Americans, most of whom earn less than $40,000 a year, already live in manufactured homes, making them the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the country. The Housing Supply Action Plan released by the White House in May mentions manufactured housing several times, identifying it as one of a few housing types that “directly meet identified local needs . . . [and are] not sufficiently provided by the market.”

It’s almost literally an off-the-shelf solution, one that can provide safe, sustainable housing for millions of Americans and help combat our affordable housing crisis.

An Urgent Need for Affordable Housing

The United States does not have enough affordable housing for everyone who needs it. And that’s partly due to “severe underbuilding” of smaller, entry-level homes, the kind that would appeal to downsizing retirees or first-time homebuyers.

From 1976 to 1979, as baby boomers were entering their twenties and thirties, the construction of entry-level, single-family houses averaged 418,000 a year, and represented more than a third of all new homes built, according to a report by government-sponsored mortgage entity Freddie Mac. In the 2010s, as a similarly sized generational cohort of millennials entered their homebuying years, U.S. builders averaged just 55,000 starter homes per year, and their share of the new construction market fell to a 50-year low of around 7 percent.

That’s a market need that manufactured housing is well positioned to fill. New site-built homes tend to be quite large, averaging over 2,400 square feet for the past decade, but the average manufactured home is under 1,500 square feet, according to U.S. Census data.

That smaller size, coupled with lower production costs, helps manufactured homes deliver a one-two punch on pricing, says Rachel Siegel, senior officer on the home financing research team at the Pew Charitable Trusts. “Manufactured housing is a lot less expensive per square foot than a site-built home,” Siegel says. “So you have two benefits there in terms of affordability.”

Stacey Epperson, founder and chief executive of Next Step—a nonprofit member of the I’m HOME Network that helps families purchase high-quality, Energy Star–rated manufactured homes—says its homes can cost 20 percent less to build, per square foot, than site-built counterparts. (Editor’s note: Lincoln Institute CEO George W. McCarthy is a member of the Next Step board.)

These homes are typically multi-section homes with a site-built look, Epperson says; when you factor in the array of sizes and styles available, the savings can be even greater. According to the Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI 2022), factory-built homes cost an average of $72 per square foot industrywide, compared to $143 per square foot for site-built homes.

Some of the reasons for the savings are obvious—there are no weather delays inside a factory, for example, so labor, materials, and carrying costs are all more predictable. Efficiencies of scale bring down supply costs, too. “If I’m the largest manufacturer, Clayton Homes, building 25,000 to 30,000 homes a year,” Epperson says, “my purchasing power is far more than the guy in the pickup truck building 100 homes a year.”

And there are other savings when it comes to materials. Compared to the dumpster full of wood trimmings and drywall scraps left over from a typical site-built home, building a house in a factory generates almost no waste. Even conscientious homebuilders squander a staggering amount of resources during construction: a new 1,600-square-foot home can generate up to 6,720 pounds of construction waste and still earn green building credits toward LEED certification. Meanwhile, Epperson says, “the waste on a Next Step home can fit into a single trash can.” That’s good for the environment and the homebuyer, who doesn’t have to pay for all those unused materials.

At a time when Americans need housing relief fast, manufactured homes also offer a speed advantage. Between the lack of weather disruptions, the ability to extend the workday through rotating shifts, and the streamlined designs and federal standards—which were put in place by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1976 and revised in the 1990s—homebuilding goes faster in a factory: once production is underway, a manufactured house can be completed in just three weeks. While a home is being assembled on the factory floor, on-site crews can do things like grade the lot for the house and lay utility connections, further hastening the overall pace of construction.

The manufactured housing industry built nearly 106,000 homes in 2021, a 15-year high. Demand for the houses is growing, and Epperson says homebuilders are capable of producing far more. But for manufactured housing to truly take off, this sector and those advocating for it must address thorny challenges related to financing, land tenure, and zoning.

Using Auto Loans to Buy Houses

Despite the relative affordability of manufactured housing, financing can be a big hurdle for would-be homebuyers. About three quarters of manufactured homes are titled as personal property, not real estate, and therefore aren’t eligible for a mortgage. That leaves buyers relying on personal property (or “chattel”) loans, which are more akin to auto loans than to mortgages, and tend to come with higher interest rates, shorter loan terms, and fewer consumer protections.

And even those loans can be surprisingly difficult to obtain.

“Our research has found that denial rates [on manufactured home loans] are astronomically high,” Siegel says. About 7 percent of completed mortgage applications for traditional site-built homes get denied, she says, but the rejection rate for manufactured home loans is nearly eight times that, at 54 percent. Even mortgages for manufactured homes classified as real property—meaning, in most states, that they’re placed on a permanent foundation on owned land and titled as real estate—are denied 40 percent of the time.

That’s a big obstacle to getting people into a house, Siegel says. The average price of a new manufactured home, excluding land, transportation, and other setup costs, was $124,900 in May 2022, according to the most recent Census data. That’s less expensive than a typical house, but it’s not exactly pocket change.

So when buyers are denied adequate financing, they may be forced to continue renting, seek out riskier loans, or pay cash for an older, lower-quality mobile home (see sidebar). Even for those who do qualify, personal property loans offer far less protection than mortgages. “When someone defaults on their loan in a real estate situation, there’s a pretty detailed foreclosure process that is designed to take some time so that residents have a chance to refinance or make other arrangements,” Gray explains. “But with personal property and chattel lending, there’s no foreclosure protection, and it’s often as easy as repossessing a car to take someone’s home away from them.”

Manufactured, Mobile, or Modular?

When it comes to factory-built housing, the term “mobile home” is commonly used and widely recognized. But in fact, it’s one of several industry-specific terms:

Mobile home refers to manufactured houses built before the mid-1970s. These structures, also known as trailers, were designed to be portable and were frequently made of substandard materials. In 1976, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) adopted standards to improve their quality and durability, codifying factors including the materials used and the ability to withstand wind, rain, and snow.

Manufactured housing refers to structures built after 1976 that meet HUD’s strict federal standards, which were updated in the 1990s. Like mobile homes, today’s manufactured homes are fitted with a metal chassis that allows them to be transported to their ultimate destination, where they can be placed on a temporary or permanent foundation. Manufactured housing is exempt from local building codes.

Modular homes also begin in factories, but they are not built on a chassis. Their components are assembled on-site and are attached to a permanent foundation. Modular homes are built to state and local building codes, not federal standards.

The Lincoln Institute and other members of the I’m HOME Network have pushed for Freddie Mac and its fellow federal mortgage entity Fannie Mae to play a bigger role in the manufactured housing market, for both real estate and chattel loans. While Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac purchase some 62 percent of residential mortgages in the United States, they back less than a quarter of manufactured home mortgages. Such loans are still a tiny fraction of their business: they purchased 169,411 manufactured home mortgages in 2021, up 50 percent from 2017, according to mortgage data firm Recursion. But at $20.2 billion, those loans represented less than 1 percent of their $2.63 trillion in overall mortgage financing in 2021, according to the Urban Institute.

They are also virtually absent from the chattel loan market, leaving it anemic and uncompetitive. “Currently, neither Fannie Mae nor Freddie Mac is actually doing anything with the personal property loan space,” Siegel says. “Even though they’re working on providing more mortgages in this market, they’re still not even dipping their toes into a pilot for personal property loans.”

Increasing their participation in both markets, Gray says, “will tend to create more national standards, and national standards will help drive competition and terms that are more favorable to consumers.” Siegel agrees, noting that manufactured home loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration through federal financing entity Ginnie Mae are denied far less often than conventional loans.

“This reinforces how important federally backed loan programs are as a source of financing for manufactured housing,” she says. The FHA does have a personal property loan designed for manufactured homes, called Title I, but it’s woefully out of date. While the FHA’s Title II mortgage program for single-family homes is updated annually, the loan terms and other requirements for Title I haven’t been revised since 2008, rendering the loans uncompetitive, Siegel says. Ginnie Mae backed more than 2,500 Title I manufactured home loans in 2009, totaling nearly $115 million, but only three such loans were issued in all of 2021, for a total of $101,500, across the entire country.

To its credit, the FHA is making an effort to resurrect the nearly defunct Title I program; both the Pew Charitable Trusts and the I’m HOME Network have submitted public comments with suggested improvements, such as better aligning Title I and Title II loans where sensible. “The current HUD leadership has really made a big priority of revising Title I and making it an effective program,” Gray says. “That’s definitely an important effort that is a complement to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac getting into the market.”

Getting Grounded

Financing a manufactured home is the first challenge, but figuring out where to put it can be just as vexing. Roughly half of manufactured-home owners also own the land on which their house sits, but millions more do not. Instead, in addition to purchasing their home, they might lease a pad in a manufactured housing community, where monthly rent includes the use of the land beneath their house and basic services such as water, road maintenance, and trash pickup.

For decades, this has typically been a reliable, relatively affordable arrangement. But in recent years, corporate investors have discovered that such communities can be lucrative cash generators. “The number of investors looking for mobile home parks to purchase is unprecedented,” says Paul Bradley, president of New Hampshire–based ROC USA, a nonprofit member of the I’m HOME Network that helps communities form cooperatives to purchase the land beneath their homes. From 2010 to 2020, he notes, mobile home parks represented “the highest returning of all real estate asset classes—offices, commercial, industrial, storage units, parking garages, you name it—with a 22 percent annual compounded return.”

The investor playbook is simple: Purchase a park and then raise the rents. While annual lot rent increases averaged 4.2 percent nationwide in 2021, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, residents from Michigan to California to Iowa have reported rent hikes of 10 to 15 percent, amounting to hundreds of dollars a month, after investors took over their parks.

The promise of that kind of profit has attracted a broad mix of investors to manufactured housing communities, from real estate investment trusts (REITs) to private equity firms to the sovereign wealth funds of foreign nations—like that of Singapore, which in 2017 invested nearly $1.5 billion to gain a majority ownership stake in 178 U.S. manufactured home communities.

In a typical rental market, tenants have enough options to keep rent hikes somewhat in check. But a manufactured home community isn’t a typical market. Despite the old moniker, a mobile home isn’t very “mobile”—it can cost upwards of $10,000 to move one. That can leave captive park residents under new ownership facing an impossible choice: either pay the jacked-up rents, spend thousands of dollars to relocate, or abandon their investment and home altogether.

This makes residents living on leased land particularly vulnerable, but there are simple and effective ways to stabilize these situations, Gray says. “Of course, the best solution is when people can own the land under their unit,” he says. In a manufactured home community, that takes some legwork, but it can be done. ROC USA has helped 303 communities in 21 states buy the land in their neighborhoods. Resident-owned communities can then elect their own boards and vote on everything from rent increases to community improvements.

The ROC USA model offers residents support in organizing a cooperative, as well as forgivable due diligence financing, so the newly formed co-op can hire a lawyer, engineer, and other professionals before making an informed offer. Their now tried-and-true approach creates a limited equity cooperative, which permanently preserves the community for affordable housing while allowing individual homeowners to build equity in their homes.

“We’re essentially helping low-income homeowners compete with deep-pocketed investors,” says Bradley. Six states have legislation that gives mobile home community residents the right of first refusal if their park’s owner decides to sell, Bradley says, allowing them time (albeit not a whole lot of it) to organize a cooperative, make a counteroffer, and secure financing. Colorado was the most recent to pass such legislation, joining Oregon, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

States can help in other ways, too, such as by ensuring certain minimum site-lease protections for residents of manufactured home communities, Gray says. Manufactured-home owners who rent space lack the full rights of a landowner, and they also enjoy fewer protections than a typical apartment tenant in most places. So under the FHFA’s Duty to Serve rule, enacted in 2016, anyone buying a manufactured housing community with Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac financing for the most part now offers some basic site-lease protections to its residents as a condition of their loan.

The protections include 30 days’ notice before a rent increase and the right to post a for-sale sign outside your unit—“things that most people would take for granted,” Gray says. But including them “has become maybe one of the biggest success stories of the Duty to Serve program thus far,” he says. States and localities need to expand upon those tenant protections, he adds, putting manufactured-home owners on equal footing with other tenants.

Zoning for Change

Next Step generally works with affordable housing developers who subdivide a parcel of land, install homes on permanent foundations, and sell the lots to individual buyers. The organization’s motto is “manufactured housing done right,” and Epperson believes land ownership is a crucial piece of that puzzle. “We want to work in an ecosystem where there are realtors, lenders, housing counselors, and affordable housing developers, just as there are for site-built homes,” she says.

There’s a demonstrated appetite for that kind of housing. Next Step partnered with IKEA to conduct a survey of first-time homebuyers and found that 45 percent of millennials would be open to buying a manufactured home. “That was more than we expected,” Epperson says, speculating that the attraction to tiny houses in popular culture may be shifting attitudes.

However, that enlightened perspective isn’t always shared among zoning officials, nor the general population of residents they serve. “In most places, we find that the local zoning code prohibits new manufactured housing, and that’s where we start from,” Epperson says. Because of outdated perceptions of the industry, she says, “it takes a lot of education, and we’ve seen different results.”

Some municipalities will permit a one-time variance for manufactured housing construction, she says, while others open up their zoning rules to allow more going forward. City officials in Hagerstown, Maryland, approved Next Step’s latest project in 2021, a 69-acre workforce housing development of 241 manufactured homes called Kilpatrick Woods. In 2022, Oakland, California, passed an ordinance allowing manufactured housing on any residential-zoned lot in the city.

In other places, it’s been more difficult to break through: “We’ve seen some cities that just can’t do it with the pressure they’re getting from not-in-my-backyard opponents,” Epperson says. Even in places like Oregon, which passed a statewide law in 2022 that puts manufactured housing on equal footing with site-built housing, she says, “you still have to do a lot of education with public officials to get everybody on the same page, even though it’s the law.”

The prominent inclusion of manufactured housing in the Housing Supply Action Plan released by the White House has added momentum to that effort, Epperson says. “We have more traction to help make change than we’ve ever had before,” she says, and cities are becoming more open to manufactured housing. The positive response is “’still relatively small for the size of the problem, but it’s better than I’ve seen in the last 15 years.”

Missed Perceptions

In a way, all these challenges come back to people’s perceptions—and misconceptions—of an industry that has evolved faster than public understanding. The fact is, many manufactured homes are nearly indistinguishable from their site-built brethren, and are constructed just as well or better. And research shows that when they are sited on owned land, these houses appreciate at roughly the same rate as site-built houses (Freddie Mac 2019).

“We say ‘a home is a home,’ so we’re out to change the image of manufactured housing,” Epperson says. That includes building Energy Star-rated homes that save homeowners at least 30 percent in utility costs compared to those of traditional homes. “We want to make sure that families can not only get into their home, but stay in their home long term, and that means controlling maintenance and operating costs,” Epperson says. “We have a vision that this could be the most sustainable and energy-efficient home in the marketplace, and the best way to deliver a zero-energy-ready home.”

Gray says today’s manufactured housing is also more durable than the poor-quality, pre-1976 mobile homes that tend to appear in the media after extreme weather events like hurricanes. “Contemporary manufactured housing is extremely strong and, I would argue, is even more resilient and better able to withstand storms than site-built housing.”

Buyers seem to be increasingly recognizing those benefits, whether they’ve had their curiosity piqued by a tiny-house show on HGTV, or they’re weary of house hunting in a ruthlessly scarce and competitive real estate market. Shipments of manufactured homes doubled between 2011 and 2021, increasing 12 percent between 2020 and 2021 alone (U.S. Department of Commerce 2022).

“There’s a huge demand for manufactured homes,” says JoAnne Hamberg, a real estate broker who sold her first mobile home to a local cable executive back in the 1980s and is now the owner and manager of Woodland Estates, the Boston-area community Jim and Kathryn Bennett now call home.

Hamberg says her brokerage, which specializes in manufactured homes, has a waiting list of buyers. “We get single professionals, young married couples, retirees, snowbirds, empty nesters—you name it,” she says. And the reason is simple: “People are realizing that manufactured homes are a great housing option.”

About the I’m HOME Network

The Innovations in Manufactured Homes (I’m HOME) Network was founded in 2005 to shift the public perception of manufactured housing, change public policy, and improve industry practices. The network, launched by Prosperity Now (formerly CFED), includes homeowners, advocates, academics, policy makers, lenders, manufacturers, developers, and others who, together, can effect change in the private sector and at all levels of government. In March 2022, the Lincoln Institute assumed stewardship of the I’m HOME Network. Convening the I’m HOME Network is an element of the Lincoln Institute’s larger effort to address the housing affordability crisis as part of its goal to reduce poverty and spatial inequality.

Jon Gorey is a staff writer for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: A Next Step manufactured home in San Bernardino, California. Credit: Next Step.

Where should new multifamily housing go? This is a fundamental question facing 175 communities across eastern Massachusetts as they work to implement a new law intended to address the region’s housing shortage. The law requires cities and towns served by Greater Boston’s public transit agency, the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority), to enact zoning that allows multifamily housing near transit.  

If history is any indication, communities will seek to locate new housing away from existing residential neighborhoods. In recent decades, the largest portion of new housing in Greater Boston has been built in isolated areas on municipal and metropolitan peripheries. As an example, the town of Wellesley approved the construction of a 262-unit complex called The Nines—separated from almost all of the town by Interstate 95 and located on a spit of land tucked between the highway, state Route 9, and the Charles River. The towns of Needham and Stoneham permitted similar “across the interstate” developments, and other examples abound. 

The next largest portion of residential permitting has come in commercial areas.  As “smart growth” caught on in the new millennium, many cities and towns added one or two small- or medium-sized multifamily buildings to their downtowns. These properties are very close to residential neighborhoods, but not right in them. Zoning for mixed-use developments along decaying strip mall corridors has also been gaining support. Thus, we see projects on Newton’s Needham Street, Bedford’s Great Road, Salem’s Highland Avenue, Swampscott’s Vinnin Square, and many other less-than-loved “stroads.”  

For many communities, preserving the status quo of existing neighborhoods has been an explicit priority, even as the housing crunch has intensified. A few years ago, the city of Weymouth rezoned a commercial corridor for mixed-use multifamily housing, drawing the zoning district surgically to avoid development near existing residential neighborhoods. Wellesley’s 2018 Draft Unified Plan explains that participants in public meetings saw commercial, office, and industrial areas as the most acceptable locations for multifamily housing; not residential districts. In fact, my review of local master plans across 100 cities and towns showed no movement to upzone residential neighborhoods, other than by allowing accessory dwelling units (ADUs), which appear to have relatively popular support.  

Given the political resistance to changing residential neighborhoods, developing housing in other areas is not without merit. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council, the regional planning agency, recently analyzed more than 3,000 strip malls and shopping centers across Greater Boston, and estimated that such sites could accommodate 124,000 new homes. Between those areas and various office parks and industrial lands, Greater Boston could raise enough residential towers and townhouses to end bidding wars, giving renters and buyers the upper hand, without changing existing residential neighborhoods.   

However, the strategy of rezoning exclusively commercial and industrial areas assumes that the only goal is housing production. Metropolitan growth policy also needs to consider transportation, the environment, local economies, quality of life, and equity.  

The transit-oriented development (TOD) paradigm at the heart of Massachusetts’s new MBTA Communities Zoning Law imagines a region defined by a network of walkable, dense hubs that are well-connected by roads, walkways, bike lanes, bus lanes, train lines, and ferry routes. Under this scenario, people will spend less time in traffic; convenient region-wide mobility will be accessible to all residents, including those without cars; carbon emissions will go down; more people will have access to the region’s best opportunities; and our collective well-being and resilience will improve.  

One of Greater Boston’s most prominent strengths is that it was built as a network of urban villages well connected by trains and streetcars before automobiles began dominating urban design. The framework for the vision of well-connected “great neighborhoods” is already on the ground. The metropolitan area is crisscrossed with village centers and downtowns that contain pharmacies, libraries, restaurants, cafes, civic institutions, schools, playgrounds, public greens, quirky shops, and transit stops.  

If we write off as unchangeable all residential neighborhoods adjacent to these great hubs, then we make it harder to achieve the combined goals of an abundance of housing and sustainable, equitable settlement patterns. There is great demand in Greater Boston for “missing middle” housing that fits between single family-houses-with-yards and bigger apartment/condo complexes. For development of smaller scale multifamily housing to serve many people and make a difference in the market, it has to be allowed in more places.  

The project to create more housing in the Boston area will involve a combination of strategies, including significantly more building on main streets and the currently car-oriented corridors that radiate out from them; continued building on some isolated parcels on municipal edges; and incremental increases in density near connected, walkable hubs—i.e., in existing residential neighborhoods. Significant development on isolated parcels and strip mall corridors should be accompanied by infrastructure redesign to create connected, walkable hubs.   

As they consider different development scenarios that meet the requirements of the MBTA Communities zoning law, leaders and residents will need to weigh the politics and pros and cons of dense zoning in commercial and industrial areas, against zoning for small-scale multifamily housing in neighborhoods. Their deliberations will be part of a larger national debate about how regions should grow. 

Many people will be anxious about the possibility of multifamily development next to their homes. They’ll worry about traffic and parking, property values, architecture, noise, privacy, and all sorts of things. But we could just as well associate new housing with the chocolate chip cookies the future residents might bake for block parties, the leadership they might take on local issues, and the purple pansies they might plant out front in big happy planters. We could think of the joy, stability, and safety that new neighbors will gain in, and contribute to, our neighborhoods.  

Humans are perhaps wired to protect against threats more than to revel in visions of possibility, but we are also well equipped to plan ahead, together. We should plan for a just and sustainable future with abundant housing in wonderful, connected neighborhoods—and reform local zoning accordingly. 

Amy Dain is an independent consultant in public policy research and writing. Her focus is on urban and suburban planning and housing policy. She has conducted research for the Lincoln Institute on zoning and approval processes for multifamily housing in the Greater Boston area. 

Image: Construction in downtown Lynn, Massachusetts. Credit: Amy Dain.