From Social Stigma to Housing Solution: The Case of Manufactured Housing

It is a little known fact that manufactured housing—homes built in factories to meet the HUD Code, the only national building code in the world—represents the largest unsubsidized affordable housing stock in U.S. While efficient manufacturing reduces production costs and high-density, low impact development promotes smart growth, newer homes often outperform site-built housing in both quality and design. Almost 8 million families, with a median income of $29,000, reside in manufactured homes. And yet, with a few notable exceptions, affordable housing practitioners remain ignorant of, or are openly hostile toward, this housing stock—instead of embracing it as a potential solution to affordable housing challenges. George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, will report on the work of a group of plucky social entrepreneurs who embarked on a Quixotic effort to transform the manufactured housing sector — and the unexpected results of their efforts to preserve and expand this essential component of the national affordable housing stock.

George W. McCarthy is president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. His areas of expertise include housing and housing finance, global urbanization, economic forecasting, program evaluation, and regional planning. Before leading the Lincoln Institute beginning in July 2014, he was director of Metropolitan Opportunity at the Ford Foundation, seeking to reduce the social and spatial isolation of poor and disadvantaged populations within metropolitan areas. Before that he administered a Ford Foundation program that focused on using homeownership to build wealth for low-income families and their communities. He has been a senior research associate at the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an associate professor of economics at Bard College, a resident scholar at the Jerome Levy Economics Institute, a visiting scholar and member of the High Table at King’s College of Cambridge University, a visiting scholar at the University of Naples, Italy, and a research associate at the Centre for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg, Russia. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a master’s degree in economics from Duke University, and a bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics from the University of Montana.