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Focus Areas and Goals

Through the I’M HOME initiative, CFED and its partners are working to address lingering problems in substandard manufactured housing, and to demonstrate the potential manufactured housing offers. Our four main goals are:

• To build new high-quality manufactured homes.
• To address the challenges facing residents in manufactured housing park communities.
• To advocate for public policies that help owners of manufactured homes.
• To develop and provide access to fair and responsibly-priced mortgage financing.

New & Replacement Development: Building new homes

I’M HOME and our partners work with manufacturers to build new, high-quality, energy-efficient homes that will blend in to local communities and be affordable to families with low and moderate incomes. Some of these homes are built in brand new subdivisions, some are placed within existing neighborhoods, and some are used to replace older, rundown homes. For our partners who already build affordable homes, using good-quality manufactured homes has simply become one more option — one more tool in their toolkit. These partners recognize that manufactured housing can help them serve their customers faster, deliver housing at a greater scale, and/or deliver more amenities for the same price. Read more to learn how CFED works to support the large-scale delivery of affordable and energy-efficient manufactured homes that will create the same opportunities to build wealth as any other kind of home.

Community Preservation & Resident Ownership: Helping people in “parks”

An estimated 2.7 million owners of manufactured homes own their homes but rent the land beneath them. The 50,000 manufactured home communities in the US, more commonly called “mobile home parks,” present special challenges to efforts to help homeowners build wealth and achieve financial security.

Some communities are maintained well by owners who treat the homeowners fairly, but others are rundown and exhibit failing infrastructure and unfair practices. Even in the best communities, however, homeowners can’t plan for the future because they never know when rents might be raised, the community might be sold to another owner, or turned into a strip mall or high-end subdivision. In many states, land owners can sell the community to another owner, or even evict the homeowners and use the land for something else, on short notice, and homeowners have few rights. This undermines homeowners’ ability to build equity, and makes financing even harder to come by. Read more to learn about how CFED works to promote asset building for homeowners in manufactured housing communities.

Policy: Changing laws and regulations

Many state and local policies still treat these homes as if they’re cars. They’re often issued titles as motor vehicles, rather than real estate, and taxed as personal property. Many consumer protections that help other homeowners don’t apply to people in manufactured homes. Some localities prohibit manufactured homes — even the best of the best — through zoning rules that are based on outdated images of run-down trailers. And the families in manufactured homes often have few good options if they’re taken advantage of by sellers, lenders, or community owners.

CFED and a national coalition of I’M HOME policy partners are working to build a more supportive policy environment at the local, state, and federal levels. Read more to learn about how CFED and our policy partners believe policy change supports our goal of delivering market-based solutions that help owners of manufactured housing build assets.

Mortgage Finance: Getting the financing right

Even though these are permanent homes, for many consumers, buying a manufactured home is still more like buying a car than a house. This often includes getting a loan provided by the dealer’s in-house financing department. Such personal property loans are often more expensive than home mortgages, and the terms may sometimes be written to take advantage of unsuspecting borrowers. Mortgage financing — like that offered on all other kinds of homes — is more affordable, has longer terms and includes important consumer protections. But even when buyers of manufactured homes can get mortgages they may be at less favorable terms than mortgages on other homes.

Lenders are subject to lingering stereotypes and bad information. But they are also limited by some real gaps in the marketplace that impact lenders, insurers, and investors. CFED is working with a variety of partners, from community development financial institutions to state housing finance agencies and federal agencies, to promote and test responsible and appropriate manufactured housing mortgage lending. In summer 2009, for example, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) held a public comment period on Duty to Serve (DTS) guidelines that say, among other things, that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a duty to serve the low- to moderate-income owners of manufactured homes. CFED and the I’M HOME network’s responses to the DTS guidelines both underscore our commitment to conventional mortgage financing for manufactured housing and outline ways to improve personal property or chattel lending in situations where mortgage financing is not feasible. We expect proposed regulations on DTS in 2010.