Getting The Middle Class On Board with Manufactured

Objective: Once the middle class embrace manufactured housing, the stigma around manufactured disappears. Manufactured can then gain entry to most housing markets.

The progress in quality, style, and luxury in the manufactured home is a true American success story. A double wide manufactured nowadays offers everything a comparable site built offers - often at half the price. And yet the site built numbers are around 15X those of manufactured. In 2021 while some 100,000 manufactured homes were built, there were some 1,600,000 site built housing starts.

The root of the problem is a lingering, dismissive, preconceived notion of what it means to live in manufactured. Most people imagine a manufactured community to look like this:

And unfortunately there is a fair share of older mobile home parks organized in this most regrettable fashion. Now to get the middle class on board it is essential that manufactured housing be properly packaged, come with the appropriate kind of landscaping, garage / storage and privacy. In fact, now is a perfect time for the manufactured housing industry to take the lead, to position itself ahead of the rudimentary landscaping so typical in site built developments. In this way the middle class can not only be enticed to consider manufactured, they can be lured away from the traditional site built community.

Here are a set of drawings illustrating the sort of manufactured suburban residential community which I believe can successfully lead the middle class away from site built in preference for manufactured:

The manufactured shown is a double wide around 60' x 30'. The garage is around 25' x 40' in order to serve as storage as well as parking. Now once the middle class give their endorsement to manufactured, the stigma will forever end. Manufactured can then enter markets at other price points and become the dominant player in the housing industry - and perhaps not a moment too soon as inflationary pressures from a multitude of sources begin to put site built construction further and further out of reach for more and more home buyers.