Has Bad Design Cost Manufactured Housing $6 Trillion ?
ChatGPT estimates that from 1975 to today around 40,000,000 single family homes were built. By 1975 the doublewide had come into its own, first becoming available in 1967. In 1976 HUD brought manufactured housing under a national set of construction codes. And finally 1974 MH sales were exceeding 500,000 per year.
Yet, over the coming decades sales dropped to an average of 200,000 per year, a decline of 300,000 homes per year or 15,000,000 cumulatively. As of 2025 the average home price is $400,000.
Putting it all together, in today's dollars manufactured housing has given up $6,000,000,000,000 in sales since 1975.
The only thing which can account for this catastrophe is the bad design coming out of the manufactured housing industry. First possible objection: You don't know what you're talking about. It is discriminatory exclusionary zoning which wreaked havoc with MH sales. Fair point. But what municipalities were trying to tell you is that they were excluding inexpensive manufactured housing not manufactured housing per se. All you had to do was offer doublewides repackaged with say private garden courtyards and sited around private garden squares, doublewides which would then have sold for about the same price as the median home price in the municipality. By following this simple expedient you would have been flush with building permits.
Second possible objection: Where site built homebuilders had begun to embrace Frank Lloyd Wright's open plan living and dining concept, MH really couldn't owing to the space constraints of MH. It was impossible for MH to appeal to the homebuyer's open plan preference. Fair point in the case of the singlewide but not so with the doublewide. All you had to do was go all in on putting Wright's Usonian principles into the doublewide and you'd have absconded with half the new home sales orders.
Now Trump 2.0 represents a second chance for the manufactured housing industry. Trump's new HUD secretary, Scott Turner, seems to be keen on finally implementing the provisions of both MHIA 2000 and DTS. The former to overcome exclusionary zoning, the latter to force Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to buy back MH chattel loans creating a secondary market as enjoyed by site built mortgage lenders already. In this way the risk premium on chattel loans is eliminated resulting in interest rates probably half what they are now and about the same as those of a conventional home loan. This is all as welcome as flowers in spring but should be seen as only one prong of a two pronged strategy. The MH industry must also make good on redesigning the doublewide around Wright's open plan and redesigning the mobile home park around the private courtyard and common garden square.
In the images shown above, there are several showing the traditional, rather stark and barren MH community in comparison the same image but repackaged with private garden courtyards. Repackaging mobile homes in private garden courtyards 'decenters' the mobile home, takes the focus off the home itself and concentrates it on the broader indoor outdoor lifestyle now available. Site built homes don't have anything like these courtyards, let alone the common garden square around which each home is sited. Nor do site built homes have advanced open plan depicted in the drawings where a very long sofa bank is centered around a very large format projection TV.
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