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A DATA REVIEW © Housing Assistance Council, 1996 Permission is granted ONLY to nonprofit community-based organizations to reproduce and/or adapt this document, and only for their own use. Manufactured housing is an important and growing source of housing in nonmetropolitan and rural parts of the United States. Housing built in factories and transported in complete or nearly complete form to residential sites inspires a range of reactions among persons interested in increasing the supply of decent, affordable housing in nonmetro and rural areas. Some believe this housing is inferior in quality and durability to conventional site-built housing. Others argue that such impressions are based on outdated information and that manufactured housing’s lower cost means it should be taken seriously in attempts to improve housing conditions. This study examines available data on manufactured/mobile homes and their occupants in nonmetropolitan areas nationwide. It does not treat in depth issues studied by the National Commission on Manufactured Housing and common to all manufactured housing regardless of location, such as the functioning of the regulatory system or design issues. 1 Nor does it treat technical issues regarding standards for manufacturing housing. Methods and Definitions The decennial Census and the American Housing Survey (AHS) provide the most complete national data available about the characteristics of manufactured/mobile homes and their residents. Unless otherwise noted, data in this report was taken from the 1993 AHS.2 The AHS is a national survey conducted every two years. The resulting data is published approximately two years after the survey; the 1993 data was the most recent available at the time this report was prepared. Definitional issues are critical in interpreting the information presented in this report because data sources, federal agencies, and the manufacturing industry use different terms and definitions. A brief discussion of these definitional issues is presented here as a preliminary to the topics that will be discussed below. Manufactured/Mobile Housing: The American Housing Survey currently defines living quarters as mobile homes if they were originally constructed to be towed on their own chassis. It does not use the term manufactured housing. Some data used in this report is from the 1990 U.S. Census, which used the same term and definition as the AHS except that it did not define units with permanent room additions as mobile homes.3 The comparability of the AHS and Census determinations of whether a unit is a mobile home is also affected by differences in data collection procedures. Census information was collected using a mail questionnaire filled out by heads of households, so respondents decided how to classify their homes. The AHS, on the other hand, used trained interviewers to solicit information, so their responses could be expected to have met the definition more accurately. The American Housing Survey is a reliable sample, but it is subject to sampling and response errors. One published AHS report cautions:
More information about the American Housing Survey and the impact of its sample size is provided in Appendix A. Other sources of information about factory-built homes do not use the term mobile homes. As discussed below, the term manufactured housing is preferred by the industry that produces such homes. Manufactured housing is also the term defined in the federal statute and regulations that since 1976 have governed the production of housing that is essentially fully completed inside a factory and transported to a residential location. Almost all homes built in the United States include some manufactured components, even without counting windows, doors and cabinets, but most of them are not considered to be mobile homes for AHS/Census data purposes or manufactured housing for federal regulatory purposes. (For more information about the range of housing making use of manufactured parts, see Appendix B.) Manufactured housing is defined by the National Manufactured Housing and Safety Standards Act of 1974 as a transportable structure that is intended to be used as a dwelling unit, is at least a specified size, and is constructed on a permanent chassis. The “HUD Code,” the regulations issued by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to implement the Act, applies to every “manufactured home” built on or after June 15, 1976. It governs design and construction, covering topics such as fire safety; body/frame construction; thermal protection; plumbing systems; heating, cooling, and fuel-burning systems; and electrical systems. (More information about the federal regulatory system is provided in Appendix C.) This report refers to both “manufactured housing” and “mobile homes,” or to “manufactured/mobile homes,” as appropriate, depending on the context. To obtain information about the various important aspects of the use of factory-built housing in nonmetro and rural America, the information on these incompatible (but overlapping) types of units must be used. Mobile Home Parks: This report uses the term mobile home park to refer to groups of manufactured/mobile homes with one management that supplies utilities and other kinds of services. A few sources call these groupings manufactured home parks or manufactured home communities, but mobile home park seems to be a more widely used term. It is more accurate, as well, because many of these communities contain pre-1976 units that do not meet the federal definition of manufactured homes. Geographic Areas: The geographic focus of this report is on nonmetropolitan areas as defined by the federal Office of Management and Budget and used in the decennial Census and the American Housing Survey. Nonmetropolitan areas are places outside Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs). Generally, MSAs are socially and economically integrated areas containing at least one city of at least 50,000 population, or a Census Bureau-defined urbanized area with a population of at least 50,000 and a total metropolitan population of at least 75,000 in New England and 100,000 elsewhere. MSAs (and therefore nonmetro areas) are established by counties except in New England, where they follow city and town boundaries. Every MSA has at least one central city (not equivalent to the colloquial term inner city) and suburban areas, which combined form the total metropolitan area. In its data analysis sections, this report usually compares mobile homes in nonmetropolitan areas to two other types of housing. First, it compares nonmetro mobile homes to mobile homes in suburban locations and central cities. Second, whenever possible, it compares nonmetro mobile homes to non-mobile (conventional, or site-built) homes in nonmetro areas. Rural areas are defined by the Census Bureau as, generally, places of less than 2,500 people, including the rural portions of extended cities and areas outside incorporated and census designated places. Because more data is available about mobile homes in nonmetro areas, this report presents very little information about rural areas. It uses the word rural occasionally in a more colloquial, nontechnical sense to refer generally to the country as opposed to the city or suburbs. The AHS subdivides occupied housing units located in rural areas into two categories: rural-farm housing and rural-nonfarm housing. Rural-farm housing includes all rural units on farms. Rural-nonfarm housing includes all the remaining rural units. In the AHS, occupied housing units are categorized as farm units if the sales of agricultural products amounted to at least $1,000 during the 12-month period prior to data collection. GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION OF MOBILE HOMES Mobile homes are a significant and growing source of housing in the nonmetropolitan United States. In 1990 the decennial Census found that, while mobile homes made up only 4 percent of the occupied housing units in metropolitan areas, they comprised 14 percent of the total in nonmetropolitan areas, a 2 percent increase from 1980. Moreover, between 1980 and 1990, the number of mobile homes in nonmetro areas increased by over 50 percent. In rural areas, two of every three housing units added were mobile homes. About half of all mobile homes in the United States in 1993 were located outside metropolitan areas, according to the AHS. The majority of these nonmetropolitan mobile homes were located in the South, while less than one in ten was located in the Northeast, as illustrated in Figure 1. One of every 13 rural-farm houses was a mobile home in 1993. Eight states, all in the South and the West, had particularly high proportions of mobile homes in 1990, according to the Census, with more than 20 percent of occupied nonmetropolitan housing units being mobile homes. Nevada had the highest percentage, followed in descending order by Florida, Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, New Mexico, South Carolina, and North Carolina. In eight states, less than 7.5 percent of the occupied nonmetro stock was mobile homes. Outside of New Jersey and the District of Columbia, which have no nonmetropolitan areas, Hawaii had the lowest proportion of nonmetro mobile homes (0.2 percent). Figure 2 shows for each state, in ranges, the percentage of occupied units in nonmetro areas that were mobile homes in 1990.
Figure 1. Geographic Location of Nonmetropolitan Mobile Homes by Region
Figure 2. Mobile Homes as a Percent of Nonmetropolitan Occupied
Units
* No data for New Jersey which has no nonmetro counties.
Almost half of all mobile homes in the United States were located in mobile home parks in 1989. The percentage of all new mobile homes placed in mobile home communities nationwide has been decreasing over time: from 44 percent in 1989 to 33 percent in 1993 (Figure 3).5
Figure 3. New Mobile Homes Placed in Mobile Home Parks
The proportion of mobile homes in groups was lower in nonmetro and rural areas than in central cities and suburban areas. Figure 4 shows that in nonmetro areas only one in five mobile homes in 1993 was located in a group of seven or more mobile homes, compared to almost all in central cities and half in suburban areas. The AHS did not provide information about ownership of land as distinct from ownership of the home, so it cannot be determined how many of these “groups” of nonmetro mobile homes were parks in which residents rented sites.
Available data for rural (rather than nonmetro) areas in 1985 showed that only one-third of mobile homes in rural areas were in parks, although over 57 percent of owner-occupied mobile homes in those areas were placed on rented land, as were almost all renter-occupied mobile homes. There is at least one logical explanation for this difference: “it must mean that significant numbers of people are buying mobile homes and then siting them on scattered parcels owned by others, perhaps relatives.”6 Figure
4. Mobile Homes in Groups of Seven or More Compared to All Mobile Homes
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