City of Fayetteville (NC) Wants New Rules on Parks

The City of Fayetteville, North Carolina has proposed new minimum housing standards for the mobile home parks in its community. The rules would make parks uniformly nicer, although park owners are quick to say that they would be expensive.

The proposal comes from the Joint City and County Appearance Commission. A year ago, that same commission voted to ban the placement of mobile homes within city limits that were built prior to the HUD code.

Fayetteville is home to the 82nd Airborne and Fort Bragg. It is a quintessential military community located in the Southeastern part of North Carolina.

It is not surprising, then, that for years a lot of people have placed mobile homes down on the area’s sandy soils. Today, Fayetteville has 50 mobile home parks. That number is down from just 66 recently, and three are for sale right now.

Nonetheless, reforming mobile home parks in Fayetteville would impact a lot of people. The new rules would require paved roads, street lights, six-foot buffers, fencing and play areas. In short, the new rules would ask mobile home park owners to build to the same specs as for stick built subdivisions.

A few park owners have offered that the regulations will lead them to convert their parks to other uses. Ultimately, they say, that could lead to homelessness and other problems.

This is an interesting dilemma. Planning Director Jimmy Teal acknowledges that not a lot of new supply of mobile home parks is coming into Fayetteville. Just one new park has been approved in the last ten years.

Yet manufactured housing is an industry that has been well-served in the past by regulations that were brought to bear on to it by external forces. The HUD Code, which enforced national standards for construction in 1974 (and implemented two years later) predicated an increase in demand for new mobile homes. With the advent of HUD code and the stamp of regulatory approval from the Federal government, financial institutions became more comfortable working with mobile homes. This opened up the doors for new loan products and a secondary market for mobile homes.

That is a macro sense of the forces that might be at play in Fayetteville. At the very least, this is interesting because it means that one City is provoking a dialog on how manufactured housing can continue to serve as affordable housing for the work force.