A proposal before a North Carolina town would evict residents living in singlewides in order to create more affordable single family site built housing.  The middle income housing development, called Veridia, would also have sustainable amenities.

The Board of Aldermen of Carrboro, North Carolina have heard a request from Trip Overholt to redesign Pine Grove Mobile Home Park.  Overholt owns the park, which has 42 lots for singlewides.

The new homes would be about 1350 square feet and sell for almost $300,000.  Overholt believes this is an affordable price point.  He says that an appraiser analyzed the homes in the neighborhood near the park, and found that they are routinely greater than 3,000 square feet and sell for about $700,000. His plan would put 39 homes in the footprint of the existing area, set within a co-housing plan with common spaces for residents.

That price is probably affordable to middle class residents with two jobs.

A local paper refers to Carrboro as “the Paris of Piedmont.”  It recently celebrated Dennis Kucinich Day.  The Board of Aldermen have passed resolutions against the Patriot Act and the Iraq War.  A small town of just under 17,000, It is home to many academics, a local slow food movement, and a decidely different sense of land use.

The developer is seeking to exempt the development from an affordable housing requirement.  Carrboro’s rule would stipulate that six homes in this development be priced under $120,000.

The Aldermen might be attracted by the development’s plans to include a special water catchment system, its 18 solar panels, community garden, Energy Star homes, and common house.

Unsaid, but perhaps already acknowledged, is that the people living in the singlewides will have to find a new home.   The area of Carrboro is surrounded by Chapel Hill to the East and some land zoned for agriculture to the West, South, and North.  The town of Hillsborough is about nine miles away.

The developer acknowledges that he is not building this development to make a huge profit.  It is a dream to see this kind of idea made into reality.

It is a dilemma, though, for Carrboro’s leadership.  The plan presents an opportunity to put in place some ecologically sound land-use planning.  It comes with a definite cost for the homeowners that will be forced to move on, made homeless by government fiat.

This is an example of selective progressivism.   If Carrboro lets this go ahead, they will be complicit in allowing low-income households to be set back.  It is nice to utilize plans that build community.  Energy saving solar panels and rain water catchment are good ideas that more developers should consider.  But sustainability should be kind, not elitist.

Carrboro has some definite credentials as a blue Town.  But blue for whom?

There is a new saying go around:  “A guy buys a toaster oven and as a free gift, he gets a bank.”

Well, its not quite like that, but this is the state of things in America in 2008.  A lot of our assumptions have been turned on their heads.

One of those that is being tested right now is the idea of home ownership.  For years, home ownership has been a goal of public policy.  Actually, its been more than just a goal.  It has been like mother’s milk, an unquestioned “good.”

You might remember, for example, how quickly efforts to think about solving our deficit and our debt were undermined when an advisory group suggested that eliminating the home mortgage deduction would be a valuable step.

Right now, though, home ownership doesn’t seem like such a great deal all of the time.  A study out this week says that almost half of all homeowners in Nevada have negative equity in their homes!  Nevada leads the nation, but every state has at least some borrowers in this situation.

Within the affordable housing industry, this notion has been used as a bludgeon to quell the use of manufactured housing in the development of more affordable homes.  The logic, these naysayers argue, is that if the rate of appreciation is lower or even trends reverse, then there should not be any intervention that uses manufactured housing.

I would argue that this is an assumption that needed to be tested.

My first thought is that we want to get people into decent housing, first and foremost.  A lot of people are living in substandard homes.  A lot of people, more than we want to admit, our living without adequate plumbing.  There are a lot of them.

To only utilize stick-built homes is expensive.  In some places, multifamily will work.  Not everywhere, and not with all cultural preferences.

We can build manufactured housing for people at 50 percent of area median income with relatively little in the way of subsidy.

Few people outside of the “know” might realize that modular homes can be utilized for multifamily housing construction.  Many might be surprised to see stackable homes.  Yet that is an option that some are taking advantage of in their designs.

Lexington Station is a great example.  Its a multi-story modular project.  There is a great website that shows how modular housing can be stacked on-site to build a multistory home.  This is ingenious.  It shows how revisioning of industry standards can find new ways to make factory built housing reach new audiences.  This project was built in Asheville, North Carolina.  This is an area with plenty of rules governing development.

The same goes for using manufactured housing in multistory designs.  One of the more well-known examples is the work done by Oakland Community Housing, Inc.  (OCHI).  The folks at OCHI have been building affordable housing in the East Bay.  It is not easy to build affordable housing in the Bay.  Land prices are very high.

OCHI’s Linden Terrace consists of three-story homes built with exterior staircases using manufactured homes.  They won a prize for best manufactured housing development from MHI in 2006.  There are garages on the bottom floor and the main entrance to the homes are located on the second story.

OCHI doesn’t build exclusively within this platform.  It has also been able to use manufactured housing on infill lots to build single family homes.  Some of their neighborhoods are cut out from parcels of land that other developers left alone.  I visited one on a slip of land adjacent to the Port of Oakland.  These are far and away the best homes in the neighborhood.

North Carolina’s General Assembly gave substantial attention yesterday to a bill that would impact the fates of manufactured housing residents.

H1700, a bill sponsored by Susan Fisher that would provide a financial incentive to park owners to sell to resident or non-profit groups, made some progress in Judiciary II.  The bill was held up by its notice provision, which had stipulated that park owners should communicate in writing via US mail to each resident prior to a sale.

According to one MH industry leader, this triggers some concerns over property rights.

An alternative was put forward that only requires notice in the event of a change in use.  In other words, no notice is required if a park is sold to another private group that wants to maintain the park as is.  If a park owner wants to sell to a big box retailer, though, then a notice is required.

Advocates and industry express doubts about the difference that this would ultimately make — after all, no resident group is going to be able to match the kind of offer that a Wal-Mart of Home Depot could make for land that it would repurpose into a large commercial center.

No, a useful bill should probably preserve the notice provision for parks for exactly the opposite set of parks — those that are likely to remain in their current status.  These are the ones whose prices can reasonably be met by non-profits.  In North Carolina, that might be parks up to $2 million.

Sometimes I talk to local officials who are concerned about the housing crisis, but do not feel that they can do much to support their own neighborhoods. Next week, in fact, I’ll be traveling down to the southeastern corner of North Carolina to speak to county and city government staff about this very topic.

Their concerns are two fold. They want to do something to increase the supply of quality affordable housing. But they are also weary about all of the abandoned mobile homes in their backyards. It is hard to say which is a greater concern. If you talk to police or solid waste officers, it is definitely the latter. If you speak to someone in zoning or in community development, though, it might be either way.

The truth is that a County government can do a lot to make a difference.

Financing

Loan-to-value limits obstruct the ability of residents and non-profits to acquire mobile home parks. Providing financing for mobile home park acquisition is a very cost-efficient means for Counties to increase the supply of affordable housing in their environs.

Santa Cruz County, in California, is one example. Santa Cruz operates its own mobile home park purchase program. It provides financing to both resident-owned and non-profit owned groups that want to acquire mobile home parks. They can also provide financing for these groups after an acquisition, in the event that they want to invest in improvements to infrastructure in their park.

This financing is vital. In today’s market, as perhaps never before, it takes a substantial down payment in order to acquire a park. To the extent that mobile home park residents skew towards a population group with lower levels of wealth, then putting together 20 or 30 percent down is a significant obstacle. Even when a park is operating at almost 100 percent vacancy and producing significant cash flows, most banks will still want to limit the loan-to values to 80 percent.

Access to this kind of financing makes a different for non-profit groups, too. It is fine for a non-profit to put some capital into an acquisition. Nonetheless, it doesn’t help. When more capital must be allocated, the mission of a non-profit is necessarily constrained. It reduces the ability of that non-profit to do the next project.

Counties are also wise to provide financing support for infrastructure upgrades. Let’s not forget the likely inequality: most neighborhoods with single-family site built housing get their infrastructure through bond financing. It is really the least that a County can do.

Counties should seek a lien against the land when they make these loans. The results are impressive, though. Consider the cost-efficiency of a County that provides 20 percent of the acquisition funding for a $3 million park with 150 units. That is $4000 in debt per unit. With a lien against the land, the risk is far less.

Abandoned mobile homes

This is a problem that comes up over and over when I visit rural counties. Last week, I spoke to a planner in Vance County, North Carolina who needed a fix for an entire park that was full of abandoned homes. The park is next door to the County’s new development of affordable single family housing. It makes for quite an eyesore.

In North Carolina, we have passed a bill that provides about $300,000 in funding for counties to remove abandoned mobile homes. It is some money, but more is needed to clean up the 40,000 abandoned units that currently exist across the state.

The legal issues are tougher. It is one thing to condemn a property on land in the possession of the building’s owner. It is different when ownership is split. If the owner of the trailer is a finance company in New York, then even serving papers is beyond the ability of a County tax agent.