Manufactured housing quietly provides deeply affordable starter homes at an average construction cost under $90,000, but is easily excluded by some communities. Manufactured housing remains a grievously underutilized, deeply affordable housing resource in Rust Belt cities with low land prices, and in rural areas in northeastern states.
Manufactured housing has long mattered most in low-income and rural areas with low land prices. In states with the most liberal regulatory treatment of manufactured housing, concentrated in the South and West, manufactured homes supply between 20 percent and 60 percent of all new single-family homes.