A manufactured solution to a manufactured problem

When people ask where he lives, Mike Zupkofska doesn’t answer right away. “I always lead off with, ‘It’s a great community.’ ” Then he explains that he lives in Leisurewoods, a gated manufactured home park in Rockland. Zupkofska, a former Rockland selectman, is very much aware of the stigma associated with mobile or manufactured homes. Most people would imagine a shady, dirty trailer park.

In reality, Leisurewoods — one of the roughly 250 mobile home parks in the state — is nothing like that. It’s an age 55-and-older community that looks like a regular suburban gated development. It’s why Zupkofska is always ready to sing the praises of his chosen lifestyle. Generally, mobile park occupants do not pay property taxes. And Zupkofska’s home is 50 percent larger and was a third of the price of the Cape-style house that he used to own.

Massachusetts could use more of those communities. The state needs housing — a lot more housing, traditional and nontraditional. And it needs housing that people can afford.

The prices for homes in mobile home communities in Massachusetts are breathtaking — in a good way. At Leisurewoods, a 980-square-foot, 2-bed, 1-bath home is on the market for $249,900; also on the South Shore, a similarly sized manufactured house is going for $189,000; whereas a 2-bed, 1-bath, 600-square-foot manufactured home in Middleboro is selling for $89,999.

The state’s strategies to drive down prices and increase supply fall broadly into two categories: reduce the local zoning barriers to multifamily housing that created the shortage in the first place and subsidize housing that’s restricted to low-income people.

The concepts of subsidized housing and affordable housing have become so fused in policy discussions that the terms tend to be used interchangeably; when you read about “affordable housing” in Massachusetts, you’re almost certainly reading about conventional housing that is income-restricted because of a government subsidy or mandate, not a mobile home on a small lot that simply doesn’t cost much.

Now, don’t get us wrong: this editorial board supports both strategies. Subsidize housing and reduce zoning barriers. Please and thank you.

But housing doesn’t need to be subsidized to be affordable. It just needs to be, well, affordable — cheap. And it doesn’t get cheaper than mobile homes.

Indeed, manufactured housing is “perhaps the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the country,” as a top federal housing official told GBH last year.

But “relative to lots of other places in the country, we don’t have a lot of manufactured housing,” George McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, told the Globe editorial board. “And there hasn’t been a lot of new development with manufactured housing going on. It would be nice if that were permitted. You could easily imagine using a manufactured housing development as a way to add housing in places where there’s available land, and not a lot of affordable” housing.

The manufactured home industry is projecting to finish 2023 with a production of roughly 120,000 new units nationwide, McCarthy said. But only 156 new such units were shipped to the Bay State through September, according to the latest annual manufactured home survey conducted jointly by the US Census Bureau and the US Department Housing and Urban Development. Between 2012 and 2022, an annual average of roughly 190 manufactured homes were shipped to Massachusetts. Between 2017 and 2022, the average sales price of new mobile homes — at $138,500 — fell by 5 percent in Massachusetts, the only state in the country where the price dropped. The national average price, though, is cheaper at $127,300.

Massachusetts is seeking to bolster construction of accessory dwelling units, or the apartment units built on the property of a single-family home. Although those units are different than mobile homes as a legal matter, they are often similar in practical terms. And a lot of the manufactured housing makers are set to build those accessory units, McCarthy said, which should raise the profile of the housing type in Massachusetts.

At mobile home parks, residents generally own the property but not the land. And despite their reputation, they don’t represent a compromise on safety: Manufactured housing is regulated by the federal government.

Indeed, before anyone looks down their nose at the thought of more mobile homes, consider that it’s the current housing market that is more likely to drive people into unsafe, overcrowded living situations.

A few years ago, the Globe chronicled the dangerous conditions of housing in Allston, a magnet for college students who lack other housing options they can afford. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus tore through places like Chelsea in part because there was so much residential overcrowding.

But Massachusetts puts up too many barriers to manufactured housing that could meet some of the need for low-cost housing. Mobile homes can’t be financed with a mortgage, unlike in neighboring New Hampshire. (In the Granite State, McCarthy explained, “once you’ve sited a home and put it on the ground it is treated as real estate,” which means that mobile home owners also pay property taxes.) Zoning codes are a barrier in some places. And a state law that could provide an incentive for localities to allow mobile homes does not.

That would be Chapter 40B, the law that lets developers circumvent local zoning to build housing if there is not enough housing considered affordable in a town.

It’s a good law that this page supports. But the language — “considered affordable” — obscures a strange quirk of the law. Some housing — including mobile homes — can be affordable to the people the law is intended to help but not counted as such.

That’s because from the law’s standpoint it doesn’t matter if housing is cheap — it also needs to be income restricted. The fear is that if communities counted mobile homes and other naturally occurring low-cost housing as affordable, there is no guarantee that those homes would actually be inhabited by poor people. There is very little evidence, though, that the wealthy are flocking to mobile home parks. A 2017 report by the Department of Revenue that analyzed 2015 state tax filings found that 79 percent of manufactured home residents at the time would have qualified for low- or moderate-income housing under 40B.

Efforts to let mobile homes be automatically counted as affordable have failed — which means that localities, most of which are keen to stay out of 40B’s crosshairs, have one less reason to permit them.

When he joined the state Legislature in 2015, state Representative David DeCoste filed a bill that would explicitly include manufactured homes in the definition of affordable housing. “Every year we file it. And like so many other good bills every year, they look at it,” DeCoste, a Republican from Norwell, said in an interview. “And every year it goes to study.” That’s the Beacon Hill euphemism to kill a piece of legislation.

However, this year the bill is still in the Joint Committee on Housing. This year it deserves a more serious look. The Legislature could address the fear of wealthier people occupying affordable housing by requiring some type of verification that residents are actually low-income before a park can be counted toward 40B.

After all, the ultimate goal of programs like 40B — and state housing policy more generally — should be affordability. While subsidized housing will continue to play a crucial role, the state shouldn’t discount the value of housing that’s affordable because it’s not expensive. That means getting over the stigmas around manufactured homes.

It’s not a housing option for everyone. But for Zupkofska, saving money on housing has allowed him to put more money into his retirement. “It doesn’t mean I’m rich but it helps with my long-term planning, especially since health insurance and health care costs have increased significantly,” he said. And Leisurewoods offers an outdoor pool that’s heated in the spring and a clubhouse where residents can host functions. “There are so many different events throughout the year. This is a community within the town of Rockland,” he said.

Efforts to let mobile homes be automatically counted as affordable have failed — which means that localities, most of which are keen to stay out of 40B’s crosshairs, have one less reason to permit them.