The Growing Demand for Affordable Housing
How MHCs Can Help Lessen the Growing Problem of Housing Affordability
The United States of America is, by many metrics, experiencing a growing crisis of housing affordability. Since 1937, the Federal Government has defined affordability in terms of housing as spending 30% or less of a household’s income on housing. Recent estimates conclude that approximately 47% of all renters are cost-burdened, paying at least 30% of their income on housing. Even worse, over 10.8 million American households are severely cost-burdened renters, paying more than half of their income on rent.
The high cost-burden imposed on renters disproportionately impacts low-income households, with less available affordable units per capita. Adding to the issue of the high cost-burden that housing imposes, the availability of low-rent housing stock continues to decline:
Federal, State, and Municipal Governments have all acted in response to the impending housing crisis, creating programs that provide incentives to housing developers that generate affordable or below-market rate housing stock in their communities. However, these programs alone are not enough to tackle the problem. While public-private partnerships may offer some levity to the issue, they are limited by public budgets and may not be permanent solutions. Many programs that restrict developers from increasing rents to market-rate are set to expire in the next decade.
So what’s a potential solution to America’s housing affordability crisis?
Private-market Manufactured Housing Communities!
Manufactured Housing offers tenants the ability to own or rent quality housing at a fraction of market-rate rent. Over 20 million Americans already live in manufactured housing units. Most of these Manufactured Housing Communities (70%) are owned and operated by mom-and-pop type of owners, resulting in severely mismanaged parks with underutilized potential. As national owners and operators of Manufactured Housing Communities, Pioneer Communities brings institutional-level expertise to managing our parks while maintaining the affordability of our housing.
We create value by investing capital into community amenities, repairing deferred maintenance, bringing in newer and higher-quality homes, and infilling parks with more homes, increasing both the quality and the overall quantity of affordable housing stock in a given community. With rising demand for variation and affordability in housing, investing in Manufactured Housing Communities is a safe and strong bet.
SOURCE: Desmond, Matthew. “Unaffordable America: Poverty, Housing, and Eviction.” Fast Focus, no. 22-2015, Mar. 2015.
https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Harvard_JCHS_State_of_the_Nations_Housing_2019.pdf