Manufactured Homes on Clustered Lots: A Case Study

As the prices of homes continue to rise and incomes do not keep pace with this rise, the subject of affordable housing becomes of increasing importance. More and more people, particularly first time buyers who have not accumulated a great deal of equity, find that they cannot afford to move back to the communities in which they were raised, and companies find that they cannot attract workers to move into their communities because of the lack of affordable housing. There seems to be a continuous stream of newspaper stories about communities forming housing corporations, housing partnerships, and other kinds of public/private ventures to try to find answers to this growing problem. As federal and state monies for housing are in ever decreasing supply, the public sector seeks to devise new strategies, sometimes turning to the private development sector through zoning incentives, sometimes seeking to build housing with a combination of public and private funds. As planners approach this problem, it is of great importance to understand the many factors which contribute to the ultimate price of a single family home. This research project will delineate what many of these factors are, and how they possibly can be mitigated in the effort to bring about lower housing prices. In this project, I will describe the actual costs involved in site development and housing construction since 1986 for a single family housing development in Southeastern Connecticut. Although specific costs do vary widely from one region to another and from one period of time to another, the categories of costs, the tasks which must be accomplished in order to develop land and housing, are fairly consistent for all developments. Therefore, future students of affordable housing will be able to refer to this study in order to perform a feasibility analysis of a housing development