These days they are called manufactured homes, not mobile homes or trailers.

But whatever they’re called, some city and county leaders are starting to see them as a possible solution to the area’s affordable housing problem.

Craig Bratschie is a sales consultant at Webster's Home Sales in North Lawrence. The company sells manufactured homes.

A city-county committee reviewing the area’s zoning and subdivision codes has been quietly reviewing ways to make it easier for developers to create whole neighborhoods of manufactured homes.

And last week, Douglas County Commissioner Charles Jones, during a discussion about the possible elimination of the 5-acre exemption in the county, told his fellow commissioners he thought it was time they start thinking about manufactured housing parks in the county.

Jones, who also is on the zoning and codes advisory committee, said he thinks the parks may be one of the community’s better weapons in its battle against rising housing costs.

“There’s no one-shot solution to our affordable housing problems, but certainly one of the shots will have to be some sort of targeted effort to make manufactured housing more available in this community,” Jones said.

A new type of park

There doesn’t seem to be much support for recreating the old-style mobile-home park with row after row of flat-roofed, metal-clad trailers sitting on cement blocks on property owned by someone else.

Lawrence/Douglas County Planning Commission Chairman Ron Durflinger, who also is a member of the zoning and codes advisory committee, said he’s more interested in encouraging new manufactured home developments with units that look more like a traditional home than a trailer.

They also would feature individual lots that residents would buy rather than rent, an important feature, Durflinger said, to prevent situations like the one at Gaslight Mobile Home Village, where the property owner forced more than 100 residents to move to make way for a future Home Depot.

“The traditional mobile home park, I think, is one of the greatest disservices to buyers we have ever come across,” said Durflinger, who is also a local homebuilder. “It provides them with no real assurances, but creates some real liabilities for them.

“Many are just on a month-to-month lease for their lot, which means they could be forced to move at almost any time. Home ownership is supposed to mean security. Mobile-home ownership means just the opposite. If we’re going to use these homes as a way to tackle affordable housing, we have to deal with that issue.”

Removing obstacles

But manufactured home dealers say current city and county regulations all but prohibit them from doing any significant development with manufactured housing.

“Especially in the city there is very little opportunity for us to do anything,” said Galen Weber, president of North Lawrence’s Webster’s Home Sales. “But it is going to be tough to correct the situation because a lot of it has to do with the price of land.

“I mean, who is going to pay $40,000 for a lot in Lawrence, when they are only able to afford to pay $60,000 for the manufactured home they are going to put on it? It just doesn’t work that way.”

Shelia Stogsdill, assistant Lawrence-Douglas County planning director, said her office recognizes the problem, too. She said that’s why planners are discussing revisions to the city’s subdivision regulations that would allow for development on much smaller lots than is permitted today.

Currently, new single family development must take place on a lot at least 7,000 square feet in size. Under regulations being discussed by the zoning and codes committee, a new zoning district would be created that would allow for single family development on a lot of approximately 3,000 square feet.

The idea, Stogsdill said, is that smaller lots should fetch smaller prices, opening the door for people who couldn’t afford to buy.

“We think it is important to come up with something in our codes to give people a better chance to actually own the land their home is on,” Stogsdill said. “If your home is just personal property sitting on a rented lot, it is tough to gain any equity in that situation and then you just have a spiral of affordability issues.”

The committee is expected to present its recommendations for changing the zoning and subdivision codes to city and county commissioners late this year.

Jones said he think the changes that are made in the codes may be the key to creating more affordable housing.

“I think we have to come up with a different set of rules that removes obstacles and creates incentives if we ever want to create more affordable housing,” Jones said.

A help for some

Durflinger is so interested in the issue that he is attending this week’s manufactured home show at Kansas City’s Bartle Hall to gather more information on their affordability.

He suspects that the homes may help solve part of the community’s affordability issues, but not all.

“I think the affordable housing issue that we have a chance to solve is the one facing young couples trying to get an entry-level home in the community,” Durflinger said. “I hope some of these zoning changes get approved ultimately because we are simply unable to deal with the affordable housing issue with the current regulations we have.

“Some people think the problem is caused by greed or profit, but it’s not anything like that. It is about the price of land and the price of a stick-built home.”

Weber says modern manufactured homes range in price from $40,000 to $70,000, and he tells customers that usually is a savings of about a third over a similar home built on-site.

“It’s just the economy-of-scale factor,” Weber said. “They buy lumber for thousands of houses at a time and that produces a savings. I think if we could get something like this going here it would probably fill the void for 20 to 30 percent of the people who are out there wanting to own their own home but can’t afford to.”

The appropriate locations for the parks haven’t been discussed. Jones said he would like to examine putting some in the rural parts of the county, but both Durflinger and Stogsdill said the density of the parks may make them incompatible with rural areas, and they may make more sense in the city where there is public transit.