Personal, Not Real: Manufactured Housing Insecurity, Real Property, and the Law

Abstract

Manufactured homes provide a critical source of affordable housing and are the primary source of low-income homeownership in the United States. Yet manufactured housing (MH) is both socially stigmatized and spatially marginalized, which translates to significant inequalities for MH residents. The law figures centrally into how MH is perceived and how it is located, segregated, and financed differently from other housing. This review explores how the law has treated MH with legal hybridity, as personal property similar to an automobile rather than real property like other forms of housing. This core legal distinction structures an array of zoning, financing, and policy provisions that together create a gulf between the opportunities available to conventional owners and renters and those available to residents of MH. I explore existing research on the outcomes of this disparate legal treatment to offer an agenda for future research on a broader range of housing insecurities. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 18 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Real Property Supremacy: Manufactured Housing and the Limits of Inclusion through Finance

“…We argue that the financial vulnerability of MH residents is less a function of the scale of the financial actors involved than of the constitution of MH in law and policy as inferior to other housing types. Much of the differential treatment of MH in home credit markets is rooted in its status as chattel, or personal property (Kear et al 2019;Sullivan 2022). We extend this analysis, inspired by scholarship on race and capitalism (Melamed 2015;Robinson 2020), to argue that the marginality of MH in U.S. housing markets is also about the historical and systemic privileging of real property in the context of U.S. homeownership.…”