Research

Why Don't We Build New Manufactured Home Parks?

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For a while, one detail about Seattle's housing boom kept nagging at me. Apartments, townhomes, and mixed-use buildings were rising everywhere I looked — yet I couldn't name a single newly built manufactured home park. That's strange, because these communities remain one of the last genuinely affordable options for working households, and investors clearly want them too: I'd heard it at home, where my family weighed these parks as investments and kept coming back to their compressing "cap rates" — a reliable sign of demand. So why does almost no one build new ones?

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To answer that, I built a financial model comparing what a single two-acre parcel would earn under three uses developers actually choose between today — a manufactured home park, rental townhomes, and a mid-rise — grounded in real Seattle-area market data, from operator lot rents and current cap rates to Washington's new HB 1217 rent stabilization law. Then I stress-tested it: higher rents, both ends of the interest-rate cycle, and even the parks' own submarket. The result never changed. Even though these communities are valuable to residents and investors alike, the park loses the math every time — worth a fraction of what the same land yields when it's built denser.

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That gap, not weak demand, is the answer. The absence of new manufactured home parks isn't an oversight or a sign that no one wants them; it's the predictable result of how land value works. What follows is the model, the data behind it, and a closer look at why the housing we most need keeps finishing last.