Nonprofit Seeks Land for New Manufactured Home Park

A nonprofit that helps mobile home park residents  create owner cooperatives is looking for land for a new park.

A private donor gave the Cooperative Development Institute, or CDI, $50,000 to jump-start the project, which is expected to cost millions of dollars and take years to complete. CDI has identified suitable land in southern Vermont that could accommodate 200 new manufactured homes, Jeremiah Ward, CDI’s water infrastructure support program manager, said this week. He declined to identify the location of the potential site, noting that purchase discussions are in their early stages.

Ward said the donor, whose name was not revealed, asked CDI’s leaders what the organization would do with a $50,000 gift. The answer: lay the groundwork for a new park.

“It’s something I’ve wanted to do for many years,” Ward said Wednesday. “While it’s important for us to do our core work, which is preserving manufactured housing, if we’re really going to solve the problem, we need to create new affordable housing.”

CDI, based in Northampton, Mass., works to create and sustain cooperatively owned manufactured housing parks and businesses in New England. It has helped residents in several Vermont parks purchase their communities, including Lakeview Mobile Home Park in Shelburne, Weston Mobile Home Park in Berlin and Milton Mobile Home Cooperative.

In its search for land for a new park, the organization has spoken to municipalities, nonprofits and the state, Ward said.

“It’s about finding a mission-driven seller who is going to be realistic about the price point for vacant land … and is willing to wait several years for us to do all the raising of capital and planning work,” he said.

The nonprofit is only considering sites that are hooked up to municipal wastewater systems and are in municipalities that seem amenable to changing their zoning to allow the construction. Act 47, the new state law that requires towns to allow dense residential development in designated water and sewer areas, will likely make it easier to find a site, Ward added.

CDI is also working with the Vermont State Housing Authority, which in August started placing new mobile homes in spots available in existing mobile home parks. The VSHA, an administrator of the federal Section 8 housing voucher program,  is buying the energy-efficient homes and listing them for around $100,000 to income-qualified buyers, said Tyler Maas, VSHA’s director of program and housing development. Under an initiative set up last summer after dozens of homes were lost to flooding, the state is paying for the site work and foundations, he said. The new owners also pay monthly lot rents of about $400, which covers plowing and property taxes.

VSHA has placed 32 homes since August.

Maas said he sees manufactured homes as an important solution to Vermont’s housing shortage. He’s working to convince homebuyers of that. “They’re modern, not the thin-walled mobile homes that shake when you walk,” he said. “They’re well-anchored on solid slabs. They have USB ports on the outlets.”