Mobile homes or mansions? Rhode Island affordable housing bill sparks confusion
Backers of one new General Assembly proposal to ease Rhode Island's housing crunch say it would not count McMansions as affordable housing, as critics fear.
Communities that haven't reached the quota — and that includes most cities and towns in the state — have less discretion to block certain affordable-housing developments.
Counting trailer parks toward the 10% target has been a long-standing goal of rural communities and Republican state lawmakers for years.
But the version of the bill that passed, part of House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi's housing affordability package, became a surprise flashpoint Thursday night.
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Why did the affordable-housing bill draw criticism?
Unlike the original version, it included no requirement that mobile and manufactured homes be income-restricted to qualify as affordable.
And it allows cities and towns to count mobile homes as half a housing unit toward their quota only if the residents own the land, as well as the trailer they are living in. That excludes traditional trailer parks, where residents rent the space their homes sit on.
"As long as a mobile or manufactured home is simply developed, it will immediately be counted as half a unit of affordable housing, which I think is wrong, because it goes against the definition of what affordable housing actually is," said Rep. David Morales, a Providence Democrat, who noted that he lived in a mobile home for some time as a child. "It doesn't make much sense why the owner of a respective mobile home will also have to be the owner of the land the unit is occupied on."
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But Melina Lodge, director of the Housing Network of Rhode Island, which worked on amending the original bill, said the purpose of the legislation isn't to count all mobile homes as affordable housing, which would only benefit municipalities that haven't hit the 10% affordable mark.
Instead, the intent is to give towns an incentive to help trailer park residents band together and buy the land their homes sit on when an investor-owner wants to sell, she said. Some towns have used Community Development Block Grant money to help create resident-owned parks, she said.
Resident-owned communities, as these co-op-style trailer parks are known, "provide those owners with the ability to be stably housed and supports generational wealth building," Lodge told The Journal.
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Another flashpoint: What qualifies as a 'manufactured home'?
There was more confusion about what homes would qualify in the bill under the term "manufactured home," which in recent years has come to describe a wide range of modular buildings wheeled to a building site and assembled there.
Some of them are large and expensive, looking like regular houses and bearing no resemblance to old-school trailers and double-wides.
"The plain language of this would allow a millionaire to have a pre-fabbed mansion on their property, and that would count as half a unit," House GOP leader Blake Filippi said.
Rep. Brandon Potter, a Cranston Democrat and lead sponsor of the mobile home bill, said that's all right, as long as it encourages more housing.
"If a hypothetical millionaire was to construct a fabricated unit on their land, ultimately that unit would be a place where somebody could live, and right now there are 400 to 500 people living outside on the street," Potter said.
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But although the state's definition of manufactured home could include a prefabricated McMansion, House spokesman Larry Berman said the bill requires units to qualify under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development definition of manufactured homes, which is much narrower.
Lodge said the HUD definition dates to 1976, before the explosion of fancy modular homes, and requires manufactured homes to remain on a wheeled chassis, which rules out mansions. (Coincidentally, President Joe Biden's administration has been looking at getting rid of the chassis rule as part of an effort to expand the use of manufactured homes.)
Six of the Rhode Island's 39 cities and towns currently meet the 10% affordable housing quota.
Lodge said that if the law passes, it it is unlikely to flip many communities above 10%, because resident-owned mobile home communities are rare and only newly created ones would be counted.
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The bill separately would give municipalities extra credit toward their affordable-housing quota for very-low-income units.
The mobile home bill passed, 44-16, with eight Democrats and eight Republicans voting in opposition.
Meanwhile, the House passed another bill in its housing package Thursday, one that would have all abandoned school buildings catalogued and studied for their suitability for potential housing.
Among other bills: Creation of state Department of Housing
And the House Housing and Municipal Government Committee Thursday passed three more bills, setting them up for a vote by the full House this week.
One of them, sponsored by Shekarchi, would elevate the state's housing "czar," now a deputy secretary of commerce, to a full Cabinet secretary.
It would also create a new state Department of Housing that the housing secretary would oversee.
Creation of a state Department of Housing is a facet of a Senate bill introduced by Sen. Meghan Kallman, that seeks to create new public housing.
The Shekarchi bill only creates the department and does not have any of the other duties and powers included in the Kallman bill.
The House Housing Committee Thursday also passed a bill that would make it easier for homeowners to build extra apartments on their property, known as accessory dwelling units.
And it passed a bill that would add two members to the state Housing Appeals Board.
— panderson@providencejournal.com
(401) 277-7384
On Twitter: @PatrickAnderso_
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Will McMansions be counted as affordable housing in RI?
