New Manufactured Home Communities Continue to Rise

By Don Westphal

DDue to the number of vacant sites in existing communities, nominal activity has transpired in new community planning over the last few years.

However, as existing communities fill up, the demand for new ones is experiencing a renaissance. The proposed communities consist of expanding existing communities, developing new communities near older communities, and acquiring site plan approval for greenfield projects.

It's interesting to note that some of the project locations have not had any new communities in decades!

What's more, these new communities all occur in areas with a significant lack of attainable housing for working families and retiring seniors.

At the Nadi Group, while we have over a dozen projects across the country that illustrate different ways to respond to new community planning, the three projects highlighted below are unique in their process:

Michigan Resort Town Property

Alta Vista, a 55+ project near Traverse City, Mich., is a new community close to the award-winning Wood Creek project featured in a previous edition of MHInsider. Even though acquiring approval for Wood Creek was a challenging exercise in zoning and site plan approval for a sophisticated resort area, the local approval process for Alta Vista was quite a bit easier.

Homes in Alta Vista will be multi-sectional with attached garages. Unfortunately, wetlands and other environmental issues have made acquiring the construction permit by the State of Michigan more difficult. Still, we expect the state to issue one soon. Memphis Blues Manufactured Home Community and Rental Homes

Memphis Blues is a unique, all-ages community where residents rent the home and homesite. Redeveloped in recent years, the community is a fascinating story. Many years ago, a flood destroyed the previous mobile home community there. The reconfiguration process on the current site has been documented in many articles since. The expansion illustrated below is in the approval stages and occupies the area that provided the fill needed to raise the existing community above the 100-year flood level. We anticipate this approval will be much easier than the previous reconfiguration since the owners, UMH Properties, have done a great job in Memphis.

Growth in Idaho

The Donnelly Idaho project in planning will be an all-age community with a mixture of single- and multi-section homes. The project needs single-section homes capable of having a garage attached to achieve a lower price point and a higher density with thinner lots. It also requires narrower sites to attain a minimum of 200 home sites there.

The ability to plow and store snow in the winter months played a significant part in the design of the community. We used cluster streets meeting National Prevention Association Code standards instead of the conventional cul-de-sac design. MHV

Donald C. Westphal has been honored with seven MHI Community of the Year Awards, has a 50-year history of planning exceptional manufactured home communities, and still enthusiastically serves the industry through his contributions to MHInsider and his work with The Nadi Group.