Catalyzing Innovation
This category includes those projects that are innovative in design, are clearly related to our mission and require SRDI’s involvement primarily because no one else is doing similar work. Our goal is to jumpstart such initiatives and hand them off to appropriate organizations. Our work currently includes:
Manufactured Housing as an Asset-Building Strategy:
In many rural counties across the South, manufactured homes comprise over half of new housing starts. In some rural counties this figure is as high as 80%. Across SRDI’s 12-state region, there are almost 4 million manufactured homes.
Despite their popularity, manufactured homes remain outside the housing mainstream. Legal classification, taxation, zoning regulations, marketing systems, and financing terms are usually quite different and less favorable for manufactured homes than for site-built homes, in spite of the fact that manufactured units can match stick-built ones in quality and longevity.
SRDI is centering its manufactured housing campaign on a common and unfortunate characteristic of manufactured housing: depreciation. Homeownership is an important source of equity capital that can be leveraged for small business and education. SRDI’s view is that depreciation need not be an automatic result of buying a manufactured home. Depreciation results from policies and practices that can and need to be changed. SRDI’s initiative will illustrate how buyers can improve their chances for building equity with a manufactured home.
