In recent years, however, with rapid increases in home and land prices, Americans have increasingly accepted and adopted the concept of manufactured housing as part of the dream of owning their own home. These lower costs have made homeownership a possibility for a wider range of people . This trend has been particularly strong in the Southeast. The top seven states in new manufactured housing deliveries between 1992 and 1996 were all in the Southeast. Leading the way was North Carolina, where nearly a third of all new homes constructed in the state between 1992 and 1996 were manufactured homes.
Counties are typically less restrictive towards manufactured housing than are municipalities.
The second task of this report, to construct a model to explain homeownership rates across the state, also achieved important results. Included in the model was the proportion of the county's housing stock that was manufactured housing. This one variable has a strong relation to the homeownership rate. To increase homeownership rates in a jurisdiction, a positive characteristic of a local economy, local governments should, if not outright encourage, at least avoid discouraging the availability of manufactured housing as a residential alternative to North Carolina's working families. One step along that road is to avoid the types of restrictions uncovered by the survey of North Carolina planning directors.