Here’s a chart via Jason Segedy’s blog that shows manufactured homes as a percentage of housing in each state.
Here’s the chart, with Minnesota marked:
Segedy writes about some patterns:
One of the things that affects the overall age of housing in any given location is the percentage of mobile homes in the mix. The median housing unit in the United States was built in 1976, while the median mobile home was built in the 1990s. Locations with a high percentage of mobile homes, like West Virginia, will have an overall stock of housing that is newer than what one might expect, given other demographic trends like population growth and household size.
Mobile homes (manufactured homes) have a come a long way, in terms of quality of construction and durability, but they still do not last as long as traditional single-family or multi-family structures.
The percentage of mobile homes ranges from 17% of all housing units in South Carolina, to 0.2% of all housing units in Hawaii. Mobile homes are most prevalent in the South and the Mountain West.
Minnesota is very close to the bottom of the list, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of this kind of affordable housing. Especially in the metro area, these kinds of communities are under threat because of age and location. The displacement in the suburb of Saint Anthony is one good example, but there might be a few others that I don’t know about.
Shady Lane mobile home park at 87th and Portland in Bloomington still stands vacant 12 years after it closed.
MPR did a story on it.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2006/04/26/trailerparks
Lots of money to be made (or not) by evicting low-income mobile home park residents.
On a positive tip, there are a lot of non profits that exist to help mobile home owners create cooperatives so they can have greater autonomy and nicer parks! Check it out, i cant remember the name of the non profit that does this in MN, but its cool:
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/07/mobile-home-cooperatives-residents-buy-land-from-owner/565277/
I know Aeon was involved in the Lowry Grove case