Posted by:
Steve Dubb
New group to help residents become land owners
The New Hampshire Community Loan Fund and the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) have announced the formal launch of a new organization, Resident Ownership Communities-USA (ROC-USA), which aims to provide technical assistance to help the 17 million Americans (3.5 million households) in manufactured home communities (or “mobile home parks") become owners of these communities through member-owned cooperatives. Seed funding for the effort, totaling over $8 million, comes from: CFED, the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, the Ford Foundation, Fannie Mae, and NCB Capital impact. It is estimated that there are more than 50,000 manufactured housing communities nationwide.
The effort to develop manufactured housing cooperatives has been building for some time now. The New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, which has helped spawn the expanded national effort, has the nation’s oldest manufactured housing co-op conversion program, which it began in 1984. As of December 2006, New Hampshire had 82 member cooperatives, which controlled 17 percent of that state’s total manufactured housing market. If that level of market penetration could be achieved nationally, it would mean that nearly 2.9 million Americans would become owners of their manufactured housing communities.
Although ROC-USA has just formally been launched this May, the organization has been incubated by the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund since 2006. Since then, it has been building a network of certified technical assistance providers. Presently, technical assistance provides reside in 28 states. CFED has disbursed $50,000 implementation grants to each local technical assistance provide to help cover the costs of year one operations.
Two other partners in this capacity building effort, which began a year earlier in 2005, in addition to the many groups named above are NeighborWorks America and the Opportunity Finance Network, a leading national association among the Community Development Financial Institution —or “CDFI"—movement. The partnership is known as Innovations in Manufactured Homes, or, more simply, “I’M HOME”. To date, I’M HOME has disbursed $3.7 million to 38 organizations, much of which has been distributed with an eye to building up a national network of technical assistance providers.
An April 2008 article in the Journal of Extension examines the benefits of resident cooperative ownership of manufactured housing through a historical analysis of manufactured housing co-ops in that state. If you are interested in more information on the effort to building a national manufactured housing co-op movement, a list of press articles is available here. For further detail, see also the presentations from a February 2007 symposium that was cosponsored by CFED and NeighborWorks America.