For decades, manufactured home builders have been working to shed the old image of boxy trailer homes reserved for the outskirts of cities and suburbia. Now, a small change in federal regulations could open the door for architecture welcomed in more neighborhoods.

This summer’s sweeping housing bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, removed a 1974 mandate that required every manufactured home to be built on a nonremovable steel frame, known as a chassis. Experts and home producers think the change could help unlock thousands more affordable housing options around the country.

But first, experts say, states have to examine outdated regulations that are blocking the manufactured home industry’s potential. The Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing initiative estimates that 30 states might need to change their regulations to align with the new federal law.

Unlocking manufactured homes from chassis will allow manufactured homes to become multi-family developments, said Stephanie Hawke, associate research director of land use and supply at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.

They’ll be cheaper for builders, she noted, and they’ll be easier to stack into two-story and multi-family homes.

“First of all, you were putting a very heavy, expensive thing on the bottom of these homes that is not needed and it is not used, and it’s made out of steel,” Hawke said. “If you’ve got this heavy piece of steel on the bottom of a home, stacking it becomes more difficult.”

Manufactured homes are built entirely in a factory, regulated by U.S. Housing and Urban Development codes, and then trucked to a home site. 

They cost 50% less per square foot than homes built on a site, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, an industry group. And experts say dropping the chassis could drive down costs by $5,000 to $10,000 per home.

“There’s really the opportunity to stack these manufactured homes to make multi-family developments,” Hawke said. “So it’s unlocking this thing which was primarily used for single-family and it’s making it much more accessible for a multi-family developer, which is great because manufactured housing is far and away the least expensive non-subsidized housing supply in the United States.” 

In a 2026 earnings call, UMH Properties, a publicly traded real estate company that owns and develops manufactured-home communities, said the chassis rule change will allow it to put two-story manufactured homes on existing lots. The company also is considering designs that could combine two stories with duplex units, allowing for smaller, more affordable apartment rentals. 

“You build 2,000 square feet of homes instead of 1,000 square feet on the same piece of land. It’s a very, very important development,” said Eugene Landy, founder and chairman of UMH Properties, on the earnings call. “This is a change that’s gonna help every manufactured home community out in the country.”

Another benefit to removing the chassis, according to Mark Brunner, president of the Manufactured & Modular Home Association of Minnesota, is that manufactured homes can blend more seamlessly into subdivisions because they won’t look too different from other homes.

Under the new law, states are required to certify before July 11, 2027 — or 2028 if their legislatures meet biennially — that they will treat all manufactured homes the same regardless of whether the homes have a chassis or not. So far, at least three states — North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — have modernized the definition of a manufactured home to align automatically with code updates from HUD.

“If you are not essentially in compliance with this new regulatory framework, then you’re really limited both in using manufactured homes and making them, which is obviously an economic driver for a state,” Hawke said. “North Carolina did an incorporation by reference, essentially saying, ‘We are just going to define this like HUD defines it. Go see HUD’s definition.’ It’s a lot simpler.” 

From temporary housing to mobile home parks

Rachel Siegel, a researcher and policy expert for Pew’s housing initiative, said her research has found that more than 30 states are going to need to update their definition of manufactured housing to remove language about a required chassis.

HUD certification now requires equal treatment of homes with and without chassis, and changes to state laws may not be as easy as striking a few words, she said. References to permanent chassis can appear throughout state statutes in various manufactured home policies.

“States vary completely across the country on how they treat manufactured housing,” Siegel said. “This requirement of permanent chassis is really pervasive.”

A Stateline review found use of the “permanent chassis” language currently written on manufactured housing laws include Virginia, Maine, New York, Missouri, South Carolina, Washington, Nevada and Maryland.

Following World War II, a shift in how mobile homes were being used began forming. No longer reserved as temporary housing, mobile homes were designed to be increasingly more permanent. Mobile home communities sprang up, though many were zoned into rural or suburban areas on a city’s edge.

For decades, manufactured homes — called mobile homes until the early 1970s — have been built in factories and trucked to their new locale. Many were unloaded into mobile home communities, specialized zoning districts where residents own their house but rent the land underneath. 

They are far cheaper than site-built houses: The average sales price of a new manufactured home rose from $81,900 in 2019 to $127,200 in 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Manufactured Housing Survey. 

Those factory-built sales have slowed since a late 1990s boom as fewer manufactured home communities have been built since 2000, a trend largely attributed to restrictive zoning and rising land costs. Still, an estimated 20 million people live in one, most of them on acreage owned by a landlord. 

In the past, a home attached to a trailer or visibly hoisted a few feet off the ground were tells of manufactured housing when they first popped up in neighborhoods. But many modern ones are virtually unrecognizable from site-built homes.

“They have the same walls, ceiling, sheetrock, windows and shingles,” said Dustin Brakemeier, who owns and operates manufactured home communities in Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. “One’s built in a factory, one’s built outside. They’re the same.’” 

Changing zoning, mortgage rules

Pennsylvania Republican state Rep. Dan Moul, who owns a manufactured home park in Oxford Township in Adams County, recalled in an interview that zoning restrictions kept him from expanding the community into an adjoining parcel a few years ago. The township said the land was zoned exclusively for detached single-family residential housing. 

“The bottom line is they look at mobile home communities as that’s where the poor riffraff lives, and we don’t want any more riffraff,” Moul said. 

One of the big domino effects from the removal of the chassis requirement could be state banning or overriding restrictive local zoning policies that targeted manufactured homes. 

In an analysis of over 6,700 zoning districts in Texas, the National Zoning Atlas found 33% of localities have explicit restrictions on manufactured housing and 11% allowed them via special hearing or permit, but not by-right. 

Last year, Kentucky and Texas banned local ordinances that would unreasonably restrict where manufactured homes could be placed. Kentucky also insisted that local governments cannot impose design standards for manufactured homes that are  higher than those for non-manufactured homes. 

Alex Rodino, a real estate agent in Savannah, Georgia, who sells manufactured homes, said the stigma isn’t just among local governments and stodgy neighborhood groups. Some buyers, he said, are confusing modern manufactured housing with the image of older mobile homes.

“I think (that perception) is slowly changing as construction quality improves and traditional housing becomes less affordable,” said Rodino.

Siegel, of Pew, said that because states must align their manufactured housing laws with HUD’s definition by 2027 – there’s an opportunity for states to take a holistic look at their regulations, including whether states can make it easier to define manufactured homes as “real estate.”

Siegel said states also should revisit laws that classify manufactured homes as personal property — like cars. 

“If you own property that’s personal property instead of real estate, you’re not eligible to get a mortgage,” Siegel said. “That’s not about a person’s financial status or financial credibility, and it’s not even about the quality of the home. It’s just this titling component.”

A Pew analysis touting the potential for manufactured homes shows that a typical $100,000 mortgage for a manufactured home would save a borrower roughly $49,000 over the life of the loan when compared with “home-only” or personal property loans, which are the only options now. 

Some states already are taking action: Laws in Georgia, Maine and New York have made it easier for some manufactured homeowners to convert their homes to real property and gain access to mortgage financing.

“If we’re going to title manufactured homes without a chassis the same way as we’re titling manufactured homes with a chassis, let’s make sure that that process is as streamlined and makes the most sense for what these modern homes are today,” Siegel said.

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.

 

The U.S. Department of Education’s suspension this year of a comprehensive monitoring process puts billions of K-12 dollars at heightened risk of undetected waste, fraud and abuse, according to a new report by the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office.

The congressional watchdog’s report also raised concerns about the reliability of federal absenteeism data, noting that absenteeism rates were reported above 100% in some schools.

Officials from the Department of Education told GAO the department suspended its consolidated monitoring of Elementary and Secondary Education Act requirements while it develops a new approach. But as of August, the department had not provided a timeline for resuming the reviews or details on an alternative for making sure states comply with federal requirements.

The change heightens the risk for Title 1 funding, which is about two-thirds of the nearly $27 billion in total Elementary and Secondary Education Act funding in 2025, the report said.  Under Title 1, states receive grants and use the money to support schools and districts with high concentrations of students from low-income families.

States receiving Title I funding are required to develop statewide accountability systems, and all states had to report certain chronic absenteeism data. The Education Department defines chronic absenteeism as missing 10% or more of school days. Consolidated monitoring was fully implemented in 2019 but the Education Department suspended the process this year. 

“As a result of suspending consolidated monitoring, Education will not be able to systematically assess whether states are complying with ESEA requirements and following their approved state plans,” the report said.

On chronic absenteeism, half the states remain unmonitored for reporting requirements that apply to all states, the report said.

The Education Department directs states to report the number of chronically absent students over a school year, but to report total enrollment based on a single date. “Calculating rates using mismatched timeframes has resulted in unreliable and implausible chronic absenteeism rates (e.g., rates over 100 percent),” the GAO said.

That was especially true in low-performing schools and for those housing career and technical education programs, the report said.

“Absent quality chronic absenteeism data, this nationwide data source cannot be used to reliably track trends or evaluate the effectiveness of accountability efforts and interventions to address chronic absenteeism,” it concluded.

Chronic absenteeism, which has been linked with declining academic performance, has remained elevated following the COVID-19 pandemic. At least one-quarter of K-12 students were estimated to be chronically absent in recent years, the report noted. 

But discrepancies in absentee rates, GAO found, were notable in low-performing schools where enrollment fluctuates more often and in shared-time schools, where students split their day between schools, often for career and technical education or other specialized programs.

More than 30% of shared-time schools had “implausible” chronic absenteeism rates, compared with under 2% of other schools. Among schools designated for Comprehensive Support and Improvement, a federal category for low-performing schools, nearly 13% had implausible rates over 100%, compared with about 2% of schools not in that category.

In Pennsylvania, GAO found 98% of shared-time schools there had implausible chronic absenteeism rates. By contrast, Delaware, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina and Rhode Island had no shared-time schools with implausible rates in GAO’s analysis.

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org. 

In its latest effort to overhaul federal homelessness funding, the Trump administration is proposing to provide more money to localities that prioritize treatment-first policies such as sober living, more cooperation with law enforcement and more temporary and transitional housing. 

It’s a reversal from a decade-long federal approach known as Housing First that sought to permanently house people experiencing homelessness without requiring sobriety or participation in treatment programs as a condition.

The Trump administration has been attempting to overhaul federal funding for homelessness programs in this direction over the past two years but had suffered defeats in court that stalled its efforts to do so in 2025 and 2026.

In a notice posted in the Federal Register on Sept. 11, the Department of Housing and Urban Development argued that current policies aren’t working and said some states and localities have already shifted toward a treatment-based approach to homelessness. The agency will take public comments through Oct. 13.

Under the proposal, the department would change the bonuses it gives to state and local areas that participate in the Continuum of Care program, a federal grant initiative to fight homelessness. The department would incentivize efforts to provide transitional housing with services “concentrating on improving employment income and meeting behavioral healthcare needs.” It would also incentivize addiction treatment and recovery services, sober housing and partnerships with law enforcement.

HUD pointed to policies in Anchorage, Alaska; Houston; Portland, Oregon; and San Francisco as evidence that states and cities are already shifting their homelessness responses toward public camping restrictions with emphasis on treatment and recovery as a condition to housing support.

That shift was made possible by the U.S. Supreme Court’s City of Grants Pass v. Johnson decision in 2024, which allowed local governments to enforce public camping bans. Since then, more than 350 cities and 14 states have adopted laws or measures to crack down on street homelessness. 

HUD had tried twice previously to change the application process for grants along similar lines, but a federal court ruled against the attempts, saying they violated required procedures. 

One lawsuit against HUD’s efforts was brought by a coalition of 22 states and the District of Columbia, while another was filed by local governments and homelessness organizations, including the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the National Low Income Housing Coalition. 

State officials joining the lawsuit were from Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, plus the District of Columbia. 

The Obama administration made Housing First initiatives the predominant federal homelessness policy. The Trump administration argues that it hasn’t worked and that chronic homelessness has increased since 2013. 

But housing advocacy groups say that Housing First initiatives are a proven, bipartisan strategy that can lead to better outcomes and reduce taxpayer spending on emergency services and the criminal legal system.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition pointed to a 2020 review of 26 studies that found Housing First programs decreased homelessness by 88% and improved housing stability by 41% compared with Treatment First programs. 

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org. 

A multi-billion-dollar federal program that helps schools and libraries afford broadband internet is under review by the Trump administration, leaving education officials and advocates worried about potentially significant cuts. 

The E-Rate program provides about $3 billion annually for internet access and telecommunications to more than 100,000 schools and 11,000 libraries across the country. It is the fifth-largest stream of federal funding for schools nationwide, according to the Schools Superintendents Association (AASA).

The Federal Communications Commission said it is reviewing “whether the program should be narrowed or otherwise reoriented to reflect the extent to which its connectivity objectives have been achieved.” The agency is accepting public comments until Oct. 13, which it will take into account when it crafts a proposal. 

Amid a landscape of scaled back federal funding for education under the Trump administration and of tightening state and district budgets, some school officials and advocates are wary of what changes to the E-Rate program could spell for how schools and libraries operate.

In June, the FCC announced it would be exploring changes to the E-Rate program. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the proposal would be “aimed at empowering parents and ensuring that our E-Rate program produces the great educational outcomes stakeholders have intended.”  

The E-Rate program has provided schools and libraries discounts on the cost of eligible services ranging from 20% to 90%, with higher discounts provided to the most disadvantaged schools and libraries. The FCC is asking whether adjustments should be made to the discount rate system.

The FCC also is asking for comment on whether E-rate support should be limited to rural areas or to areas served by a single provider; whether some services remain necessary; and whether concerns about students’ screen time should be addressed. 

At a virtual town hall hosted Wednesday by the Schools Superintendents Association, concerns over the FCC’s inquiry ranged from whether the FCC had the jurisdictional authority to change the program to how schools would be able to maintain broadband and internet connectivity without shifting funds away from staffing and other budgetary needs. 

Without the same level of funding, schools and libraries could be subject to higher internet costs, less support for rural and high-cost communities and greater difficulties in upgrading needed building infrastructure, the AASA said.

E-Rate dollars impact every corner of the country, with nearly 102,000 schools and nearly 12,000 libraries receiving commitments in funding year 2024, according to the latest publicly available data. California had more than 12,000 E-Rate recipients, Texas nearly 9,800 and New York more than 6,200.   

LaTonya M. Goffney, superintendent of the Aldine Independent School District in Texas, said her district received $11 million in E-Rate support over five years. 

“Internet connectivity is not a one-time purchase,” she said during the superintendents group call. “If E-Rate were reduced or eliminated, Aldine ISD would face an immediate and significant budget shortfall and that means millions of dollars would have to be redirected from somewhere else in our budget…there’s no way to absorb a loss of this magnitude without affecting people.”

According to Shawnda Hines, deputy director of communications for the American Library Association, 73% of U.S. public libraries rely on the E-Rate program to pay their internet bill or to keep their networks updated.

When Congress established the program in 1996, only 14% of the nation’s K-12 classrooms had access to the Internet, according to the agency. The FCC has some authority to change how E-Rate is administered without congressional approval, but whether the agency can eliminate a congressionally authorized program altogether is an unsettled legal question.

Access to the internet in modern schools extends far beyond classroom instruction, Stacy Hawthorne, executive director of EdTech Leaders Alliance, explained.

It also powers bus routing, security systems and building ventilation, and helps digitize attendance records, school meals and student health information. Districts rely on internet-connected systems to operate buildings, comply with state and federal requirements and manage basic administrative functions. 

“It’s not just email and Google Docs. Imagine it’s 5:30 a.m., the buses start coming to life. They use GPS routing, and they have parent-facing tracking apps,” Hawthorne said. “Cameras come to life, the security systems start running at full speed. Visitor management scans driver’s licenses against offender registries before a single visitor gets access to any of our school buildings.”

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org. 

The country’s two largest school districts — New York City and Los Angeles — banned most student use of artificial intelligence in classrooms for this school year as anxiety over AI’s effect on learning intensifies.

The Los Angeles Unified School District announced last week that it is barring student use of generative AI on school-issued devices for the current school year. Generative AI creates new text, images or other content following a user’s instructions. During the school year, a committee will produce recommendations for use of the technology in future years.

New York City Public Schools last week announced a similar but less broad approach. The district put in place a one-year moratorium on generative AI for children from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. 

High school students will have to complete 45-minute AI literacy modules twice a year. Some career-focused AI use will be allowed and some high schools will be permitted to test AI pilot programs.

The restrictions, which New York officials said will affect 600,000 students, will allow time to study the technology’s impacts. 

“The tech industry wants us to believe that A.I.-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a news release. “We do not see it that way.” 

Chicago officials may follow suit. About half the candidates running for the Chicago Board of Education this November have signed a pledge calling for a three-year moratorium on generative AI use in the public school classrooms.

Smaller school districts around the country have taken similar steps. Districts in Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Texas and Washington have blocked or limited tools such as ChatGPT, while some allow approved platforms under teacher supervision.

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.