Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave's series on solutions to affordable housing and housing the unhoused. It is made possible by a coalition of funders including the City of Kalamazoo, Kalamazoo County, the ENNA Foundation, and the Kalamazoo County Land Bank.

PODs, tiny homes, condos, former hotels, refurbished houses, and brand-new "stick-builds" -- Kalamazoo is trying many options to get low-income people housing.

But manufactured homes may provide "the biggest bang for the buck," says Gwendolyn Hooker, Vice Chair of the Kalamazoo County Public Housing Commission.
 

Inside the mobile home units to be located in Sugarloaf Mobile Home Park.  
 

Ten units are being built now in Indiana. Lots at the Sugarloaf Mobile Home Park, in Schoolcraft just south of Portage, are being cleared of old mobile homes and trees. New utility hookups will be installed. A new playground will go up. And an old building at the park will be turned into offices for supportive services.  

The manufactured homes will be going to ten families with school-aged children, families who've experienced homelessness and are at 60% area median income* or below. They would pay rent, adjusted to their income, to the county.

Courtesy An artist's rendering of one of the models of the manufactured homes by Clayton Wakarusa being put up by the Kalamazoo County Housing Commission.Kalamazoo County Housing Director Mary Balkema and Housing Project Manager Willa DiTaranto hope that this will all be in place by the end of October. There have been some delays, but the project is much quicker and cheaper than building other housing, whether traditional homes or even tiny, they say. 

Balkema and DiTaranto have been talking up the Sugarloaf project in interviews and public meetings for much of the year. 

Why do they seem so excited about it?

"Well, I think it's a way to get quality housing quickly into our area and for a significantly reduced cost of what stick building (traditional permanent houses built on-site) is," Balkema says, "for a significantly reduced price from what stick construction is costing per square foot."

Eric HennigHousing Project Manager Willa DiTaranto.DiTaranto says, "It's a very creative way of using the money. It's something that I haven't seen done before. I mean, ten units of housing for less than a million dollars is almost unheard of. So it's a really efficient use of the millage funds."

 Parks for manufactured homes

Clayton Wakarusa, of Wakarusa, Ind., is building the units. They'll be from the company's Pulse series, homes with three-to-two bedrooms, and two-to-one bathrooms. All utilities, including a washer/dryer, are included. Total price for ten of them is $700,397. The most expensive, at $82,544, is the 997 square feet model 4424-E733.

They'll be shipped to lots at Sugarloaf, which are undergoing some changes. Trees are being cleared for a total of $25,000. Engineering and survey work is happening now, and new utility hook-ups will go in soon.

Sugarloaf is a small park, with a lot of trees. Near Sugarloaf Lake, with surrounding woods and wetlands, it's in a natural setting, and quiet. It's on Shaver Road near its connection with U.S. 131, so traffic can be fast and heavy at times. It's three and a half miles to a Harding's in downtown Schoolcraft, or three miles to the Meijer on Shaver. The nearest neighborhood, a cluster of lakefront homes on Sugarloaf and Little Sugarloaf, are valued around $600,000-$300,000 on Zillow. 

Balkema often says that if a County Public Housing Commission project is in a neighborhood where she wouldn't want to live, she doesn't want to place lower-income people there.

Eric HennigA new playground will go up and an old building at the park will be turned into offices for supportive services.  Sugarloaf is "in a calm area of the county. It's actually quite beautiful when I go by there. And sometimes when we have a beautiful, soft, calm, serene setting, sometimes our life is a little bit more stable, too, than if we would put it right in a place that has a lot of crime and a lot of unsavory activity."

Also on the list of changes for the park is a transformation of an old cinder block building into an office for supportive services, and a playground that'll be on a tree-shaded lot.

Tree removal on the unit lots has to happen because mobile homes aren't so mobile -- residents long ago planted trees by their trailers, and they grew to be a hindrance to moving anything out or in, Balkema says.

What used to be known as "trailers" are no longer simple trailers. According to this 2022 NPR report, since 1976 such homes have been referred to as manufactured homes, because they were designed to be moved once, from the manufacturer to the lot pad. It costs $10,000 to $15,000 to haul an old unit to a new location.

This can be an issue because of mobile home parks' unique setup: You may own your house, but you don't own the lot you're renting. If the lot's rents, utilities, and other fees jump -- say, if a new owner buys the park -- residents can't simply put the house on wheels and move to another park.

What used to be called "trailer parks" have had a bad reputation, from run-down trailers to crime. They're now referred to as mobile home parks or manufactured home parks; the units are called modular or pre-fab housing.

Eric HennigLots at the Sugarloaf Mobile Home Park, in Schoolcraft just south of Portage, are being cleared of old mobile homes and trees so ten new homes can go in.What's being constructed inside an Indiana factory for the Kalamazoo County Public Housing Commission is "2x6 construction, it's built inside (protected from) the elements," Balkema says, making it easier to build and, in her opinion, likely stronger than a house built outside.

"I know that prefabricated housing has had a stigma over the years, but millions of Americans do live in it. And if I told you that I bought a trailer in a retirement place in Florida, you might have a different thought in your mind than if I told you I lived on Cork Street in a mobile home park," Balkema says.

"So, you know what? I think that it has come a long way, and we need all housing types in our community," she says.

Eric HennigKalamazoo County Housing Director Mary Balkema.Balkema and DiTaranto say that there are major issues with some parks, mainly that private investors are buying them up, raising lot rents, making no improvements, profiting, selling, and moving on to the next.

"Michigan is the 13th state with the most manufactured housing parks in the country. But unfortunately, we're number two for parks that are owned by private equity-backed firms," DiTaranto says.

"There's been a few articles in Crain's about the issues around that, how they're increasing rents exponentially and making it almost unaffordable. They're squeezing the tenants out."

DiTaranto thinks that there's a source of stress causing these communities to go downhill. "Part of that is that there's just been a significant disinvestment in some of these parks over the years, which is probably why you're seeing them picked up by larger investors," she says.

"There's been deferred maintenance for so long that the mom-and-pop owners of the past can't necessarily afford to keep up with them. And they certainly can't afford to do the expensive infrastructure improvements that are required to put any new units into a park," she says.

DiTaranto says, "For whatever reason, private equity is seeing Michigan as a really prime place to be investing in land and opportunity. And so I think that the more projects like this (Sugarloaf) that we can do where we're preserving affordability, the better."

Who owns Sugarloaf?

We reached out to Jared Falconer, CEO of Best Value Communities, owners of Michigan and Kentucky manufactured home parks. He replied via email that "as a company policy we don't provide updates on the various projects we are working on."

Eric HennigSugarloaf is a small manufactured home park, with a lot of trees.Falconer did give this statement:  “We are excited to be partnering with Kalamazoo County and helping to be part of the solution to the low-income housing shortage experienced across SW Michigan.”

We did confirm that Falconer was born in New Zealand, attended high school in Portage as an exchange student, went to university in his home country, and did some work there and in Australia, before moving to the U.S. He's now headquartered in Chicago with a small office in Paw Paw. His LinkedIn describes him as the "managing member of a mid-sized RE (real-estate) private equity firm" with a portfolio of over 1,000 units.

DiTaranto and Balkema say that Falconer's firm has been helping, not hurting, low-income families find housing at his parks, unlike other private equity owners of this story. He worked with Grand Rapids' Family Promise of West Michigan to house people coming out of homelessness, and in 2023 sold two GR-area parks to the non-profit, so they could continue the work.

Balkema says, "The owner is also local, and I've known him for 40 years.... His roots go pretty deep in Kalamazoo County. So I think that's an added benefit as well, that we know the players personally."

Are they able to guarantee that BVC won't sell Sugarloaf anytime in the future to someone not as concerned with providing transitional housing, ruining the project's goals?

"About half" the parks in the county are owned by outside equity firms, Balkema says, and "they jacked up the rent" at their parks.

In the case of BVC, they have a loan with the county, "and if they sell it, that loan comes due immediately. We also have the lot rent raising no faster than the rate of inflation," Balkema says.

The Public Housing Commission has safeguards, "but as you know, nothing is certain, and things do sell, and so could it sell? Sure," Balkema says.  "Are we going to master lease the ten parcels with our units on it? Absolutely." Any new owners would have to honor their agreement, she adds.

Hooker knows Falconer, and sees that he's "an upstanding guy," Balkema says.

Eric HennigLots at the Sugarloaf Mobile Home Park, in Schoolcraft just south of Portage, are being cleared of old mobile homes and trees so ten new homes can go in.Hooker says, "I think that it makes a big difference when you have folks that are local, folks that are invested in their community, people that have some type of equity in just being good players and want to help the community, and be team players and really alleviating the housing crisis that we have, with affordable units."

She continues, "At the end of the day, the County Housing Commission owns those ten units. They're not owned by Sugarloaf." If the park was sold, "Worst case scenario, we will pack up our ten units and leave, and then they will have to immediately pay the County Commission the money back on that loan," Hooker says.
 
Helping families transition from homelessness

The money for Sugarloaf is coming from the 2015 housing millage, aimed specifically at housing for families with school-age children, plus money from the 2020 housing millage that will go toward infrastructure upgrades in the park.

When the homes are ready, "within a two-week time frame" applications will open up online and be available in hardcopy form, Hooker says, and they'll get the word out to people who could qualify.

Applicants will have to match criteria: They must be families with school-aged children, with an income of 60% AMI, and hold previous homeless status. (An income of 60% AMI for a family of four is $60,980.)

They'll be working with "the McKinney-Vento folks" who are working through the Federal Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program in the area of unhoused children in school, Hooker says, as well with ISK, and Kalamazoo and Portage public schools, to find families that fit the criteria and who need help finding housing.

To ensure that children aren't uprooted from schools they're currently attending, "you're allowed under federal law to attend the school that you were in prior to experiencing homelessness if you wish," DiTaranto says. "So, they have to arrange busing for students to go back and forth from wherever they are staying currently, to the school district that is their home district."

"I think this was really important to Vice Chair Hooker and the Commission, that the owner of this park is willing to work to put in a new playground for the kids," DiTaranto says. 

Also needed, "an office building that they're actually going to renovate for, so that we can have wraparound services at the park for these families," DiTaranto adds.

Schoolcraft is a long way from supportive services offices. The nearest Metro stop from the park is over a mile’s walk down busy Shaver's shoulder at West Osterhout Avenue -- though Balkema points out that most families will likely own a vehicle. "Quite a few folks that are struggling with homelessness really do have cars and jobs," she says. In some cases, "they're living in their cars."

The County Public Housing Commission will hire from local organizations to "do individualized wraparound services to the needs of the family" at the park, Hooker says. "And that can run a gamut from making sure their child has all of the things so they're prepared for success at school, to clothes, to making sure that they can get prescriptions that they may need, to helping with applications, whatever the case may be."

Hooker emphasizes, "That wraparound piece is crucial. It's crucial to understand that the folks that have lived through homelessness and being unhoused for any extended amount of time are traumatized. And so we have to be very intentional in making sure that we're providing compassionate, equitable, and individualized services and supports for each individual family so that they're getting what they need."Eric HennigMary Balkema and Willa DiTaranto are excited about housing going in at Sugarloaf Mobile Home Park in part because ten units of housing for less than a million dollars is "almost unheard of."

Rising tides

The team says they've received no NIMBY-like pushback, and the project should benefit the park and its current residents. 

Schoolcraft Village government is on board, and "I think that having a really willing and ready park owner who wants to make the best situation for these families has been really helpful," DiTaranto says. 

The park is getting ten new units where old trailers and empty pads had been. "I think that the owner is very excited about getting brand new units," DiTaranto says. "They look a lot nicer than your 1970s trailer."

They've found that investment in an area really does lead to the old saying, "rising tides lift all boats," she says. "We've seen houses (around other millage projects) that don't have any county investment into them -- they've done landscaping, someone painted the house, fixed the porch. I think that, when you get new, fresh investment into a community, it's contagious."

*What is the Area Median Income? 

AMI is a metric, defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, that shows where an income-earning individual or family stands economically in a geographic region. If someone has an AMI below 80%, HUD defines them as low-income. They are very low income below 50%, and extremely low at or below 30%. 
According to HUD, households at 60% have an annual income of $42,360 for homes with one person, $48,420 for two people, and $54,480 for three people.