It's Not Your Grandma's Trailer Anymore; Modular Homes Growing In Popularity, Acceptance

(Source: MIRS.news, Published 06/06/2025) Drive down a Michigan freeway for any amount of time, and you’ll most likely see a half or a whole house being pulled on a wide-load semi-trailer. What you might not know is that the Michigan State Housing Development Authority (MSHDA) might have paid for that home in its effort to stanch the housing bleed.

MSHDA Executive Director Amy Hovey said the funding requests to MSHDA for modular developments have increased after a pilot for a program called MSHDA Mod was rolled out two years ago. Now, modular developments are being supported by many of the authority funding resources, from the low-income housing tax credits, to Missing Middle, and Mi Neighborhood programs.

“I think folks are looking for an easier way to get housing developed, a predictable path for development, and modular is the answer to a lot of that. It would be great if we had some additional modular factories in our state so we could cut down the cost and the time of transit,” Hovey said.

She said there was a big difference between the traditional mobile home communities and the modular communities that are being built today. The model used isn’t where someone owns the chassis of a trailer and pays lot rent. She said the single-family homes that are being installed are usually owned by the developer and rented or the land and home are owned by one person.

“So we're not seeing a lot of NIMBY-ism (Not In My Back Yard) around the type of housing that is getting developed,” Hovey said.

She said there were still holdouts, but it had more to do with the income level of the people rather than the type of housing being built.

“Some communities need to get their codes up a little bit to look at being more accepting. But it's not the people necessarily, at least that's not what I'm hearing,” she said.

She said complete neighborhoods in northern Michigan were being assembled with modular housing and many people can’t tell the difference.

“When you walk through these neighborhoods, you would not know the difference whether it was a stick build or modular. Sometimes they have garages. Sometimes they don't, but we see that in stick built,” she said.

"Stick-built" refers to a traditional construction method where a structure, like a house, is built on-site, piece by piece, using wood studs, framing lumber, and other materials. This contrasts with modular construction, where sections are pre-built at a factory and then assembled on-site.

She said there isn’t one part of the state that hasn’t hopped on the modular train, and it wasn’t relegated to single-family housing either and pointed to a condominium development near Flint that was being built using modular housing techniques.

“It's modular housing, more as townhouse style, but it has basements, it has decks. You would not know the difference when you go through this housing, whether it was modular or it was stick built,” she said.

Communities First Inc. CEO Glenn Wilson, a Flint-based nonprofit that helps develop affordable housing, said modular housing isn’t new and has had a stigma attached to it because it was made in a factory.

“Because of how much people want to build a home, we got to do something. And this is what has to be done, trying to figure out more creative ways to build additional housing,” Wilson said.

Wilson said the cost of modular housing was the real factor in the rise in popularity, but the quality of new modular homes is helping, too. He said an entire plot could be bought out and set up much cheaper than a stick-built house.