America once built 5x as many factory-made homes — now 'there’s almost no other way' to house people but to go back

Manufactured housing is both faster and less expensive to build than normal housing. But there are still a number of obstacles standing in the way of larger adoption.

Here’s why prefabricated homes aren’t more popular in the U.S. — and what the government can do to help these homes become more viable.

Factory-built homes have a bad reputation they’re struggling to outrun

When people think of manufactured homes, they often think of small, poorly made mobile homes sitting on overgrown lots.

“I’m not one to shy away from our stigma — the stigma that our industry had, we earned,” said Logan Hanes, executive director of the Kentucky Manufactured Housing Institute, to the Washington Post.

That’s one of the reasons why the number of manufactured homes shipped in the U.S. has fallen from a 1970’s peak of over 500,000 yearly to around 100,000 in 2025.

But factory-built housing has come a long way in recent years. Many manufactured homes — housing that’s completely built in a factory setting, then transported to their final destination — are designed to look just like regular stick-built housing.

There’s also modular housing, where the majority of the home is built at the factory, then transported and finished on-site. These homes can offer some of the benefits of stick-built homes, but they take only half the time to build and cost 10% to 20% less.

One reason that people try to avoid manufactured homes is because they believe that they’ll depreciate in value over time, unlike stick-built homes which generally go up in value.

But manufactured homes have appreciated in value at around the same rate as traditional housing since 2000, as long as manufactured homeowners own the land their home sits on.

There are still downsides to manufactured homes. It’s harder to get a loan for a manufactured home than a regular home, for instance. But these downsides are not as severe as they used to be.

The prebuilt housing industry needs state and federal intervention if it’s to help fix the housing crisis

Even with the clear cost advantages, manufactured house production has been relatively flat since 2020.

Part of this is because many local governments go out of their way to make building a manufactured home hard.