The tests showed that it was not the homes themselves that were failing, it was largely the fault of attachments that people had bolted to their mobile home. Manufactured housing companies often refer to this 2014 test from the American Modern Insurance Group (see video) in which they tested homes to see how they would hold up in high winds. In fact, it is difficult to get insurance if you do not use over-the-top anchors, so a lot of people living in mobile homes don’t have insurance. After Hurricane Andrew, hurricane standards called for straps to go over the top of mobile homes that secure them to the ground. Back then, mobile homes that were anchored at all were anchored by driving a rod into the ground and then connecting that rod to the home’s frame. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew destroyed an estimated 90% of mobile homes in Southern Dade County. These are called “D-sticker” homes, which means they have been designed to meet an even higher wind resistance requirement.Īnother consideration: How is the home built? What kind of foundation does it use and is it anchored? There is also a special category for manufactured homes that are sited within 1,500 feet of the coastline in hurricane-prone areas of the country. The southern tip of the state is different from the rest of the state. Generally, each step up in zones requires several thousand dollars in increased costs to meet the higher building standards.Įven in Florida, zones differ by whether the county they are in is coastal or if inland. This is the national wind zone map to which they refer: Manufactured homes are designed to withstand wind speeds of 100 miles per hour in Wind Zone 2 and 110 miles per hour in Wind Zone 3.” The MHI adds: “In areas prone to hurricane-force winds (Wind Zones II and III) of the HUD Basic Wind Zone Map, the standards for manufactured homes are equivalent to the current regional and national building codes for site-built homes. Richard Jennison, formerly the president and CEO of the Manufactured Housing Institute, the national trade association for the factory-built housing industry, said in 2016, “The standards for manufactured housing are subject to robust compliance and quality assurance regulations, sometimes more stringent than those for traditional site-built homes.” In many ways, mobile homes still suffer from the stigma of homes built prior to June 15, 1974, when Congress passed the first safety act that regulated mobile homes. That is critically important when you understand how building standards for all homes, mobile and otherwise, have changed in recent decades. More than 600,000 of them are older homes, meaning they were not built to current hurricane standards. One consideration: When was the structure built?Īt last count, Florida had about 828,000 mobile homes. The Florida Manufactured Housing Association says, “One of every five new homes sold in Florida is a factory-built home.” Manufactured housing represents 7.3 percent of all occupied housing units, and 10.3 percent of all occupied single-family detached housing.The median annual income of manufactured homeowners is about $26,000.Census data, the average price per square foot of a manufactured home is $50, compared to $111 for a site-built home. Manufactured housing provides quality, affordable housing for more than 22 million very low-, low- and moderate-income Americans.The Manufactured Housing Institute provides this data: How many times have we done stories about storm damage that focused on the debris that used to be a mobile home park?īut is it true that mobile homes are less safe in storms? The answer is, like most nuanced answers, it depends. It is conventional wisdom that when tropical storms like Elsa blow in, you do not want to be living in a mobile home. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. Covering COVID-19 is a daily Poynter briefing of story ideas about the coronavirus and other timely topics for journalists, written by senior faculty Al Tompkins.
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