When Millard’s Apple Park was platted in Nacogdoches, TX, in 2002, the 69-lot subdivision was designed to accommodate both conventional homes and manufactured properties.
But only two years later, the metropolis stopped permitting new manufactured properties by proper in its residential districts. Homes already there could stay, but they turned legally nonconforming—limiting house owners’ means to substitute or broaden them.
It’s a common sample across the state: 33% of cities don’t explicitly permit manufactured housing and an extra 11% subject it to a particular allow or public listening to, according to a current evaluation from the National Zoning Atlas.
Nacogdoches, for its half, understood the trade-off at the time. Its 2003 complete plan called manufactured housing “one of the most affordable means of entering into homeownership,” but appeared to put more stock in the issues from native residents about its potential impact on neighboring property values.
Then, in early August, Nacogdoches reversed course.
A real estate agent prepares a household home for sale on May 17, 2024. Getty Images
A construction employee is seen on a new home under construction at the Taylor Morrison Avalon at Cypress group in Cypress, Texas, on Aug. 3, 2026. Bloomberg via Getty Images
Homes are under construction at the Taylor Morrison Avalon at Cypress group on Aug. 3, 2026, in Cypress, Texas. Bloomberg via Getty Images
The City Council unanimously created a new residential district where manufactured properties are permitted by proper—including all 69 heaps of Millard’s Apple Park.
It was a win for affordability advocates, and particularly for house owners of the manufactured homes that had been constructed before the legal guidelines modified.
“They don’t have to wait till it just completely falls apart to replace it,” Mike Neu, the metropolis’s government director of development and infrastructure, informed council members. “This gives them options. They didn’t have that before.”
A “Welcome to Texas” signal is pictured on April 4, 2015, in Orange, Texas, close to the state border with Louisiana. Getty Images
But Nacogdoches was not performing solely by alternative. Beginning on Sept. 1, a new state law (Senate Bill 785) requires Texas municipalities with zoning to permit new HUD-code manufactured properties by proper in at least one residential district.
The change will require practically 400 cities to replace their codes to comply, according to an estimate from the Texas Manufactured Housing Association—making Nacogdoches an early glimpse at what could soon play out across the state.
Why Texas is betting on manufactured housing
The metropolis affords a clear case for why state lawmakers are betting on manufactured housing to ship mass affordability.
By national requirements, the metropolis appears comparatively cheap. But shopping for stays badly mismatched with what native residents earn.
Homes are seen at the Taylor Morrison Avalon at Cypress group on Aug. 3, 2026, in Cypress, Texas. Bloomberg via Getty Images
The median home was listed for about $325,500 in August, according to knowledge from Realtor.com®, while the median family income of $39,281 is roughly half of what someone would need to qualify for a mortgage that dimension. As a end result, fewer than 4 in 10 households own their properties.
Renting doesn’t offer residents much reduction, either. City officers have described the rental market as “tight,” while Realtor.com knowledge exhibits the median asking rent reached $962 in August—up 13% in three years.
Manufactured housing, meanwhile, could offer a much decrease entry price. A new single-section manufactured home offered for an average of $87,300 in 2025, while a multi-section home averaged $151,500.
Those figures exclude land and taxes, so they don’t offer a good comparability to a site-built home. But further analysis suggests that a new manufactured home put in on a basis can value roughly 35% to 73% as much as comparable site-built construction.
Texas has already adopted manufactured housing at an huge scale, too. The state acquired 17,458 manufactured properties in 2025, more than 2.5 instances the quantity despatched to second-place Florida.
But despite the clear need and demand for wider adoption, manufactured housing has run headlong into a patchwork of native guidelines that can make them legal in one group, discretionary in the next, and outright not possible in another.
Construction staff are pictured at a new home at the Taylor Morrison Avalon at Cypress group on Aug. 3, 2026, in Cypress, Texas. Bloomberg via Getty Images
And while SB785 is designed to close that hole, it’s also where the limits of the law are already starting to show.
Cities can still keep the door principally closed
While an earlier model of the laws required cities to permit manufactured properties across a “substantial area of land” and prohibited other laws that instantly or not directly amounted to a citywide ban, neither provision survived intact.
The last law requires only that the qualifying district apply to “an area of land,” without quantifying how much.
In Nacogdoches, metropolis planners recognized three areas that could probably obtain its new R-3M manufactured-home zoning. But only Millard’s Apple Park was really rezoned. For the adjustments to span more broadly, property house owners would have to request the change themselves.
Homes are under construction at the Taylor Morrison Avalon at Cypress group on Aug. 3, 2026, in Cypress, Texas. Bloomberg via Getty Images
“Theoretically, there could be no other property owners requesting a change to R-3M beyond tonight,” Neu informed council members in May.
That means Apple Park’s 69 heaps could conceivably symbolize the full extent of the metropolis’s response—a drop in the bucket in contrast to the 1,300 models the metropolis wants in the next 5 years to adequately handle demand.
Bellmead, a small metropolis outside Waco, affords an even sharper instance. The metropolis created a new manufactured-housing district but requires a tract to include 5 contiguous acres before it can be rezoned into it.
For Amber Haliburton, that was the distinction between building new housing on her household’s property or transferring on.
Homes are seen under construction at the Taylor Morrison Avalon at Cypress group on Aug. 3, 2026. Bloomberg via Getty Images
“Because we have chosen a manufactured home, there is currently no clear or practical path for us to move forward in Bellmead,” she informed the City Council in February.
Haliburton also questioned why a rule ostensibly supposed to open the metropolis to manufactured housing appeared higher suited to builders assembling subdivisions than someone attempting to place a single home.
City workers acknowledged some of that rigidity. The new district, Community Development director Fred Morris said, was supposed to comply with state law and facilitate development tasks, “not to address individual residential lots.”
Bellmead ultimately recognized a 13.98-acre tract beside an current manufactured-home development as applicable for the new zoning. But even that didn’t routinely open the land to manufactured properties. The metropolis’s own memo emphasised that the designation “does NOT rezone the property.” Its proprietor still has to request the change.
The NZA evaluation warned about that risk before SB785 was handed. Researchers really helpful requiring cities to rezone in “good faith,” noting that a municipality could otherwise fulfill the law with land unlikely ever to host a manufactured home.
All eyes will be on Texas
How the issues play out will matter far beyond the Lone Star State.
“Sold” indicators are seen outside of a home on March 11, 2024, in San Marcos, Texas. Bloomberg via Getty Images
By September 2025, the Pew Charitable Trusts had recognized 9 states that had enacted zoning reforms designed to broaden manufactured housing. Some have gone further than Texas, requiring qualifying manufactured properties across single-family residential zones rather than guaranteeing them a foothold in only one district.
At the same time, Washington is attacking other items of the downside.
The bipartisan twenty first Century Road to Housing Act, which turned law in July, contains a sequence of reforms supposed to broaden manufactured and modular housing. But it stops short of overriding native zoning, leaving opponents with a highly effective instrument to proceed to restrict where manufactured properties can be constructed.
The resistance is rooted in half in an outdated stigma. Manufactured properties have long been handled as a lesser kind of homeownership—cheaper to buy, but also assumed to be a worse investment.
The numbers inform a totally different story. Realtor.com analysis discovered that manufactured properties offered with land appreciated 70.1% from 2019 to early 2026, in contrast with 58.6% for single-family properties. Even manufactured properties offered without land appreciated 51.6%.
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