New York has rolled out a new program that relies on manufactured homes to tackle housing affordability.
A bright, blue home now stands at a once empty lot in Schenectady’s Mont Pleasant neighborhood.
It has a stainless steel fridge, three bedrooms and two baths. But it wasn’t built in Schenectady. Instead, it was manufactured at an offsite warehouse and transported to the Electric City.
The home is one of three structures that have recently gone up throughout the state as part of a pilot program the governor is calling “MOVE-IN NY.”
The program seeks to create 200 modular homes, which can be built more quickly and cheaply than traditional homes, across the state in an effort to address housing affordability.
RuthAnne Visnauskas, Commissioner of the New York State Homes and Community Renewal Department, says the project alone won’t solve the state’s affordability crisis. But she says it is an important tool as the state looks to build 800,000 new homes over the next decade as part of a pledge Governor Kathy Hochul made last year.
“There isn’t really one solution to the housing crisis, people need town homes, and they need single family homes, they need multi-family rentals and large elevator buildings. And so, we want to be able to provide in every community all different types of affordable housing and so this is sort of one piece of the puzzle and we need lots of pieces to make that whole puzzle,” Visnauskas said.
The state agency is now accepting applications from local governments, land banks, nonprofit housing developers and home manufacturers to build more of these pre-fabricated homes.
Visnauskas says Homes and Community Renewal is asking each applicant to provide a minimum of 10 locations where a potential new home could be built and says the program could expand if proven effective. Accepted applicants would be given grants in the form of reimbursements.
“We are going to award up to 15, I would say we’ll get maybe between ten and 15 really strong applications, we’re hoping,” Visnauskas said.
Schenectady Mayor Gary McCarthy says the city plans to apply for more housing.
“When you do these types of projects, you also see some of the adjacent properties people pay more attention to detail, fix them up and it creates a synergy within the neighborhoods that is hard to replicate,” McCarthy said.
Richard Ruzzo is the Deputy Chair of the Schenectady County Legislature and is planning to build 10 more of the houses throughout the county.
He says people typically cannot receive traditional mortgages for modular homes because of a lack of collateral.
“They come and they sit on a frame and typically what happens is you pull the wheels off but that frame is still here and technically someone could hook a flatbed truck back up to it, put the wheels back on, lower it to the ground and remove it, so at that point the collateral would be limited,” Ruzzo said.
Ruzzo says that in this case the houses have added permanency, making the properties eligible for mortgage applications.
“We purchased, we selected these options, he talked about full sized cabinets, he talked about a entertainment center, a center island et cetera, all that was selected at the factory,” Ruzzo said.
The construction and installation of the homes are being supported by $50 million included in the state budget. Three have been built so far; one each in Schenectady, Syracuse and Newcomb.