She applied for help with a down payment from Champlain Housing Trust’s Manufactured Housing Down Payment Program.
The program received an extra $1.25 million this year, part of a total of $5 million in additional funds the Legislature appropriated to help people who live in manufactured homes. The funds would help people buy new homes, make repairs to their existing ones, and assist owners of manufactured home parks to make their own repairs and improvements, such as removing abandoned homes and fixing up parks by installing new pads and foundations on vacant lots.
“Manufactured home communities … are disproportionately occupied by people who have very low incomes,” said Maura Collins, executive director of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency.
According to Vermont Housing Commissioner Josh Hanford, about 8% of Vermonters live in manufactured home communities.
(In this story, VTDigger is using the term manufactured homes to describe what are commonly referred to as mobile homes. “There hasn’t been a mobile home built in the United States since 1976,” said Joe Cicirelli, director of housing for the Cooperative Development Institute, a nonprofit that helps manufactured home owners turn the parks they are in into coops, “but it’s hard to shake that moniker.”)
The down payment program began after Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, when floods devastated many mobile home communities across Vermont. Michael Monte, chief executive officer of the Champlain Housing Trust, said his organization has financed 256 homes across Vermont in this way since Irene. The average household income of the recipient, he said, is $45,000 a year. Monte said his organization receives about 100 applications a year.
The program provides what Monte calls essentially a silent second mortgage. Someone who wants to buy a manufactured home takes out a first mortgage. Champlain Housing Trust comes in and provides a $27,500 zero-interest loan for an Energy Star home and $35,000 for a home with net-zero energy consumption. The manufactured homes financed by the program range in cost from $65,000 to $180,000.
All payments on the loans are deferred until the home is sold, transferred or refinanced, and if the homeowner sells the home, the next buyer can assume the loan.
“The funds (in the manufactured housing down payment program) are recycled, so it sort of lives on and helps folks in an ongoing way,” Hanford said.
The money for the program that helps people buy new manufactured homes comes from a state tax credit. The Vermont Housing Finance Agency sells these tax credits to banks and insurance companies at a discount and makes the money available to Champlain Housing Trust and Addison County Community Trust, according to Collins.
For example, an investor could buy $500,000 in tax credits for $450,000 and the $450,000 goes to the Champlain Housing Trust. The investor makes a $50,000 profit on the tax credit and the Housing Trust gets the rest for the program.
This year, the Legislature appropriated an additional $1.25 million to finance these tax credits over the next five years, according to Hanford, more than doubling the amount of money available for homebuyers.
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