The blue and white house arrived on two flatbed trucks in this modest Syracuse, N.Y., neighborhood in mid-July. A week later, the three-bedroom manufactured home, with two bathrooms, an open-concept floor plan and an island in the kitchen, was assembled like a jigsaw puzzle, bringing a burst of color to a vacant lot on a street of aging homes.
Built on an assembly line in a nearby factory, the house sits on a 60-by-120-foot lot owned by the Greater Syracuse Land Bank, a nonprofit that aims to return vacant and abandoned properties to productive use. It goes on sale Monday for $175,000.
This house, along with one in Schenectady, N.Y., and another in Macomb, N.Y., a small town in the Adirondacks, marks the start of a $50 million investment by New York State to deliver 200 modular and manufactured homes to low-and middle-income families over the next year, part of a $1.5 billion housing initiative secured in the 2026 budget.
The program, Move In NY, is aimed at addressing an acute housing shortage in suburban, upstate and rural New York that accelerated during the pandemic. Between August 2019 and August 2025, the median home price rose much faster in the suburbs and in rural areas than in urban centers — 74 percent in suburban counties and 73 percent in rural counties, compared with 51 percent in urban counties, according to Redfin.
To address the shortage and keep up with population growth, the state needs to build 800,000 housing units by 2030, according to the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit civic organization. While 200 homes won’t begin to close the gap, Gov. Kathy Hochul sees the potential in manufactured housing.
“This is the answer to how we can get the supply quickly,” Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, said in an interview with The New York Times ahead of the announcement.
Beginning Monday, municipalities can submit proposals to participate in the program, which will be available to up to 15 communities. To qualify, communities must commit to building a minimum of 10 homes on land free of any zoning restrictions, and make them available to buyers who meet income requirements. While the first three homes were built by Champion Homes, a Michigan-based manufacturer, other companies can bid to supply the additional housing.
Manufactured housing is generally cheaper and faster to build than traditional wood-frame housing. A typical wood-frame house takes about 18 months to build, while the house in Syracuse was completed in six months and assembled in eight days, at a cost of $250,000 — about half of what a conventional build would cost. But manufactured homes have never caught on as a popular housing style, in part because the homes are difficult to finance and come with a stigma: Manufactured homes are synonymous with trailers in trailer parks, evoking images of aging mobile homes vulnerable to severe weather and deterioration.
“A trailer in a trailer park is vastly different than the 2025 version,” said Ms. Hochul, whose parents lived in a single-wide trailer in Buffalo before she was born. Once the public is reintroduced to manufactured housing as a way to rapidly deliver starter homes to communities that need them, she said, the perception can change: “That’s how you get rid of the stigma. And it should go away very quickly.”
Manufactured homes are hard to finance because banks frequently do not consider them real property. They are built on a chassis, and owners often do not own the land beneath them. Borrowers often get chattel or personal loans, at less favorable terms than a mortgage.
Homes in the Move In NY program must be built on land that will be sold with the home, and they will follow design guidelines that meet federal housing standards, allowing them to qualify for a conventional mortgage. (Various state financing programs will be available to buyers for down payment and mortgage assistance).
Unlike trailer homes, modern manufactured homes can now include features that make them almost indistinguishable from wood frame houses, including open kitchens, pitched roofs, garages and porches. While the three models are almost identical, Champion Homes can build ones as large as 2,300 square feet with five bedrooms.
Rural communities and smaller cities both need new housing, but their needs are not the same. While a city like Syracuse struggles with vacant lots and deteriorating properties, a tiny, forested town like Macomb also needs to find the money to fund basic infrastructure like roads and sewers before it can start building houses. Michael J. Borges, the executive director of the Rural Housing Coalition of New York, worries that rural communities could be overlooked in a program that sets a 10-home minimum.
“When you’re trying to build housing in rural areas, you need programs that are specific to rural areas,” Mr. Borges said.
The program also faces a hurdle in communities that have been known to push back against building affordable housing, particularly manufactured homes. Rather than force towns to build, Ms. Hochul’s plan offers incentives, like zero-percent loans and partial grants. She hopes the incentives, along with the reality that communities need more housing, is enough to persuade municipalities to participate.
“Their communities will stagnate if they don’t build more housing,” Ms. Hochul said. “We’ll lose kids, not to Florida and Texas; we’ll lose them to New Jersey and Connecticut because they built more housing. That’s what’s happening.”
Ronda Kaysen, a real estate reporter for The Times, writes about the intersection of housing and society.
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