Local Spotlight: Bringing More Affordable Homes to the Inland Empire
Casita Coalition Board Member and Director of Lending & Realty with Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services (NPHS, Inc.) Fabian Casarez shares how NPHS is using factory-built homes to house more people in the Inland Empire.
Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services, a HUD-approved nonprofit community development organization, is working on several projects that use factory-built housing and small housing to expand homeownership within the Inland Empire. The mission of NPHS, to build equitable communities through innovative housing and economic solutions, enables them to provide a wide range of services to homebuyers in San Bernardino, Riverside, and East Los Angeles counties, from down payment assistance to education to housing itself.
NPHS has partnered with Silvercrest Homes to create affordable homes and ADUs that offer 28% savings when compared with a traditional site-built home. They will be offering $200,000 in down payment assistance and loans through MH advantage with 3% down. Their current project is a 3 bed, 2 bath home with a 2 bed, 2 bath ADU in the backyard. To make this project financially feasible, they hope to rent to a family at 80% AMI for three years, and then sell to them, offering down payment assistance to keep it affordable. NPHS considers this a Beta project and plans on scaling this model.
What makes manufactured housing ideal for these types of projects? “Manufactured homes are more energy and cost efficient, environmentally friendly, and provide a great opportunity for first-time homebuyers,” says Fabian Casarez, Director of Lending & Realty with NPHS. “As a realtor-broker, I hear about a lot of scams from a variety of individuals, especially with ADUs. With prefab, it’s hard to scam people because everything is clearly laid out and already done. There’s no risk of things being built incorrectly, change orders, timelines getting longer… so it’s much more accessible. Plus, the financing is more feasible because it’s more predictable and cost-efficient.”
NPHS had success with similar projects in the past - specifically three manufactured homes that were built in San Bernardino, each of which was sold between $380,000-$425,000, well under market rate for Southern California. These brand-new manufactured homes had stick-built attached garages, giving them a fashionable look and making it more difficult to tell that the homes were manufactured. Financing for these homes was made possible through Freddie Mac’s Home Possible® & Fannie Mae’s HomeReady® programs.
Freddie Mac has expressed interest in working with NPHS to scale their current projects nationwide, as well as an upcoming project involving the development of unimproved pads -land with foundation slabs and utilities that needs to get developed. NPHS will begin approaching builder-investors this year to discuss building manufactured homes and ADUs on these properties.
“We’re always asking ourselves, ‘How can we get more families into homes, either via rental or homeownership?’” says Casarez. “It’s a challenge. Lenders don’t layer loans, the compensation isn’t there, the work model is twice as much, and lenders don’t understand how to qualify the buyers. We work with many single parents, domestic abuse survivors, recovering addicts, and formerly homeless individuals, many of whom have been living on government subsidies. At a certain point, these individuals need housing that works for their family, so we’re trying to facilitate a model that can really get some of these families housed. Manufactured housing has created a lot of opportunities for us to make filling that need a reality.”