California is facing one of the most severe housing affordability crises in the country. Housing costs have risen far faster than incomes, pushing homeownership and stable rental housing out of reach for middle- and working-class households across the state.
In response to these structural pressures, Manufactured Home Inspection, Inc. (MHI), operating as BuiltADU, has emerged as a vertically integrated manufactured housing platform delivering lower-cost housing faster and with greater cost certainty than traditional stick-built construction. Based in Southern California, MHI works with homeowners, developers, and municipalities to deploy manufactured housing across single-family lots, backyard ADUs, and small-scale multifamily communities.
What is manufactured housing?
Manufactured homes are factory-built residences constructed to federal HUD standards, then transported to a site and installed on a permanent foundation. Unlike traditional on-site construction, most of the building process occurs in a controlled factory environment, reducing labor exposure, weather delays, material waste, and timeline uncertainty. Today's manufactured homes increasingly resemble conventional single-family housing in design, durability, and energy performance while benefiting from industrialized production methods.
The economic case for alternatives like manufactured housing has become increasingly urgent. By late 2025, monthly payments for a typical mid-tier home in California exceeded $5,500, nearly double the national average and well beyond what most middle-income households can realistically afford. With wages largely stagnant, interest rates elevated, and inflation eroding purchasing power, the barrier to entry for both homeownership and rental housing has steadily risen.
Nowhere is this imbalance more pronounced than in Los Angeles County, where home prices increased by roughly 276 percent between 1990 and 2022 while inflation-adjusted wages for middle- and working-class households remained largely flat. Across Southern California, the purchase price of a typical three-bedroom, two-bath single-family home commonly ranges from $800,000 to $1 million, roughly two to two-and-a-half times the national average.
This chronic undersupply has produced real demographic consequences. In 2024, California recorded the largest net population loss of any U.S. state, reflecting mounting financial strain on households attempting to remain in the region. While housing costs are the primary driver, high state taxes, prolonged COVID-era restrictions, governance challenges, and public safety concerns have further accelerated out-migration among families and businesses.
Within Southern California, rising coastal housing costs have pushed residents inland toward Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, where land has historically been more attainable. Yet population growth in these areas has consistently outpaced housing production, reinforcing a structural jobs-to-housing imbalance rather than alleviating it.
As these pressures compound, manufactured housing has re-emerged as one of the few scalable solutions capable of delivering housing at attainable price points. Nationally, more than 7.2 million Americans live in manufactured homes, representing a significant share of the country's naturally occurring affordable housing stock. What has changed is not the concept, but the execution.
Modern manufactured housing succeeds because it transforms housing delivery into an operational system rather than a bespoke construction process. Factory production shortens timelines, stabilizes costs, and reduces exposure to labor volatility, advantages that have become increasingly valuable as traditional construction grows slower, riskier, and more capital-intensive.
MHI was originally founded with a narrow focus on Title 25 manufactured home inspections. Over time, it evolved into a vertically integrated platform encompassing inspections, repairs, remodels, re-leveling, and fully manufactured home installations on private property. Today, MHI specializes in turnkey manufactured housing delivery across backyard ADUs, single-family residences, and small multifamily developments.
This integration matters. By controlling inspection, site preparation, installation, and compliance, MHI reduces handoffs, minimizes late-stage regulatory risk, and delivers more predictable outcomes than fragmented project teams. The result is faster delivery and fewer cost overruns, two factors increasingly prized by homeowners, developers, and municipalities alike.
MHI works with cities across Southern California to deliver repair and remodel projects funded by municipal grants, often serving low-income homeowners, seniors on fixed incomes, and residents with disabilities. In parallel, the company partners with developers on 20- to 40-unit manufactured home communities and supports individual homeowners installing manufactured ADUs as rental units or family casitas. MHI has also provided single-family manufactured homes for households displaced by the Eaton fires in Altadena, offering faster and more cost-effective solutions during disaster recovery.
From a cost perspective, the economics are increasingly compelling. For current projects in Altadena, total installation and construction costs, including both hard and soft costs, typically range from $100 to $150 per square foot, depending on site conditions and scope. Manufactured homes themselves average approximately $125 per square foot, bringing the total all-in cost of a manufactured home installed on a permanent foundation to roughly $225 to $275 per square foot.
By comparison, new stick-built construction in the same markets routinely exceeds $400 to $450 per square foot, driven by labor shortages, material costs, and extended construction timelines. Manufactured housing, therefore, delivers cost savings on the order of 40 percent while still meeting modern standards for quality, durability, and energy efficiency.
These economics are expanding the addressable market for manufactured housing. Beyond primary residences, manufactured homes now present a compelling option for backyard ADUs, small infill developments, rental properties, and post-disaster rebuilding, use cases where speed, predictability, and capital efficiency matter more than speculative appreciation.
At its core, California's housing crisis remains a failure of supply. Demand has remained strong, particularly in major employment centers, while housing production has consistently lagged. The result has been predictable: higher home prices, higher rents, and declining affordability across income levels.
If California is serious about addressing affordability, it must deliver housing faster and at materially lower cost than traditional stick-built construction allows. Manufactured and modular housing are among the few construction methods that reliably achieve this at scale. They reduce labor exposure, shorten timelines, and offer cost predictability without sacrificing performance or compliance.
Construction innovation alone, however, is not enough. California's regulatory environment continues to make housing unnecessarily expensive and slow to deliver. Extended permitting timelines, overlapping agency reviews, inconsistent enforcement, and late-stage regulatory challenges have turned housing development into a high-risk endeavor, particularly for smaller builders and attainable housing projects. Ironically, this environment favors large property owners and institutional investors who can afford to hold underutilized assets, benefiting from artificial scarcity while middle- and working-class households bear the cost through higher rents and home prices.
Expanding manufactured and modular housing, paired with meaningful permitting and regulatory reform, offers the most practical path forward. With extensive experience delivering manufactured housing projects across Southern California, MHI is positioned to help homeowners, developers, and municipalities cut through these constraints and bring attainable housing to market more efficiently.
In a market defined by delays and cost overruns, MHI offers something increasingly rare in California housing: speed, certainty, and affordability in a proven and scalable delivery model.
