You Don’t Need Zoning to Be Exclusionary: Manufactured Home Parks, Land-Use Regulations and Housing Segregation in the Houston Metropolitan Area.

Abstract: Manufactured home parks (MHPs), businesses that are “designed, developed, operated and maintained.for the placement and occupancy of manufactured homes on a long-term basis,” are an important source of affordable housing in the United States and other countries1. The social and spatial stigma surrounding MHPs has been widely documented, and the location of these communities is a key feature of their marginalization. We examine the how land use regulations contribute to the spatial distribution and segregation of MHPs in Greater Houston, a fast-growing urban region in the southern United States. At the local-government scale, we collect land-use regulations from the 134 jurisdictions in the Houston MSA to analyze how jurisdictions shape development, expansion, or improvement of MHPs within their boundaries, and how the regulation of MHPs varies across jurisdictions. At the scale of the individual MHPs, we draw a random proportionate sample of 400 MHPs and collect data from primary and secondary sources including tax parcel records, local zoning maps, remotely sensed imagery, and a proprietary real estate dataset. We discuss four key findings. First, local governments use a variety of land-use tools, not just zoning, to exclude, limit, or condition the placement of MHPs within their respective jurisdictions. Second, we show that these land-use regulations have widely varying requirements for the (re)development of MHPs. Third, we find that a significant number of MHPs are already located in unincorporated areas and that new MHPs will be less likely to be in incorporated areas. Finally, we find that local governments often treat MHPs as something other than housing, which introduces important uncertainties about the future of MHPs.

Affordable But Marginalized: A Sociospatial and Regulatory Analysis of Mobile Home Parks in the Houston Metropolitan Area

Abstract: Mobile home parks (MHPs) are a major source of unsubsidizedaffordable housing in the United States but are poorly understood in planning research and practice.Here we present findings of one of the first and most comprehensive studies of MHPs in a U.S. metropol-itan area. We located and spatially analyzed MHPs in the Houston (TX) metropolitan statistical area, com-paring the sociodemographics, built environment, and environmental exposure of census block groupswith higher shares of MHP land to block groups with fewer or no parks. We examined the relationshipbetween land use regulations and the location of MHPs by coding government documents for the 132jurisdictions in the metropolitan statistical area. We found that MHPs are an important component of theregional housing system and are located in areas with more diverse populations, lower socioeconomicstatus, and larger families. MHPs are concentrated in moderately urbanized areas relatively close to thecentral business district with lower housing costs and moderate job opportunities. They are clusterednear other MHPs in areas with less access to transportation and urban amenities and greater exposure toenvironmental hazards. We demonstrate that the location of MHPs is associated with exclusionary landuse regulations, which indicates future parks will likely be in areas with significant inequalities.

‘Between the devil and the Bay of Bengal’: the Ford Foundation and the politics of planning in post-Independence Calcutta

Abstract: From 1960–1973, the Ford Foundation and the Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organization (CMPO) engaged in a unique partnership that produced the Basic Development Plan, a bold strategy for the development of the world’s ‘most troubled city.’ The Ford-CMPO partnership brought together leading planning experts from the United States and India and resulted in innovative and abortive development plans and programmes, and was beset by the economic and political crises that came to define post-Independence Calcutta. This paper provides a detailed history of the Ford-CMPO partnership and highlights the myriad of political dilemmas that challenged the project and that provide a window in the politics of planning and urban development in post-Independence India.