Grandfathered to Death: Why It’s Nearly Impossible to Maintain the Communities We Say We Want to Preserve By Jason Ramshaw

An empty site is remarkably easy to approve. It requires no permit, no variance and no public hearing at which six people explain that they strongly support affordable housing before describing, in considerable detail, why this particular affordable housing should be located somewhere else. An empty site can sit for a decade collecting weeds, a tire and a shopping cart nobody remembers stealing, and no one will ever ask whether it is adequately serving working families. It has never been accused of changing the character of the neighborhood. In the language of the ordinance, it is in full compliance. 

Put a home back on it, however, and the site develops a criminal record. 

That is not a thought experiment. Stand in Bremerton Mobile Home Park in Griffith, Indiana, and count more than twenty homes sitting empty. Not renderings. Not concepts. Homes —on finished sites, with roads and power, in a state that says out loud that it has a housing shortage, waiting six years on a sewer line. 

There is a deadline for that sewer line. I want to be fair about that: it exists, it is written down, and someone at the city can tell you exactly what it was. We are two years past it. The date is far enough behind us now that it functions less like a commitment and more like a landmark. A deadline commits everyone to a date. It does not commit anyone to twenty households. Those turn out to be different documents. 

So twenty families live somewhere else, or somewhere worse, or with somebody’s mother, who has made it clear that the upstairs bathroom is not “for everyone.” 

Our industry spends enormous energy fighting over whether new communities can be approved, and we should. But the quieter fight — the one we lose weekly, and frequently do not even show up for — is whether the communities we already have are still permitted to be communities. 

We Used to Call This a Neighborhood 

Most of these places were never conceived as developments. They did not begin with a capital stack, seventeen consultants and a rendering of two suspiciously attractive people drinking coffee beside a decorative pond. They grew because people needed somewhere to live. A family owned some land. A relative needed a home, so one was brought in. Then another. The road got a little longer, the water line followed, children grew up, and neighbors learned who owned the good socket set and who should never be allowed anywhere near electricity. 

Nobody cut a ribbon. Nobody announced a placemaking initiative. What emerged anyway is the thing developers now spend serious money trying to reproduce on purpose: people collecting packages from the wrong porch, watching each other’s kids, noticing when the man three homes down hasn’t opened his blinds. No site plan has ever manufactured that. It wasn’t revolutionary. It was practical, which may explain why we eventually became suspicious of it. 

Legal, But Not Enthusiastic 

Then zoning arrived, and it did not make these communities illegal. That would have been too direct, and someone would have had to vote for it out loud. Instead it made them legal nonconforming uses: permitted to continue existing, provided they do not become enthusiastic about it. 

It is the zoning equivalent of being invited to Thanksgiving. You may stay. Do not move the furniture. Do not touch the thermostat. And if you bring in a new chair, we are all going to have to sit down and talk about it.

That works beautifully for a use that never changes. Housing changes. Homes age, storms come, residents move away, and something has to go back on the site. 

So an owner replaces a worn-out 1974 home with a new HUD code home — safer, better insulated, better for the resident, better for the neighborhood, and better for everyone who has ever said the words “housing quality” into a microphone. Then the permit counter explains that putting a home where a home has stood since Nixon may not be maintenance. It may be an expansion of a nonconforming use. 

Expansion. Of a use that just got smaller. Expansion requires a variance. A variance requires a hearing. And while everyone deliberates, a second clock is running, because many ordinances hold that a site left unused for six months, or a year, forfeits the right entirely. Two clocks now: the approval process, and the penalty for waiting on the approval process. That is not preservation. That is a magic trick in which the housing disappears and everyone insists they never touched it. 

One Sensible Brick at a Time 

Zoning restrictions. Density minimums. Infrastructure standards written for five-hundred-unit subdivisions. Entitlement timelines measured in quarters. Each is defensible standing alone, which is precisely why the whole is impossible to argue with. One department wants a wider road. Another wants larger lots. Another needs one more study. Everybody brings a single sensible brick, and eventually somebody looks up and discovers a wall, with the affordable housing everyone keeps saying we need sitting on the other side of it. 

Then financing joins the meeting, because the meeting was not long enough. A vacant site is worth something only if it can be filled, so the appraiser discounts it, the lender declines to fund it, and it stays empty — which confirms the appraisal. Nobody designed that loop. That is how you know it’s real. 

And this is what makes the problem so durable: no villain is required. The planner may be doing exactly what the ordinance requires. The engineer may have a legitimate concern. The neighbor may sincerely worry about traffic. Everyone involved can be entirely reasonable, and twenty homes can still sit empty for six years. 

The Vacancy Nobody Photographs 

The resident across the street has not read the nonconforming use section of the ordinance. He knows a home has been empty since before the pandemic, and he draws the obvious conclusion: somebody stopped caring. He is looking at the same empty home I am. His explanation is shorter, and from the sidewalk, it is the better one. 

That is the part of the housing shortage nobody can photograph. We can photograph an apartment building coming down, interview displaced residents, stand beside the rubble and understand exactly what was lost. Nobody photographs the family that never moved into the home that was already sitting there, on a finished site, waiting on a signature. There is no moving truck, no eviction notice, no crying child on the evening news. There is only a lot where people used to live, a file containing the very responsible reasons they no longer do, and a site in perfect compliance.

 Fix Bad Owners. Don’t Outlaw the House. 

Sometimes the neighbor is right. Some communities are badly run. Infrastructure gets deferred, rents rise with no corresponding improvement, and some owners know every number on the rent roll while remaining mysteriously unfamiliar with almost everyone who lives there. That is bad ownership. Call it bad ownership and fix it. 

But we make a remarkable leap from “some operators behave badly” to “therefore this form of housing should be extraordinarily difficult to maintain.” When an apartment building has a terrible landlord, we do not ban apartments. When a restaurant poisons its customers we close the restaurant; we generally resist zoning out lunch. Yet the system blames operators for deterioration and then requires a variance to reverse it. It demands reinvestment and then penalizes it. It says preserve the community, provided preservation looks exactly like neglect. 

I’ll grant the counterargument its due, and it has been made in these pages: restrictive zoning does keep a competitor from building across the road. Scarcity is good for the rent roll. It is a moat — wonderful right up until the day you need a drawbridge and discover you’re on the wrong side of it, standing with your residents. Fewer communities mean fewer choices, and fewer choices have never once produced better prices, however compassionate the hearing sounded while creating them. Good intentions matter. They are not a housing unit. 

Never Only an Asset Class In this business we reduce neighborhoods to wonderfully efficient language: occupied site, lot rent, past-due balance, home type, year built. I do it in every offering memorandum I touch. The spreadsheet isn’t wrong. It’s incomplete. 

Somewhere between those columns is a family that finally found a housing payment it could manage, a retiree who drinks his coffee on the same porch every morning, and a kid who knows which streetlight means it’s time to ride home. Someone planted tomatoes beside a home that somebody else, in a hearing, called temporary. 

It is not temporary. It is where the dog sleeps, where the Christmas decorations are stored badly, and where everyone knows which floorboard makes noise. It is one of the last places in America where a family gets a detached home, a yard, some privacy and neighbors who know their kids’ names, without a mortgage the size of a small municipal bond. That inventory is being retired one empty site at a time, quietly, with everyone’s paperwork in order. 

Permission 

None of this is an argument against standards. Safe utilities and responsible infrastructure matter, and nobody serious misses the era when the utility department consisted of a gentleman named Earl, one wrench and a filing system based on vibes. It is an argument about proportion. 

Treat home replacement as maintenance, because that is what it is. Let existing communities refill their existing vacant sites by right. Stop the abandonment clock when the delay is administrative, so a city cannot create a delay and then let the delay erase the housing. 

And stop treating “no” like weather. Most operators never lose these fights; they never have them. They hear “no” from a planner and accept it the way you accept a forecast. It isn’t weather. Somebody decided it, and decisions come with procedure — appeals, zoning boards, variance standards, deadlines shorter than anyone expects. A legal nonconforming use is a property right, not a favor. Quite often the answer at the counter is an opinion delivered in the tone of a statute.

 New communities matter, and we should keep fighting for them. But preservation cannot become a polite way of supervising the disappearance of the product. Protect these communities in principle while making them impossible to maintain in practice, and in twenty years we will have a beautifully preserved shortage. That isn’t a housing strategy. It’s curation. 

We keep waiting for the affordable housing breakthrough to be an invention. Maybe AI. Maybe 3D printing. Maybe a federal program with an acronym so encouraging that we briefly forget it requires a seventy-four-page application. But the cheapest affordable housing in America is the housing already standing, on land already zoned, on sites already served. It doesn’t need a new idea. It needs permission to work the way it always has — and owners willing to insist on that permission in writing, with a citation. 

Until then, everyone involved remains fully compliant. 

So do twenty homes at Bremerton, still waiting on a sewer line that had, I’m told, a deadline

By Jason Ramshaw is an affordable housing advocate and founder of Rhino Communities, a manufactured housing-focused brokerage and advisory firm specializing in MHC sales, acquisitions, and strategic consulting nationwide. He spends much of his time somewhere between rent rolls, utility systems, zoning maps and the recurring American mystery of why housing everybody agrees we desperately need becomes a problem the moment somebody tries to build it. He is also partnered with Equity Consultants Real Estate, where he helps structure, underwrite and execute transactions across the Rhino platform with an emphasis on disciplined, financeable deals and housing that works in the real world