The Habitat for Humanity of the Greater La Crosse Region executive director watched this summer as semitrucks pulled into the Vernon County city of Hillsboro, population 1,400. Instead of bringing materials to build a traditional home, they each carried a preassembled half of a house.
Workers removed the wheels that carried them down the interstate. Then, a crane hoisted them up and onto a concrete foundation.
The scene illustrated a transformation within Habitat for Humanity, which has since the 1970s relied on community members to help construct homes from their foundations to the roofs. But even with volunteer labor, construction costs have skyrocketed over the years. That has prompted the nonprofit to introduce factory-built homes as an option, finding savings that allow it to develop more affordable homes for first-time buyers and working-class families.
Habitat’s La Crosse affiliate was early to embrace the factory-built model, which is spreading to affordable housing organizations nationwide. But the organization hasn’t gotten all Wisconsin municipalities and residents on board.
Some local governments use zoning laws to prohibit manufactured home developments like the one in Hillsboro. Others require extra work or alterations before allowing manufactured housing projects. Some green-light developers that restrict factory-built housing from filling empty lots where they build.
Several states require local governments to allow manufactured homes alongside site-built single-family housing. Wisconsin is not among them.
Critics of the model still associate manufactured housing with cheaply built and short-lived mobile homes built in the 1960s and 1970s — before the government started to regulate construction, Fox said.
But construction must now follow a federal building code, and manufactured homes can appreciate in value at similar rates to traditional homes, a Harvard University study found.
The cheaper cost of developing factory-built homes does not reflect poorer quality, Fox said. Savings come from finding scale in mass production, with factories buying materials in bulk and cutting down material waste through computer design. Building can unfold faster in factories than on site, where builders face unpredictable weather.
While Fox said building a traditional Habitat home can take professionals and volunteers longer than a year, four homes trucked to Hillsboro this summer were placed in one day.
Fox highlighted farmhouse sinks and stainless steel appliances as she walked through each house — features already assembled as the crane lifted the homes into place.
A seam in the laminate wood floors split the kitchen from the living room, the only interior evidence of how the home arrived. Drywall and floor boards will eventually cover the seams, making the Hillsboro homes look similar to any site-built development, Fox said.
“It’s not until you see them standing there and get in and walk through and touch things that you’re like, ‘No, this is like any other house,’” Fox said. “It’s beautiful.”
‘The place that I can leave my family’
Russell and Katie Bessel expected to learn the fate of their Habitat for Humanity application on May 28. By 1 p.m. on May 29, Russell started calling friends and family to tell them they must not have been chosen for a new home.
The family was getting used to bad news. A motorcycle crash in 2024 paralyzed Russell from the waist down, around the same time Katie started dealing with a cancer diagnosis.
But just as Russell finished speaking with his mom, Katie walked through the door crying. She showed him an email once she managed to stifle her sobs: They would move to Hillsboro in 2026.
It didn’t feel real until they saw one of the Hillsboro homes this summer, Katie said.
“Beautiful countertops, cabinets, flooring. It’s gorgeous,” Russell said.
And most importantly, the home will be wheelchair-accessible, unlike the family’s current apartment.
Russell sleeps, bathes and eats in the living room because his wheelchair can’t fit through narrow halls and doorways. He can’t maneuver to the dining table, forcing him to watch from his chair or bed as his wife and three children eat dinner.
“I’m tired of that,” he said. “I want to sit down and have a family meal.”
Their new home will have a giant kitchen island where he can eat next to his kids.
The family will move into one of 10 manufactured homes in Habitat’s Hillsboro development — three of them for traditional Habitat homeowners, including the Bessels, who must work a set number of hours for the nonprofit and earn less than 60% of the local median family income, $95,400 in Vernon County.
Three other homes are for first-time buyers who earn less than 80% the median income and will receive down payment assistance. Families earning no more than 120% of the local median income will be eligible to purchase four homes, which Habitat listed this spring during the rendering stage for about $350,000.
The tiered system benefits families with different levels of need, Fox said. Proceeds from Habitat’s sale of the four homes will help finance the rest of the development. The nonprofit has attracted interest in the homes since posting photos of their move-in-ready state, Fox said.
The city of Hillsboro will pay Habitat up to $206,000 if the development is finished by July 2026, according to its contract.
No- or low-interest loans will help keep the Bessels’ mortgage payments affordable. But the family will ultimately pay for the full value of their home, like any other buyer.
“It’ll be the place that I can leave my family,” Russell said. “I don’t have to worry about when I do pass from this earth, that they’re gonna struggle.”
Factory-built models catch on
A crane will do most of the work once the trucks with the Bessel home arrive in Hillsboro. That doesn’t eliminate the need for volunteers and future homeowners to work at the sites, Fox said. They will help landscape the nearly half-acre lots for the traditional Habitat recipients and construct two-car garages attached to each home.
“The beauty of local businesses putting teams together and retirees showing up and picking up hammers is a piece of Habitat for Humanity that’s been there since the very beginning, and it runs through everything that we do,” Fox said.
Still, less reliance on volunteers helps at a time when fewer people are volunteering for nonprofits nationwide, said Kristie Smith, executive director of St. Croix Valley Habitat for Humanity.
Smith’s affiliate started its final site-built home last year. This year, it’s developing six factory-built homes — all purchased through the La Crosse affiliate.
So far, St. Croix Habitat has developed only modular housing, building homes inside a factory but for a specific plot of land in line with specific state and local building codes.
Modular housing cuts the affiliate’s costs and time spent by 30%, Smith said. Manufactured housing like what’s being developed in Hillsboro would be even more affordable.
Unlike modular housing, manufactured homes are built to a federal building code, allowing for larger-scale building with fewer customizations. The average manufactured home in 2021 cost half the price per square foot than a site-built home, according to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research firm.
The Hillsboro homes are a relatively new manufactured housing model called CrossMod — built to federal code, but with room for amenities typically associated with a site-built home. The Hillsboro development will feature the first CrossMod homes placed on full basements. They will be more energy-efficient than traditional homes.
Stigma and barriers persist
Thirty minutes away from Hillsboro, however, Reedsburg’s zoning ordinances prohibit mobile and manufactured homes outside of mobile home parks, where homeowners pay a monthly fee to rent a lot. It is among many municipalities to limit such housing.
“People want affordable housing, but they want it in the next town over,” said Amy Bliss, executive director of the Wisconsin Housing Alliance, a manufactured housing trade association.
Other local governments say they allow manufactured homes in single-family neighborhoods, but reject them in practice, Bliss said.
And the Habitat development isn’t unanimously popular in Hillsboro. Several local homeowners strongly opposed it, arguing that the city does not need more housing or should add it to a different neighborhood, according to previous reporting by Hillsboro Sentry-Enterprise.
A decades-old federal policy bans zoning that discriminates against factory-built housing, industry leaders say. But a lack of government enforcement leaves developers and customers to fight the restrictions in court, a costly, rarely pursued process, Bliss said, adding that projects like the one in Hillsboro should help ease any stigma surrounding nontraditional homes.
“Some municipalities are coming around because they realize that that’s the only way to get housing that is affordable for their workers,” Bliss added.
A new start
The Bessels’ 8-year-old daughter isn’t thinking about how her house will be built.
“When we have the yard, we can play tag. We could play whatever game we want,” she said.
With months left until the move, she’s already planning summer barbecues in a new yard. Her parents will cook while she rides bikes with her siblings and new friends.
Russell hopes this will be the last time his kids must start over after bouncing around Wisconsin in search of housing. They’ll finally lay down roots in the Hillsboro home.
“This is the end of the road for us,” Russell said. “This is finally ours.”
Trisha Young of Wisconsin Watch contributed to this report.
This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
