GROUNDED: Financialization, Legal Constraints, and the Limits of Preservation in Chapel Hill’s Manufactured Housing Communities

Chapel Hill's four manufactured housing communities (MHCs) are home to approximately 230 predominantly low-income, Latine households facing mounting displacement pressure from investors who target these parks for their high returns and low operating costs, waiting to capitalize on redevelopment. This study draws on qualitative and quantitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with policymakers and legal experts, zoning permits and restrictive covenant documents, and CoStar ownership and demographic data to examine how investor ownership models extract value while exploiting regulatory gaps. This approach uncovers the foundations for four different investor strategies: the embedded, opportunistic owner, the cash-flow operator, the quiet land banker, and the aggressive redeveloper. Each investor archetype carries different implications for displacement risk for residents.  The central finding is that regulatory tools are more legally fragile than some planners assume, and that preservation ultimately requires taking land off the speculative market. By identifying enforcement failures in the Tarheel Mobile Court conditional zoning agreement and documenting how recent state legislation (S.B. 382) and existing case law (Graham Court Associates v. Town of Chapel Hill) prohibit the regulatory preservation tools most commonly proposed by planners, this paper shows how zoning-based preservation strategies such as overlay districts and right-of-first-refusal ordinances are legally constrained under current North Carolina law. Instead, this study recommends that Chapel Hill pursue strategies outside the zoning framework: a locally funded municipal repair program, tax incentives for owners who maintain affordable operations, direct municipal acquisition of parks to facilitate Resident-Owned Community conversion, investment in resident organizing infrastructure modeled on PODER Emma's Neighborhood Council in Asheville, proactive relocation planning, adoption of a Neighborhood Median Income standard for affordability, and state-level legislative advocacy. These recommendations are broadly applicable to municipalities nationwide facing similar pressures on manufactured housing, particularly in states where property rights protections limit local government authority to downzone or regulate ownership form.