The average sales price for a manufactured home in 2013 was $64,000, according to the Census Bureau, while the average sales price for a single-family home was $324,000. The single-family site-built home includes the land, though, while owners of manufactured homes often have to still grapple with landlords and leasing issues. But the structure itself is nevertheless significantly cheaper: New manufactured homes cost around $43 per square foot; site-built homes cost $93 per square foot.

"In many areas, working class families are priced out of the market to buy homes," said said Stacey Epperson, the president and CEO of NextStep, which connects the manufactured home industry with affordable housing groups. "But for us, homeownership is still part of the American dream."

New Hampshire residents Wanita Ordway and her husband Kevin are once such working-class family: Kevin is a carpenter, Wanita is retired. They were looking at rentals, and then stumbled across a manufactured house last year that cost just $87,500 for the structure and the two acres of land it's on.

It’s spacious, Ordway said, with three bedrooms, two baths, a fireplace, a family room, and a breakfast nook with an island in the kitchen. The kitchen is cheerily wallpapered with images of fruits, and the bathroom has ivy wallpaper. When Wanita asked the utility company to audit the house to see how much energy it used over the cold winter, she discovered it was too energy efficient to even qualify for an audit.

“It’s just a wonderful option for people who cannot get a conventional home,” she said. “If you get past the stereotype of a mobile home, these are just as well-constructed as a stick home.”

There are currently about 18 million Americans living in manufactured homes, and the houses make up the largest stock of unsubsidized housing in the country, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute. That is becoming more important as government budgets shrink and Americans prioritize other policy areas over public spending on subsidized housing.

This type of residence used to be known as a mobile home, and was often poorly built and inexpensive, a refuge for those on the outskirts of society who couldn’t afford anything better. Then, in 1976, HUD building codes went into effect regulating design and construction of the units, and in 1980, Congress changed the name from “mobile home” to “manufactured home.”

The quality of some of these homes have improved significantly since then. There are, of course, the swanky pre-fab homes by Muji and architecture and design firm ARKit that would make any apartment-dweller salivate. But even the low-cost pre-fab homes have gotten snappier: They are Energy Star versions, models with marble countertops and sunken baths, models with fireplaces and porches and dormer windows.

“These are homes that travel down the highway at 55 miles-per-hour, which site-built homes don’t,” said Paul Bradley, the president of Resident Owned Communities USA, a group that works to help residents of mobile-home parks or manufactured-housing communities buy their own land. “You can inarguably buy very good quality, very energy-efficient HUD-code homes that are better built than site-built ones.”