HOPE Community Corporation is manufacturing mobile homes for the nine St. Vincent de Paul owned trailer parks around Oregon — with the help of a Lane Education Service District apprenticeship program.
This partnership between SVdP and HOPE began two years ago. Since it became fully operational in November 2024, eight Housing and Urban Development-certified mobile homes have been constructed.
On Jan. 14, two homes went to Tivoli Mobile Home Park in Junction City. Three other homes are equally divided between SVdP-owned mobile home parks in Talent, Oakridge and Portland.
The sixth, seventh and eighth homes are waiting to be transported from the factory and the 17th HUD-certified home just made its way to the first stop on the assembly line. Along each step, students enrolled in a Lane ESD Career and Technical Education program partner with HOPE.
Spending part of their time in a classroom on site, HOPE Managing Director Lisa Hartwick says students also learn welding, electrical and plumbing skills by constructing the mobile homes.
Each home is 728 square feet, including all standard appliances sans washer and dryer (although they each come with the required plugins), and a Northwest Energy Efficient Manufactured Housing Program ENERGY STAR plus rating.
NEEM is a federally-recognized quality assurance provider for the Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR program; HOPE Director of Manufacturing Shaun Woolley says they’ve achieved the highest tier of energy efficiency called NEEM Plus.
“The focus is on quality,” he says. “There’s a list of things that we do. The windows and doors are also high energy rated, so you don’t get heat loss there. We seal the complete exterior of the home so there’s no air drafts.”
“It’s a low cost option for folks, but it’s still high quality,” SVdP’s Executive Director Bethany Cartledge says. “Where do you find that?”
Costing $70,000 out of the box, this will help expand the real-estate stock across the state. “There’s a lot of compassion fatigue for folks who are experiencing homelessness, but the reality is, they’ve been priced out of housing,” Cartledge says.
Including transportation costs, utility hookups, siding and ramps, Hartwick says the final cost would be around $100,000 — one-forth the average cost of a home in Lane County. Across Lane County, the average home is valued at $443,510 in 2024, according to the real-estate database Zillow.
“This makes home ownership possible for people who may never have considered it otherwise,” Cartledge says.
The plan is to place more of these mobile homes on all SVdP-owned trailer parks across Oregon, especially the six in Lane County.
Cartledge says this is the “pet project” of Terry McDonald, the previous executive director of SVdP. McDonald, who sits on the HOPE board of directors, utilized an existing SVdP 501(c)3 to create HOPE. “Terry had long had the idea of having a factory specific around manufactured housing, because there are these factories in the state of Oregon that are for profit and really capitalizing on double wide and triple wides,” Cartledge says.
“This is more like the Model T factory, where you can have any color as long as it’s black,” she says.
However, Hartwick says this factory’s floor isn’t just made up of “salty seniors.” Through the partnership with Lane ESD, students can partake in a Career and Technical Education program at the factory, getting on-the-job manufacturing experience.
All students in the program are guaranteed on-the-job manufacturing experience on the factory floor, in addition to on-site instruction in a classroom.
Lane ESD CTE Regional Coordinator/Specialist Shareen Vogel says there are 49 students enrolled in the program from 13 of the 16 school districts across Lane County.
To help HOPE meet its projected 80 homes constructed by the end of 2025, Hartwick says they hire straight out of the program. “We hired four kids from the last school year, and when summer came they graduated, four of them applied and were able to come on as employees,” she says.
HOPE is discussing strategies to expand the factory’s output, like creating more storage for construction materials on site and hiring over a hundred more staff. At that point, Hartwick says they hope to push out one mobile home every day. “We don’t want to just support people and help people who are experiencing homelessness. We want to prevent homelessness,” she says.