Sometimes a house is not a home until the wheels come off–and even then it might still be a vehicle.
Thousands of Missourians live in houses that used to have wheels. Because of that there are complications when it comes to financing, titling, assessing, and taxing.
These homes fall under the same laws today as, say, an Airstream trailer. And that’s what Senator Jane Cunningham of Chesterfield wants to change. "What we all used to term as ‘house trailers,’ now the term is ‘manufactured housing,’" she says. "Those are vehicles under Missouri law. They have a title. And when someone takes a manufactured housing unit, takes the wheels off, puts it on a slab, makes it into real estate, some people are looking at it as real estate. Some people because it still has a title are looking at it as personal property."
Her bill, which has advanced in the Senate sets up a system in which the Revenue Department can remove a manufactured home from its personal property list and consider it real estate once the wheels are off and the trailer or mobile home is permanently mounted on a foundation—transforming it to a house.
Another round of voting sends the bill to the Missouri House, which has passed it in a couple of previous sessions when Cunningham was a Representative, only to see it die in the Senate.