Wood Is Superior To Metal

Ashland Planning Commission · January 27, 2026 · 1h 34m · joint study session with the Mayor, City Council and Housing and Human Services Advisory Committee · five of seven commissioners present · no public forum speakers.

A study session decides nothing, which is exactly why it is worth reading. This one ran ninety minutes on a proposed manufactured home park zone, and it contained the clearest example this desk has yet found of a code that is quietly out of date in a way that could get somebody killed.

The Sentence

Ashland’s land use code, chapter 18, was largely drafted more than forty years ago, when the way to make a manufactured home acceptable was to make it look like a stick-built house. It carries floor-area minimums, roof-pitch requirements, a twelve-foot minimum width, and rules about exterior materials.

The community development director read the material provision aloud. The code requires that siding and roofing be “similar or superior to the existing exterior siding or roofing material used on nearby residences,” and then defines the term: wood or wood-appearing siding is superior to metal.

His own comment on it: “And I know from wildfire standards, metal siding is superior to wood.”

That is the whole problem in two sentences. A rule written to protect neighbourhood appearance in the 1980s now instructs an owner, on paper, toward the more combustible material, in a town with a wildfire overlay.

It gets worse the further you follow it, and the following was done in public by the mayor, who asked whether removing the material rules would let manufactured homes escape Ashland’s fire-resistant construction standards.

The answer is that they already do. Ashland’s wildfire overlay lets the city regulate new construction — plan review, inspection, ignition-resistant materials. A manufactured home is built in a factory somewhere else, certified to federal HUD standards, and trucked in. The city’s building inspectors do not plan-review it. In the director’s words: “we don’t have the ability to hold that unit to our local building code for stick-built homes.”

So Ashland’s fire rules apply to the houses being built here and not to the houses being delivered here, and the code’s only word on the subject affirmatively prefers wood.

The Number

The case for caring about all of this was made by a member of the Housing and Human Services Advisory Committee, from the city’s own community wildfire protection plan, and it is the number that should govern the rest of this project.

Of the roughly 2,500 homes destroyed in the 2020 Almeda fire, about 1,500 were manufactured or mobile homes.

He added the survey findings behind it: over half of respondents to that plan’s community engagement were low income, and nearly a quarter lived in mobile home parks. The plan attributes the risk to poor insulation, lack of defensible space and high density.

Which is why he was careful about the proposal in front of him. Most of what is being recommended reduces requirements — smaller lots, tighter setbacks, more units per acre — and he asked the commission to weigh that against what happened six years ago to exactly this housing type.

A commissioner made the same argument from the other end, and named the mechanisms: setbacks, master electrical disconnects, whether the sewer and water lines are adequate, and the yard barns, carports and overhangs that carry fire from one home to the next. He wanted the fire department in the room, which it was not. “I don’t think we should make these as dense as possible and lower the standard of quality of living for the people in these parks.”

What Is Actually Being Proposed

The project comes from the city’s 2023 housing production strategy — one of about fifteen commitments over eight years — and is funded by a state technical assistance grant, with 3J Consulting doing the audit.

Ashland has six manufactured home parks. Three are inside the city: Wingspread on Clay Street, the largest at roughly 20 acres and about 116 units, zoned R-2; Tolman Creek, 6.6 acres and 38 units; and The Pines on Siskiyou, 51 units on 2.6 acres, unusually zoned commercial and already containing shops. Three more sit outside the city but inside the urban growth boundary: Siskiyou Village at about 49 units, Park Estates off Highway 99 at about 42, and roughly 16 permanent units at Jackson Wellsprings.

The recommendations, in brief: strip the minimum and maximum densities; cut lot widths; reduce internal setbacks to fire code; drop the twelve-foot width rule; allow two units of 400 square feet or less on a lot where one stood; permit community-serving buildings up to 20,000 square feet — childcare, offices, cafés, with apartments above; simplify landscaping; and create a conditional-use path so an ageing park can upgrade one thing without being forced to bring everything into compliance at once.

That last one is the point of the exercise. Owners told the consultants they want to fix a road or a sewer line and cannot, because doing so triggers a requirement to overhaul the whole park.

And one recommendation that is not about buildings at all: extended notice when a park is sold or closed, and a right of first refusal with timelines, so residents can organise and buy the park themselves — the resident-owned community model, borrowed from Bellingham, with CASA and ROC USA named as possible partners.

Two Warnings Worth Recording

The park owners do not want a new zone. Interviewed by the consultants — and only the three inside the city were interviewed — they preferred to keep their existing base zoning, said the added density and relaxed standards were not worth a rezoning, and reported that they intend to keep operating as parks. Only one had looked at redevelopment; apartments did not pencil. The consultant’s read: “I think they’re doing well financially.”

Then a councillor made the argument that ought to be pinned to the front of the final ordinance. The phrase everyone keeps using is naturally occurring affordable housing. He does not accept it:

“It’s not really naturally occurring affordability. It’s like it’s the only thing people can afford, and they have to maintain their own thing, and then all the infrastructure under them is outdated.”

His warning was that reducing barriers without care would produce “the perfect recipe for syndicators, large investors, Wall Street bankers to come in and buy these” — because the owner holds the land, the resident owns the structure and cannot move it, and the upkeep is somebody else’s. He put the tenant’s position plainly enough that the transcript does not need help.

He also supplied the sentence that prices the whole ambition. When a park burned in Talent, the rebuild came back at about fifty units where roughly eighty had stood, because forty homes could not share a four-inch sewer lateral; the fix was twelve-inch mains and manholes, and roughly a million dollars of infrastructure. Bring a park up to standard and the affordability that made it worth preserving goes with it.

Mayor Graham drew the conclusion for new parks and it was the sharpest piece of policy thinking in the session. Two of the three in-city parks work out to about six units an acre. At Ashland land prices, six units an acre does not reach affordability. She would protect the parks that exist — an overlay, and a rule that a park annexing in stays a park — and stop short of spending the city’s energy incentivising new ones, which will pencil in rural places and not here.

The People Who Live There

The chair asked the last question of the night.

The consultants interviewed park owners. Two residents sit on the project’s advisory committee. Has anybody interviewed the residents?

No. An open house is scheduled, and notices will go to park residents to encourage them to attend. As of January 27, no public outreach to the people living in Ashland’s six manufactured home parks had been done.

“I would hope,” the chair said, “you would make an effort to bring in the residents who live in these parks.”

This desk will record whether that happens, because everything above — the setbacks, the sewer laterals, the right of first refusal, the siding — is a description of somebody’s house.

The Docket

The advisory committee meets again in February to review a redlined code. The consultants expect a marked-up draft ready in March, then adoption hearings before the Planning Commission and the City Council, running into April and May.

An open house for park residents is scheduled and not yet dated.

Regular business resumes at the Planning Commission on February 10, when the continued hearing on 431 North Main returns with the historic committee’s review of the revised design and the tree committee’s read of the arborist.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the January 27, 2026 joint study session of the Ashland Planning Commission, City Council and Housing and Human Services Advisory Committee. Quotations appear as transcribed, lightly conformed to natural speech, with bracketed interpolations where the repair is interpretive; the caption software recycles and garbles speaker labels, so participants are identified by role except where the chair’s own words or a speaker’s self-identification confirm them. Park acreages, unit counts, code provisions and the Almeda figures are as stated by staff, consultants and committee members in open session. A study session takes no action.