The Lot Rent Index: Illinois

The Illinois state registry lists 617 licensed manufactured home communities across 88 counties, holding 42,289 lots between them. Of the 343 parks FEMA has mapped, 12 (3.5%) sit in a special flood hazard area. For scale, HUD's FY 2026 fair market rent for a two-bedroom rental across those counties runs $916 to $1,781/mo — the area apartment benchmark, not lot rent, which usually runs well below it.

Parks and the county rent benchmark

One row per county. Registered parks and lots come from the Illinois registry itself, as of July 23, 2026. HUD FY 2026 2-BR FMR is what HUD estimates a modest two-bedroom rental costs in that county — the figure Section 8 payment standards are set from. It is the area apartment benchmark and it is not lot rent: lot rent buys the ground under a home the resident owns, and it usually runs well below the FMR. The two are side by side here because the gap between them is the thing worth reporting, not because they are the same measure.

The Illinois registry does not collect vacancies, so there is no vacancy column — an absent column, not a zero.

What the parks themselves look like

Two federal joins the registry does not carry, matched park by park, and the one occupancy figure a handful of registries do collect. Each says exactly what it counted and what it could not.

• Their own drinking water. At least 69 of 617 registered parks (11.2%) run their own EPA-regulated community water system: a well or intake, a distribution main, and a meter on every lot. Those parks are water utilities that also rent land. This one is a floor, not a census: a park counts only where the EPA record matched confidently enough to publish, so the real number is higher, never lower.
• Flood exposure. We hold coordinates for 432 of the 617 Illinois parks; FEMA returns a flood zone for 343 of them, and 12 of those (3.5%) sit inside a special flood hazard area. Unlike the water count, this share is not a floor: the parks we could not place or FEMA has not analysed could be more exposed than the mapped ones or less, and we have no basis to say which.
• Vacancy. Illinois does not collect it. Only three of the thirteen registries in this index do, which is itself the finding: nobody can say how much of this housing stock sits empty, because almost no state asks.

Method, in one paragraph

We pull each state's own licensing or registration file, normalize the addresses, geocode what we can, and join the result to three federal datasets: HUD's county Fair Market Rents, EPA's inventory of active community water systems, and FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. Nothing is modelled, estimated, or filled in. Where a source is silent, the page says so and shows nothing. Counts come from the registries and can lag real life: a park that closed last month may still be licensed, and a park that opened may not be listed yet. Every figure above recomputes from the snapshots each time the page is served, so the next pull moves the numbers with no edit to the page.

Source: Illinois Department of Public Health manufactured home communities directory (dph.illinois.gov), as of July 23, 2026. Counts come from the state's registry and can lag real life. See something out of date? Tell us.