How firm is this? Not very — and the legislature went the other way

We want to be precise about status, because a proposal like this is easy to misreport as an imminent threat.

Firmness: an industry-side recommendation in a draft subcommittee report, superseded in practice. No bill implemented A1.12 or A1.13 in the 153rd General Assembly. We could find no legislator publicly advocating it.

And in 2026 Delaware moved decisively in the opposite direction. SB 235, signed July 23, 2026, repealed the sunset on the CPI-U-based rent-increase calculations at §§ 7052A and 7052B — converting a pilot with a July 1, 2027 expiry into permanent law, and repealing the provisions that would have revived the older grounds. It passed the Senate 19-0 and the House 41-0.

A framework that was scheduled to lapse is now entrenched. That is the reverse of what this report asked for.

Why it is still worth knowing about

Three reasons.

It is the clearest statement of the industry's actual position. Most public advocacy on Delaware manufactured housing comes from resident organisations. This document is the other side's analysis, in its own words, and it identifies rent justification as the central grievance.

The mechanism it proposes is unusually consequential. A grandfather clause plus an exclusion for new buyers does not repeal a protection — it lets it expire by attrition. Every sale converts a protected household into an unprotected one, without any further legislative act. Over a decade, that hollows out the protection without ever taking it away from anyone who has it.

And the disclosure requirement makes it saleable. A new buyer told in writing that they are not covered has been informed, which is a real answer to the obvious objection. It also creates a two-tier community: neighbours in identical homes on adjacent lots, one with a rent ceiling and one without.

What the current framework the proposal targets actually does

Worth restating, because “rent control” overstates it. Delaware does not cap lot rent. The permanent framework sets a ceiling above which an increase must be justified, keyed to a 24-month CPI-U that the Delaware State Housing Authority calculates and the relocation authority publishes. As of July 14, 2026 that ceiling permits an increase of 5.678% without justification.

Above it, the owner must justify, and residents may petition for arbitration. The Delaware Supreme Court held in July 2025 that only the direct costs of a capital improvement count — not a return on investment, not depreciation, not the income tax owed on the higher rent.

And the check is rarely used: Delaware certified 56 rent increases in March 2026 alone and scheduled one arbitration all year, the first in three years.

The supply argument, and what happened to it

The report's core claim is that rent regulation suppresses new community development. That is a real argument and we are not going to adjudicate it.

What we can note is that Delaware's own housing task force reached a different conclusion about the mechanism. The Delaware State Housing Authority's Affordable Housing Production Task Force — whose final report came out on April 7, 2025, seven weeks after this draft — listed nine objectives, of which Objective 8 was to “assist in purchasing manufactured home communities by homeowners.” That is a resident-ownership answer, not a deregulation answer.

The task force's output became SB 23, which contains nothing on manufactured housing. So neither approach was enacted.

Meanwhile the practical evidence on resident purchase is discouraging. The relocation authority's board minutes record that at Pinewood Acres, right-of-first-offer letters went to all tenants on April 7, 2026 and as of April 30 there was no tenant interest in buying or forming the required homeowners association.

What did get enacted instead

Delaware's manufactured-housing legislation over the past year ran toward resident protection and legal process:

• September 2025 — a pattern of violations became consumer fraud, the Attorney General gained receivership power, lot-lease transfers and inheritance were rewritten, and the trust fund's statutory cap was removed
• January 2026 — the whole monthly per-lot assessment redirected to legal aid, community owners' portion zeroed
• July 2026 — the rent framework made permanent
• September 2026 — a right of redemption covering manufactured-home lots

The itemised landlord maintenance duties in HB 39 are the one resident-side measure that failed, dying in a Senate committee after passing the House 39-0.

What to watch next

Nothing is pre-filed for the 154th General Assembly, which convenes January 2027 — we checked the legislature's own database, which returns zero bills.

The Delaware Manufactured Home Owners Association publishes no forward-looking 2027 agenda; its bills page lists only enacted measures. Its general meeting is scheduled for September 28, 2026 in Georgetown. That is a plausible venue for a 2027 agenda to surface, and an observation about timing rather than a report that anything has been announced.