The counter-intuitive consequence for covenanted communities

Read quickly, this looks like a preemption story that threatens associations. It is closer to the reverse, and here is why.

Before 1 July 2026, a covenanted subdivision in a city that zoned manufactured homes out of single-family districts had two barriers: the zoning ordinance and the declaration. Only one of those has gone. As of 1 July, in those communities, the recorded covenant is the only remaining barrier.

That shift raises the stakes on drafting in a way most Kentucky declarations were never stress-tested for. The practical questions are all definitional:

• What word does your declaration actually use? “Mobile home” is a term of art that in federal usage refers to units built before 15 June 1976. A covenant banning “mobile homes” may not, on its terms, reach a 2026 HUD-code manufactured home — and it certainly does not reach a modular home built to the state residential code.
• Does it define “single-family dwelling” by construction method or by use? A definition keyed to use (one household, not for business) does no work here at all. A definition keyed to site-built construction does.
• Are your architectural standards written as objective criteria? A 900-square-foot, twenty-foot-wide, permanently founded manufactured home may satisfy a minimum-square-footage covenant comfortably. If the association's real objection is appearance, the declaration has to say so in terms a committee can apply.

An association whose covenant uses the 1970s vocabulary and relied, in practice, on the city's zoning to do the work has just lost the half of its protection it was not looking at.

What an association can and cannot do about it

The route to changing a declaration is the declaration's own amendment provision, and in Kentucky that is a real constraint rather than a formality. For planned communities the Planned Community Act's amendment section, KRS 381.791, governs; for condominiums, KRS 381.9155. Neither permits a board to redefine a use restriction by resolution.

What a board can do without an amendment is narrower but not nothing: confirm with counsel how the existing language reads against a modern manufactured home, and stop assuming the zoning ordinance is still there. An association that sends a violation letter citing a city ordinance voided on 1 July is citing a rule that no longer exists.

The one thing this Act is not is a licence to enforce more aggressively. Subsection (6) preserves covenants; it does not enlarge them, and it does not convert a doubtful covenant into a clear one.

Where this collides with the other half of the problem

Kentucky has no manufactured-home community statute — no lot-rent regulation, no park-closure notice period, no resident opportunity to purchase. Residents of land-lease communities own their homes and rent the ground beneath them, and the state has left that relationship to contract.

HB 160 does not change that. It widens where a qualified manufactured home may be placed in single-family zones; it says nothing about the security of a household already living in a park. Those are different problems, and only the first one moved.

What to watch next

A concrete, dated item: the Interim Joint Committee on Local Government meets on 15 September 2026, and its published agenda includes “the State of the Manufactured and Mobile Home Industry and Update on Implementation of 2025 RS HB 160,” presented by the Kentucky Manufactured Housing Institute.³

That is the first public accounting of how the Act is landing, ten weeks after it took effect, and it is where any push to extend the preemption — or to answer the land-lease question the Act left alone — would surface first. Interim committee minutes and agendas are published on the Legislative Research Commission's site; the meeting is worth reading rather than waiting for coverage of it.