“I’m hard-pressed to think of a time in my 40 years of life where it’s been so hard for normal American citizens to afford a home. Even renting a home has become a challenge, or worse yet, fallen completely out of reach for so many of our families. I was talking with a relative a couple of years ago and she just made kind of an off-handed observation. As a younger person than I am, she was looking to buy her first home and just mentioned that when her parents were growing up, they could afford a nice home on a single middle-class income. And she was sort of mentioning this as a sorrowful thing. She was sad that wasn’t true for her generation.” – So said Vice President J.D. Vance to the Congressional Cities Conference of the National League of Cities (NLC) on Monday, March 10, 2025, in Washington, D.C. What VP Vance may or may not realize is that the Trump Administration and HUD Secretary E. Scott Turner now hold the key to unlocking the door for homeownership for potentially millions of Americans of all backgrounds, ethnicities, and genders. J.D. Vance, meet J.D. Harper of the Arkansas Manufactured Home Association (AMHA). Said VP Vance to the NLC just days ago: “And one area of shared interest between President Trump, and I think every single person in this room, is the importance of providing good housing for our citizens at a reasonable and affordable cost.”
VP Vance also said this.
Because while we made it a little bit hard to build homes in this country over the last four years, we’ve also unfortunately made it way too easy for people to compete against American citizens for the precious homes that are in our country to begin with.
Pardon me, Mr. Vice President, but at least two HUD researchers seem to disagree with you at some level, sir. They said there has been 50 years of failure by Democrats and Republicans alike in dealing with the root causes of the affordable housing crisis. See exactly how they said that in the report with analysis linked below. Let’s also note that HUD removed this post from their own website, but a HUD staffer thoughtfully provided it to our publications and said that they will repost it at some future time. That said, it is the editorial view – and common-sense economics – that your point about competing against illegal aliens for housing is true, but it is also incomplete. So, on that specific point we’d concur, but as noted, there is more to the story, as this report will explore.
The full transcript of VP Vance’s remarks plus a video of his delivery of those statements are found in Part II of this article.
Part I is a letter to the editor first published at this link here, in which Harper said the following.
Part III – Additional Information with More MHProNews Analysis and Commentary.
Part I – JD Harper – Manufactured Housing Assoc Exec Director – Sounds Off on Zoning & HUD Failure to Enforce Federal Preemption
Tony, thanks for the opportunity to comment on the actions of the City of Stuttgart relating to the placement of manufactured/modular homes within the city’s boundaries.
This action by the city – like most others we encounter – is a reaction to the response of residents to a factory-built home being placed in a residential zone.
City officials look at the placement of the home as a mistake – something that should be remedied and not allowed to happen again – rather than as the right of a resident to exercise his/her housing choice on land that is zoned for single-family housing.
With 500 cities and incorporated towns in Arkansas – it is increasingly difficult for a one-person staff to keep up with all of the ordinances and regulations being enforced by local governments.
While Arkansas does have a law that prohibits cities from banning manufactured homes or restricting their placement to only leased-land in parks or communities – most cities view factory-built structures through the same prism as billboards, cell towers and sexually-oriented businesses… something to be avoided if at all possible, but restricted and heavily regulated if allowed at all.
It has been our organization’s policy over the past two decades to offer assistance to cities as they address manufactured/modular housing placement within their boundaries – and not to ‘pick fights’ with cities to force factory-built homes into areas where they would not be compatible with surrounding structures or have values consistent with other forms of housing.
I’ve told many city officials that I don’t believe that manufactured homes belong on every lot in every zone in every town – but I DO believe there are MANY lots in MANY towns which restrict manufactured homes where a factory-built residence would provide access to decent, affordable housing for working Arkansans — without having an adverse impact on surrounding property values or the quality of life in that neighborhood.
The larger question is why the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has failed to embrace its duty to encourage inclusive zoning and acceptance of a Federally-regulated housing product.
Recent efforts to urge HUD regulators to update outdated and obsolete guidance and policy relating to the preemptive nature of the HUD program – even after the 2000 Act which ‘strengthened preemption’ – calling for preemption to be ‘broadly and liberally construed – have fallen upon deaf ears within the Department. [See attached letter to HUD officials].
Thanks for allowing me to vent.
JD Harper
Executive Director
Arkansas Manufactured Housing Association
1123 South University – Suite #720
Little Rock, AR 72204
(Original Editor’s Note: This is a widespread issue that Harper is addressing in this Op-Ed. He is spot on with his statement that HUD has routinely failed to enforce the enhanced preemption under the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act of 2000 (MHIA 2000). See a related article, linked here. MHIA 2000 download, linked here.)
Part II Per REV Transcripts – Vance Speaks at Congressional City Conference to National League of Cities (NLC)
Councilman Kramer (00:00):
… allow me to introduce our headliner speaker for the season. He began his career serving in the United States Marine Corps for four years, including a tour in Iraq. Upon returning home, he went to law school, became an investor in startups across the Midwest, and penned the best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
(00:20)
Vice President Vance (01:18):
Thank you all. Thank you. Please, please, please take a seat. It’s good to see everybody. Good afternoon and thank you all for having me. Thank you to Councilman Kramer for the kind introduction. I was talking with him backstage a little bit. My wife and I both love the city of Louisville and have spent a lot of time there, so thank you for being here. It means a lot, and thanks for the kind words.
(01:41)
And I’d say to all of you, whenever I was in the Senate and I welcomed a group from Ohio, and I know you guys represent the entire country or cities and municipalities all over the country, I would always just say, “Enjoy the town because it is your city.” And I think that Washington is a beautiful place. It’s a beautiful place to spend a few days. I know you guys have some work to do, but I also think it’s important to get out there and see the people’s city. It was built with your tax dollars. I think these incredible buildings and museums are supported by all of you, and of course, by all the people that you represent. And so I hope you enjoy your time in Washington D.C.
(02:15)
So, I know you’re all busy, and I know it’s never easy to come here to Washington, especially on a Monday. So I appreciate the effort involved in getting here, and I also appreciate the mission of this conference. The work you all do back home is extremely important. Most Americans, of course, they interact with their state and local governments far more regularly than they do their federal government, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way the Constitution sets it up. We know that good governments starts at the local level. So while those of us in Washington certainly take up most of the press attention, and we do that whether we want to or not, I want to acknowledge the enormous impact local governments have on the lives of our great American citizens.
(03:08)
Now, the Trump administration believes in the wisdom of federalism and leaving local issues to local officials, but we also recognize the importance of supporting and collaborating with all of you, because so many of the issues that you deal with, of course, implicate local issues, but state issues and federal issues as well. And one area of shared interest between President Trump, and I think every single person in this room, is the importance of providing good housing for our citizens at a reasonable and affordable cost.
(03:46)
And I have to say, I’m hard-pressed to think of a time in my 40 years of life where it’s been so hard for normal American citizens to afford a home. Even renting a home has become a challenge, or worse yet, fallen completely out of reach for so many of our families. I was talking with a relative a couple of years ago and she just made kind of an off-handed observation. As a younger person than I am, she was looking to buy her first home, and just mentioned that when her parents were growing up, they could afford a nice home on a single middle-class income. And she was sort of mentioning this as a sorrowful thing. She was sad that wasn’t true for her generation. And I think all of us in this room, certainly including me, have a little bit more work to do, I think to make housing more affordable. I want to talk about that because I think it’s the issue where our interests in some ways are most aligned with the people in this room.
(04:42)
Now, I read recently that the average income it takes to buy a new house is nearly two times the average salary of your typical American family. Not the average American worker, but the combined incomes of a husband and wife. And that’s just not acceptable or sustainable in the United States of America. We want Americans to be able to afford the American dream of homeownership, because we know that when people own their homes, it makes them a stakeholder. It makes them a stakeholder in their neighborhoods, in their cities, and ultimately, of course, in this country that all of us love so much. We want our citizens to feel that investment in their own country. And it’s hard. It’s hard to feel that investment if you feel like you can’t even own a slice of it, even if that’s what you want to do.
(05:30)
Now, on a more basic level, we don’t want people living paycheck to paycheck. We don’t want them to make trade-offs between a trip to the grocery store and meeting next month’s rent, because even if you don’t yet own a home, or even if you don’t ever want to own a home, the knowledge that if you work hard and spend wisely, eventually you’ll be able to afford a nice place to live. That goes, I think, a very long way to giving people a sense that they belong here and a sense that they have a stake in the future.
(06:02)
Now, there are some important reasons why that belief is dwindling among Americans today, and a lot of it, of course, comes from the historic inflation that this country has dealt with over the last four years. Now, under the previous administration, get a little bit political, the cost of a median price home in America more than doubled, and that was just in four years. And if your salary didn’t keep pace with inflation and rise 20%, your buying power took even a bigger hit. And of course, if you think about this, if the price of a home doubles and your actual salary doesn’t double, then you’re a lot worse off. And we know that most Americans did not see their salary double over the last four years. So it’s no surprise that home sales hit a 30-year low in 2024.
(06:52)
Now, another reason for the elevating costs comes down to zoning. And the reality, as you all know, is that zoning is an area where federal authority is actually quite limited. And I’m sure none of you want the federal government in the business of mandating how cities and towns handle local laws, and that’s certainly not what we want to do either. But I would ask everyone in this room is to be good partners with us, and certainly partners with your citizens, and think about how we can improve the costs of housing for our citizens. And I think one of the ways that we’re going to have to do that is by being a little bit smarter about our local zoning rules.
(07:30)
And in particular, when I think about zoning, I can’t help but think about it without, of course, the communities that I know best, which are those that I represented in the state of Ohio. And Columbus, Ohio in particular, I assume we’ve got some Columbus people here, and Columbus is a boom town in so many ways. I’ve got relatives and family members who live there who love Columbus. It’s a magnet because it’s had so much economic development. But one of the things that I worry about when I look at a city like Columbus or Miami, which became a boom town during the COVID years, is the unaffordability of housing. And we’ve got to fix that.
(08:07)
If we actually want these places to be magnets, not just for jobs and investment, but also the dreams of our young people, we’ve got to actually make it easier to build homes. And in particular, I think the city of Austin has done a pretty interesting job, because in Austin you saw this massive increase of people moving in, the cost of housing skyrocketed, but then Austin implemented some pretty smart policies, and that brought down the cost of housing. And it’s one of the few major American cities where you see the cost of housing leveling off or even coming down.
(08:38)
Now, the Trump administration has taken important steps to make building cheaper and to boost the supply of housing. Now, of course, it’s going to take time, but this is a day one issue for our entire team from the president on down. On his first day in office, the president issued an executive order making it a priority to bring down prices for new buyers. Now, part of that will come from slashing needless regulations, which according to some estimates, account for about 25% of a new single-family bill today.
(09:08)
We’ve also seen Secretary Turner, our great Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he’s working hard on this issue, cutting some of the Biden rules at HUD that hike costs and shift the decision-making from local governments to Washington D.C. And Secretaries Burgum and Wright, and certainly Administrator Zeldin at the EPA, are putting in important work to bring down the costs of energy, which is of course a critical input to the cost of building a home, to say nothing, of course, of heating one and keeping its lights on.
(09:40)
But I actually want to focus on something a little bit different, because I think this is one of the areas where what the Trump administration can do and has done is going to be one of the major drivers of bringing down the cost of housing. Now, local zoning, regulations, the cost of energy, these things are about the supply of housing. How do we get more houses out there to be built? But I think it’s important to talk about the demand side of the housing market. And so much of what we’re doing in the Trump administration when it comes to the immigration issue is framed about law enforcement, about reducing fentanyl coming into our communities. And that is true. That is a big part of why we’re doing what we’re doing at the border. But when we talk about housing and why costs are so high, we don’t talk enough about demand.
(10:26)
And one of the drivers of increased housing demand we know, is that we’ve got a lot of people over the last four years who have come into the country illegally, and that’s something we have to work on if we want to meaningfully reduce the cost of housing, too. Now, just think about this. If you allow 20 million people to compete with American citizens for the cost of homes, you are going to have a large, and frankly, completely preventable spike in the demand for housing. And that is what we, of course, have seen. Because while we made it a little bit hard to build homes in this country over the last four years, we’ve also unfortunately made it way too easy for people to compete against American citizens for the precious homes that are in our country to begin with.
(11:15)
Now, I’ll say this, it’s actually not just an American problem either. If you go to Canada, where because of their laws and regulations, they’ve seen a massive increase in the number of people who have come into their country. You go to the United Kingdom, you go across the world and you see a very consistent relationship between a massive increase in immigration and a massive increase in housing prices. And we have to be honest about that.
(11:46)
Well, I see one of our nice representatives out here wants to actually, I guess, continue to flood the country with illegal immigrants, making your communities and citizens unaffordable. But ma’am, with all respect, one of the reasons why we’re doing what we’re doing is because we want to make it more affordable for Americans to live. That is one of the reasons why we’re doing what we’re doing. Now, last week, I visited the southern border and we decided to check in on what’s going on there at the southern border.
(12:28)
And of course, like I said earlier, you often hear about immigration enforcement as about crime and about drug trafficking, and that is a big part of it. I was at Eagle Pass and I was talking to local border control down there, and they told me that in just a matter of weeks, their small part of the border had gone from 1,500 daily encounters to less than 30. And again, that’s in a matter of weeks. That’s just a simple matter of common sense border enforcement. That matters. Thank you.
(13:09)
And let’s talk about why it matters. I mentioned housing, but one of the things I heard down there, I was talking to the mayor in that community and he said, “It’s incredibly stressful on local resources.” It’s stressful on their local hospitals. It’s stressful on their local schools to have this massive increase. And so while, look, I recognize there’s a diversity of opinions here, clearly there is, I also think it’s important to be honest about those disagreements, to acknowledge those disagreements, but to say that the reason why we care about border security is because we want your communities to be safer. We want them to be more affordable, we want there to be less drugs in our country, and we want your citizens to be able to live the American Dream. It is the birthright of every single one of our citizens, and we’re going to fight for it every single day.
(14:15)
So, with all due respect for some of the disagreements in opinion, I’d say we welcome disagreements, we want to talk about those disagreements, but we also have to respect the law in the United States of America. I can tell you that, yes, of course you’re going to disagree with some of our policies. That’s okay. Come and tell us when you disagree with our policies and we’ll have a conversation about it. Maybe don’t shout it in front of 2,000 people. I can’t even hear what you’re saying, sir.
(14:58)
But importantly, importantly on this question of immigration, we have to recognize that yes, you can disagree with some of the laws that are in place, you can disagree with the enforcement of those laws, you can even vote for people who want to change those laws, but while we have immigration laws on the books, we will enforce them, and we expect our local municipalities to help us.
(15:32)
So it will be the policy of the Trump administration to enforce the nation’s laws, and it will be the policy of the Trump administration to say that it is not up to local cities to choose which federal laws that they’re going to enforce. It’s important. We can’t do immigration enforcement with sanctuary cities. We’ve got to have everybody respecting the law, and that is going to be one of the major policy focuses, of course, of the Trump administration, and it already has been.
(15:59)
And I want to just say one final point about this issue of housing and of the strains that immigration, and illegal immigration in particular, put on our housing stock. We know from economists that blue collar folks are often those who face the biggest cuts in wages and in services when you have communities overwhelmed by illegal immigration. I come from a blue collar family, and I think one of the main drivers is that we need to be able to give our citizens, Black, white, or whatever skin color, whatever belief system that they have, if you are an American citizen, you deserve to have a government at the local, city, and federal level that fights for the American Dream for you.
(16:47)
And we’ve seen, yes, over the Biden administration, but let’s be honest, over 40 years of American policy, we’ve seen a lot of our blue collar Americans, urban and rural, struggling. Struggling to afford a home, struggling to raise their kids in safe communities, struggling to look to the future with hope and optimism. And so, with all respect for policy disagreements, I think that one thing that unites us in this room is that we want to give our blue collar people in the United States of America a shot at the American Dream again. We may disagree about how exactly to do it, but let’s do it together, let’s fight for our people to together, and let’s reinvigorate the American Dream for the American citizen once again.
(17:49)
And let me close here with just an acknowledgement here. I know you guys have some of the hardest jobs in government, Democrat, Republican, or nonpartisan, you guys are the ones of course who fix the potholes. You guys are the ones that make sure our local police have the funding that they need, our local firefighters are able to do the incredible job that they do.
(18:09)
So, I just want to let you know, from the Trump administration, from the president, the vice president and everybody else, we respect what you do. We are impressed by you, we think you guys are doing a great job, and we want to make sure that you have a presidential administration that is making your lives easier and not harder. So please, consider our administration one with an open door. Please come to us when you have issues. Even if you don’t like what we’re doing on the policy, you guys have got to be able to come and talk to us. So, keep doing a great job, keep doing what you’re doing, enjoy the rest of your time in Washington. God bless you guys, and thank you for doing the great job.
Part III – Additional Information with More MHProNews Analysis and Commentary
1) In no particular order of importance, let’s start by quoting VP Vance from the transcript above to the NLC on 3.10.2025.
I think that one thing that unites us in this room is that we want to give our blue collar people in the United States of America a shot at the American Dream again. We may disagree about how exactly to do it, but let’s do it together, let’s fight for our people to together, and let’s reinvigorate the American Dream for the American citizen once again.
2) That may be the polite thing to say, the political thing to say, and perhaps even an appealing way of phrasing it, Mr. Vice President. But let’s recall the words of J.D. Vance, who said that somewhat differently, and it is has been his job to deal with this specific issue for years.
City officials look at the placement of the home as a mistake – something that should be remedied and not allowed to happen again – rather than as the right of a resident to exercise his/her housing choice on land that is zoned for single-family housing.
With 500 cities and incorporated towns in Arkansas – it is increasingly difficult for a one-person staff to keep up with all of the ordinances and regulations being enforced by local governments.
While Arkansas does have a law that prohibits cities from banning manufactured homes or restricting their placement to only leased-land in parks or communities – most cities view factory-built structures through the same prism as billboards, cell towers and sexually-oriented businesses… something to be avoided if at all possible, but restricted and heavily regulated if allowed at all.
3) But as a professional, Mr. Harper didn’t just vent, he laid out the obviously solution to those who are properly informed about federal law.
The larger question is why the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has failed to embrace its duty to encourage inclusive zoning and acceptance of a Federally-regulated housing product.
Recent efforts to urge HUD regulators to update outdated and obsolete guidance and policy relating to the preemptive nature of the HUD program – even after the 2000 Act which ‘strengthened preemption’ – calling for preemption to be ‘broadly and liberally construed – have fallen upon deaf ears within the Department. [See attached letter to HUD officials].
Imagine if this was one JD to another JD. Because Harper also said this.
4) At least on paper, this is a topic that Democrats and Republicans should be able to agree upon, because it was part of Congressional legislation that was passed by a widely bipartisan vote and signed into law nearly 25 years ago. That law was considered, per a congressional hearing, for a dozen years before it was enacted.
5) And Congress held not one, but two hearings on the topic that J.D. Harper raised. Namely, why is it that years after the law was enacted that it has only been enforced on a handful of occasions? Why has it gone largely unenforced? Is this a bit like the U.S. southern border in the sense that it takes an active desire to enforce existing federal laws to the benefits of the citizens those laws are designed to protect?
6) There are good reasons to wonder why a federal law can routinely fail to be enforced when that failure is reportedly costing the U.S. economy some $2 trillion dollars per year in lost gross domestic product (GDP) because affordable housing is not available near where it is needed. There are also good reasons to wonder why certain manufactured housing industry leaders do bring this up, but fail to do so in a routine, squeaky wheel fashion. Then MHI vice chairman, and currently their chairman, William “Bill” Boor said this to another Congressional hearing on 7.14.2023.
7) As the Washington, D.C. based Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform (MHARR) posted during the first term of President Donald J. Trump, this writer for MHProNews asked a White House staffer about getting “enhanced preemption” under the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act of 2000 (a.k.a.: MHIA, MHIA 2000, 2000 Reform Law, 2000 Reform Act) routinely enforced. That staffer said that the White House was looking into it and that enforcement was “on the table.”
8) It is a fair question to ask if prior HUD Secretary Ben Carson (R) was personally aware of the 2000 Reform Law and its enhanced preemption provision. Perhaps Congress should hold hearings, and he and other 21st century HUD Secretaries should be called in to testify? But what appears to be clear is that prior Secretary Marcia Fudge, appointed during the Biden-Harris (D) era, did know about federal preemption and she refused to enforce it. See the discussion with CSPN video and transcript on that topic linked below.
9) This next graphic as well as a prior one in the preface were from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report in May 2024 prepared for Congress. It reflects the steady rise of housing costs, both rental and purchase, in the 21st century. The full GAO report is linked here.
10) While institutional investors are said to own about 5 percent of the single family housing market by 2022, there are select markets that GAO studied that reflect the point that from 2 percent to as high as 25 percent of the single family housing market in some markets are owned by institutional investors. See the one page summary document per the GAO linked here.
11) While it may be all too common for such research to overlook manufactured housing, the 2024 GAO study for Congress, per an MHProNews WORD search of their document, it lacks all of these terms: manufactured home, manufactured housing, modular, prefab, factory built, and even the routinely misapplied term “mobile home.”
12) Given that research by Scholastica “Gay” Cororaton revealed that manufactured homes were often more affordable on a monthly payment basis than renting or buying other forms of housing, that oversight by the GAO reseachers is perhaps rather surprising.
13) Fannie Mae had a similar finding prior to Cororaton’s research. A prior GAO reference to that kind of comparison was shown in a 2014 report. So, why didn’t the GAO consider the manufactured home category, given their apparent awareness?
14) What VP Vance, HUD Secretary Turner, and the entire Trump Administration should realize is that without millions of more HUD Code manufactured homes, the U.S. affordable housing crisis can’t mathematically be solved. Let’s disclose that MHProNews demonstrably supported candidate Trump 3x in the last 9 years, because in our editorial view he was the clearly superior candidate each time. Indeed, in his 2016 campaign, the Trump Campaign website featured a letter from our co-founder, Soheyla Kovach (see screen shot below), who publicly endorsed Trump. That said, it shouldn’t matter who we supported or voted for because we are U.S. citizens and deserve the same God-given equal protection of our rights and for justice under law, the same as any other American regardless of their politics. It is precisely those God-given rights that are perhaps not completely grasped by Team Trump as they apply to HUD Code manufactured homes and just how important they are to fixing the U.S. housing crisis?
15) Let’s pivot back to the GAO data, before honing in on the importance of what JD Harper and others had to say.
Per page 17 of the GAO report.
Studies we reviewed found institutional investors may have contributed to
an increase in home prices and rents after the financial crisis. But their
effects on homeownership and tenants are less clear because data are
limited and there is no agreed-upon definition of institutional investor.
Excuse me? What self-contradictory and red herring GAO nonsense. Just as illegal immgrants clearly increase demand for single family and other forms of U.S. housing, driving up costs due to the law of supply and demand, the same principle applies to institutional investors, regardless of how they may be pigeonholed by this or that definition. While a uniform definition is always useful when discussing an issue, the fact that several U.S. housing markets have from 10 to 25 percent ownership by institutional investors is going to have a similar impact as if 10 to 25 percent of a population in an area is occupied by those illegally in the U.S. If anything, if institutional investors had exactly the same percentage of ownership in a market as illegal immigrants did, because investors sometimes outbid single-family home seekers, they may drive up housing costs more on an apples-to-apples basis. To illustrate, consider this Q&A with left-leaning Google’s Gemini AI system. MHProNews asked the question shown below on 3.14.2025.
Aren’t institutional investors known to have outbid individual residential home buyers in several instances, thus driving housing costs up?
Gemini responded.
Yes, institutional investors, with their significant capital, are known to outbid individual residential home buyers, potentially driving up housing costs and reducing affordability, particularly in competitive markets.
16) The GAO should know this, thus that part of their report is arguably flawed. The complete response by Google to the inquiry is shown below, click the image or this link here and follow the prompts to expand it to a larger size.
17) Conventional builders can’t keep up with the demands of the market, either in price or in production pace, per their own statements.
18) Additionally, Federal Reserve system linked researchers Elena Falcettoni, James A. “Jim” Schmitz Jr., Mark L. J. Wright have repeatedly pointed out that HUD and conventional builders purportedly colluded to sabotage’ the market for HUD Code manufactured homes for decades. While that wasn’t mentioned by HUD researchers Gray and Blumenthal, the two fact sets fit together like puzzle pieces that help explain the bigger picture of why the affordable housing crisis has been so chronic in the U.S.
19) An array of third-party as well as industry research reveals the point that manufactured housing is utterly necessary to close the housing affordability gap. Just as the Trump Administration version 2.0 (sometimes referred to as T2) recognizes the value of driving up production of U.S. energy (e.g.: “drill baby drill”) to drive down costs and lower the rate and harms of inflation, a similar principle could be applied to manufactured housing. When it is the proven most affordable kind of single-family housing, it is outrageous that potentially millions of Americans are being denied access, especially when years of third-party research debunks the common outdated myths and misconceptions.
20) Note that the remarks by Lisa Tyler, now Ph.D., who did her doctoral dissertation on “Examining Community Attitudes Toward Manufactured Housing,” stressed the key point. Research has dispelled the outdated “negative stereotypes” but they “continued to influence local governments to impose regulatory restrictions on this type of housing.” That dovetails with the point raised by JD Harper, or for that matter, similar points made by the Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform (MHARR) among others.
21) Mark Weiss, J.D., the current president and CEO of Washington, D.C. based MHARR framed the issues like this. Highlighting was added by MHProNews.
Weiss has been involved in this issue for well over two decades. Indeed, MHARR was pushing for the principles behind what became the 2000 Reform Law and enhanced preemption prior to MHI coming on board in that effort.
22) Now, let’s pivot and flashback to then NAHB CEO Jerry Howard in a different interview with Stuart Varney on Fox Business. In this video, Howard explained how supply chains (meaning, from other countries) were harming almost every part of the industry. This is one more reason why President Trump’s push to reshore production of parts and labor makes sense. As the president said this week, there is really ‘nothing that we need’ from Canada, because most everything that Canada has, the U.S. has too. While that push to get Canada to be the 51st state, or get right on trade policy, is a seemingly tangential issue, as this video that follows illustrates it is one more valid piece of the puzzle for producers of factory-built homes, including manufactured homes, as well as for conventional ‘site building’ too.
23) While Trump and HUD Secretary Turner have spoken about Opportunity Zones and opening up better paying production jobs in the U.S., where is their respective lightbulbs for getting factory builders to open, expand, or ramp up their production in cities and towns across the country? Manufactured home builders can ship longer distances, but a common figure that is heard from producers is that a 300-mile radius around a production center often makes sense.
24) Restated, there are a range of reasons why manufactured housing could be part of the solution for the affordable housing crisis in every state in the U.S. and Puerto Rico (PR) too, so long as production centers would be established in locations like Alaska, Hawaii and PR rather than incur shipping costs. It could boost the U.S. economy. More manufactured home production could raise wages. It could increase the wealth production for families, perhaps particularly so for minority families. The history of the industry demonstrates that it is possible, as a range of research reveals.
25) To keep this article from going much longer, let’s simply note that not only those Federal Reserve researchers, but others in and beyond manufactured housing have said that apparent antitrust violations are at play. That too should be addressed, but let’s leave that for linked articles to explore so the scope of this article is more focused on the two JDs and one J.D., Mark Weiss. Manufactured homes are a free market tool in the T2 administration toolbox that needs to be unleashed. HUD’s subsidies for conventional housing could be steadily phased out simply by enforcing the “enhanced preemption” provision of the 2000 Reform Law.
So, VP J.D. Vance, meet J.D. Harper and Mark Weiss, J.D. Please. Millions of potential homeowners are waiting for the enforcement of a law that was widely bipartisan and that ironically former Senator Joe Biden co-sponsored. It is just too juicy a solution to ignore.
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By L.A. “Tony” Kovach – for MHProNews.com.
Tony earned a journalism scholarship and earned numerous awards in history and in manufactured housing.
For example, he earned the prestigious Lottinville Award in history from the University of Oklahoma, where he studied history and business management. He’s a managing member and co-founder of LifeStyle Factory Homes, LLC, the parent company to MHProNews, and MHLivingNews.com.
This article reflects the LLC’s and/or the writer’s position and may or may not reflect the views of sponsors or supporters.
Connect on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/latonykovach
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