Attached for your review and information, are MHARR’s comprehensive written comments opposing the U.S. Department of Energy’s June 17, 2016 proposed rule for manufactured housing energy standards. These comments refute the misinformation that has been circulated within the industry regarding this needless and destructive abuse of government power and fully document a DOE rulemaking process that has been fundamentally tainted and illegitimate from the start. That irretrievably tainted process has resulted in a disastrous proposed rule that must be opposed by the industry and consumers.
Based on the above, MHARR has been a consistent opponent of both DOE’s tainted process and the resulting proposed rule, that will needlessly increase the purchase price of manufactured homes by thousands of dollars and exclude millions of mostly lower and moderate-income families from the American Dream of homeownership and all of its benefits, while imposing mandates on manufactured homes that even million-dollar site-built homes are not required to meet across the vast majority of the country. If adopted, these non-life-safety mandates will – in combination with other recent, costly HUD program requirements, such as costly and burdensome new rules for on-site construction – further undermine the industry’s ability to compete with other segments of the housing industry.
At the same time that this extreme one-size-fits-all big government mandate pushes potential homebuyers out of the manufactured housing market, its worst impacts within the industry will be felt by smaller businesses that – unlike the industry’s largest corporate conglomerates – cannot amortize resulting cost increases over a very large base of production and do not have the resources to cushion or negate large corresponding purchase price increases for their own customers.
The MHARR comments demonstrate, among other things, how DOE’s alleged cost-benefit “analysis” fails to consider or include major cost elements of the proposed rule – including costs for testing, enforcement and regulatory compliance – that will make any final rule much more costly (with a significantly longer “payback” time for consumers) than is reflected in DOE’s June 17, 2016 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.
We urge you to review these comments and judge for yourself whether an industry that currently provides the nation’s most affordable housing with a high degree of energy efficiency already – as proven by U.S. Census Bureau statistics – deserves to be the target of such a draconian mandate.
Ironically, during a hastily-called teleconference meeting of the Manufactured Housing Consensus Committee (MHCC) on August 9, 2016 (see, pp. 18-19 of MHARR’s attached comments) to review and consider the DOE proposed rule (just four business days prior to the public comment deadline), HUD methodically detailed many of the fallacies and flaws of that rule which, it confirmed, had been brought to DOE’s attention over a period of “a few years,” but had been rejected by DOE. Based on this revelation by the Department and consideration of the flaws and fallacies thus exposed, the MHCC adopted – for submission to DOE – consensus comments pointing out key defects in the proposed rule as currently constituted. That said, however, the question remains why HUD did not bring these concerns to the MHCC at an earlier point – given that the DOE Manufactured Housing Working Group proposal underlying the proposed rule was finalized in October 2014 and approved by DOE’s Appliance Standards and Rulemaking Advisory Committee (ASRAC) in December 2014 – to strengthen its position vis-à-vis DOE by garnering MHCC consensus support, while simultaneously providing affected stakeholders with additional venues to impact and oppose the proposed rule as it was being considered by DOE.
Ultimately, though, based on what has been known, as well as these new revelations, it is of the utmost importance that industry members and consumers aggressively oppose this destructive proposed rule by sending comments to DOE. In doing so, stakeholders are free to use or draw-upon MHARR’s comments – or any part of those comments – as they wish.
Comments on this proposed rule must be filed with DOE by August 16, 2016. 
