The Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform (MHARR) participated in the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee’s field hearing on “The State of Manufactured Housing” held in Danville, VA Nov. 29, 2011, submitting written testimony on the need for congressional oversight of the Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s manufactured housing program. MHARR says the field hearing, with the exception of the elementary overview of the HUD program by its administrator, and a MH resident satisfied with her home, focused primarily on the lack of available financing and the anticipated negative impacts of the SAFE Act and the Dodd-Frank law, and included Kevin Clayton, CEO of Clayton Homes, the nation’s largest producer of MH. MHARR has consistently and repeatedly maintained HUD has failed to comply with key reform provisions of the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act of 2000. “The smaller businesses represented by MHARR have major and specific grievances based on HUD’s failure to fully and properly implement key reform provisions of this law designed to ensure that manufactured homes are treated as housing rather than ‘trailers’–distorting some, ignoring others and effectively reading yet others out of the law entirely by process of ‘interpretation.’ This failure negatively impacts all aspects of the industry and the use and availability of manufactured homes, including the availability of financing for mostly lower and moderate-income home buyers. Yet, neither they nor the independent expert witnesses they identified for the Committee are here today because of changes to the venue and focus of the hearing.” MHARR insists the industry will not improve until HUD fully complies with the reforms.
