Sometimes topical or news tips come in MHProNews with several paragraphs of thoughts and information from the tipster. But a recent tip from a source known to MHProNews had only two words in addition to a link. Those two words? “Poor fool.” The provided article was from VT Digger and was entitled “Vermont is desperate for new homes. Is it time to build them in factories?” Certainly, every new state is “desperate” for more new and affordable homes. The article in question had a subtitle that said in part: “governments have bet big on encouraging modular construction to accelerate homebuilding. But there are some risks and barriers.” More on that shortly in Part II, but next up in our headline topics is an item on the Daily Signal that was originally published on the centrist Real Clear Wire. That will be found in Part I. Part III will include additional facts and analysis.
The great “Realignment” that is presented by Philip Wegmann is a political-national topic. The significance to manufactured housing will be explored in Part III, because an insight from Part II will be relevant.
Part I From the Daily Signal to MHProNews is the following.
NEWS
‘The Realignment’: GOP Sen. Hawley to Introduce Pro-Union Legislation
Philip Wegmann | February 14, 2025
He was the first president to walk a picket line. And he crowed regularly about being the “most pro-union” president ever. But after four years as president, Joe Biden could not stop a growing working-class coalition, one that increasingly includes rank-and-file union members, from flocking to Donald Trump.
Reflecting on election night about the coalition that returned him to the White House, Trump called it “a historic realignment.” John McLaughlin wondered if it would endure.
While Republicans celebrated in the weeks after the election, Trump’s longtime pollster looked to the future.
“Right now, these Trump voters—the GOP is just renting them,” McLaughlin told RealClearPolitics. Speaking of the coalition Trump cobbled together consisting of disaffected Democrats and traditionally liberal constituencies, he added that Republicans “need to make a decision if they’re going to make them permanent.”
Enter Sen. Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican emerging as the right-of-center pro-labor leader.
“Look at what Donald Trump achieved. He achieved victory based on this coalition, and he deserves tremendous credit for making it possible, and he knows it,” Hawley said in an interview before picking up where Trump’s pollster left off. Hawley is asking his Republican colleagues whether they want their new-found working-class support “to begin and end with Donald Trump.”
His framework for pro-union legislation amounts to something of a downpayment. It is a set of proposals to reform the way businesses interact with organized labor, from requiring worker rights to be displayed on a job site to prohibiting “unsafe work speed quotas.” And soon Hawley will introduce legislation mandating accelerated negotiations between unions and employers.
A 2022 Bloomberg Law analysis found that the average time between workers voting to unionize and reaching their first contract with employers was 465 days. The Hawley bill would mandate that once workers vote to form a union, the employer and employees must begin the negotiations process within 10 days. It is a significant reform, which unions have wanted for years. Two Democrats have already promised to co-sponsor: Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Gary Peters of Michigan. But its author is unusual in that Hawley comes from a party traditionally more favorable to corporations than workers.
Hawley has embraced the heterodoxy. Last year he abandoned his support for right-to-work laws, policies which bar unions from requiring workers to pay dues as a condition of employment. Before that, Hawley introduced legislation that could have easily come from the desk of socialist firebrand Bernie Sanders. One was a bill to cap credit card interest rates; another sought to overturn the Supreme Court’s campaign finance decision, Citizens United.
Neither was well-received in traditional conservative precincts. The latter earned Hawley a rebuke from the business-friendly Wall Street Journal editorial page. But Hawley represents a vanguard of a New Right, and while his bill mandating accelerated negotiations between labor and business faces an uphill battle in the Senate, skepticism of corporate power is increasingly in vogue among the GOP because of Trump’s ascendancy.
“As conservatives, who are now benefiting from the support of working people, it’s time we deliver for them and bring into actuality this Trump realignment, this working-class realignment of the Republican Party,” Hawley said of his efforts. “This is my project.”
In this, the president is sympathetic. Trump delights in bragging about how he peeled union votes away from Democrats. He invited Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to address the Republican Convention in Milwaukee without any preconditions about what the union boss could or couldn’t say on stage. Later when the Teamsters declined to endorse him or former Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump portrayed the non-endorsement as a tacit repudiation of Democrats.
Trump and Hawley have spoken in the days since the inauguration. A source familiar with those calls reports that the president is generally supportive of Hawley’s pro-labor legislation. A senior White House official did not dispute that characterization, telling RealClearPolitics that “the president will never turn his back on union voters.”
The administration made their commitment explicit on the campaign trail where Vice President JD Vance often bemoaned the “tragedy” of declining union membership in the private sector.
“I think what we see as our job in national policy is to protect as many workers’ jobs as possible, to promote tax and spending and tariff policies that promote large scale economic growth and actually give workers more their take on pay and more jobs to begin with,” Vance told RealClearPolitics last September before adding that the incoming administration would work to make the job of unions “easier, not harder.”
This was a winning political argument. Now those voters are likely to expect results. Hawley says Republicans must embrace working class voters or, he warns, “we will never be a majority party.”
“The Republican Party right now is defined largely by one very specific personality who’s been quite successful,” said Abigail Ball, executive director of the conservative think tank American Compass. “If we’re going to see this be a long-lasting realignment,” she continued, “where working-class voters take seriously that conservatives want to deliver, we have to do real long-term policy work.”
If Trump exits the Oval Office in four years without overseeing any such “policy work,” Hawley fears that the GOP is at risk of “reverting to the days where we are a wholly owned subsidiary of these mega-corporations.” That comes with its own familiar result: a return to what Hawley calls “the political wilderness.” There is no majority coalition there, he said, warning his party, “We know this because we’ve lived it for 30 years.”
An early test comes in the person of Trump’s nominee for labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer. She is a former member of Congress, a Democrat from Oregon with well-defined, pro-union views. Her support of the PRO Act, which would pre-empt state right-to-work laws, makes her anathema to pro-business Republicans. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul promised to oppose her and predicted she could lose as many as 15 GOP votes. Democrats like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, seemed pleasantly surprised and signaled a willingness to back her. “I think she’d be terrific,” Hawley said.
If there is indeed a realignment, it is incomplete. Republicans are not as comfortable as Hawley on a picket line. They are more inclined to side with industry. And while Trump seems eager to keep union voters in the GOP fold, during his first time in office he sided with business. His judicial nominees, as well as his nominees to sit on the National Labor Relations Board, were undoubtedly labor skeptics. Trump even praised Elon Musk’s perceived penchant for firing Tesla workers interested in starting a union.
“You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk during a live conversation on X. “I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike, and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.’”
The richest man in the world, Musk is now not just a supporter but a key member of the Trump administration. The second and third richest men in the world, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta and Jeff Bezos of Amazon, attended Trump’s second inaugural. All three have, at one time or another, been caught up in lawsuits over their treatment of employees looking to unionize.
The proximity of that much capital to the president does not worry Hawley. “There’s only one person who runs the Trump administration, and as many who think otherwise, sadly, learn, that one person is Donald J. Trump,” he replied when asked about the new coziness between Silicon Valley elite and the populist president. “So, I have no doubt that Jeff Bezos would love to be in the president’s inner circle,” he added. “Do I think that the president is going to ultimately listen to him? No.”
The Missouri senator would prefer if the president listened to him and helped get his latest pro-labor legislation into law. So would the Teamsters who support the new bill.
“Legislation gets put forward, oftentimes, as a political chess piece and part of the game, but the ultimate result is that it doesn’t see the light of day,” said Teamsters spokeswoman Kara Deniz. Unions have watched that dynamic play out over and over again across administrations, she said. Led by O’Brien, though, the Teamsters are increasingly open to working across the partisan divide. “The priority is to wherever we can, whether it’s Democrat, Republican, or independent, to work together with any political leader that is going to support workers,” Deniz told RCP.
“Hawley has been that person,” she said.
Originally published by RealClearWire
—
Part II – Excerpts from VT Digger
Outside of Vermont, governments have bet big on encouraging modular construction to accelerate homebuilding. But there are some risks and barriers.
Any estimate you look at indicates that Vermont is not on track to build the number of homes needed to close the state’s stark housing gap and rein in rents and home prices.
The need to ramp up Vermont’s sluggish rate of home construction — which has never fully rebounded from the 2008 housing market crash — has housing wonks here wondering: should we start building more homes on the assembly line?
The promise of mass production
That’s the question at the heart of a recent state-commissioned report that looks at how to grow Vermont’s off-site construction industry, a catch-all term that includes manufactured housing — like single-wides and double-wides often located in self-contained parks — and modular construction, the Lego-like building method that Huntington Homes uses.
Elsewhere, governments have bet big on encouraging modular construction to accelerate homebuilding, including across the northern border in Quebec. Oregon and Colorado have dedicated state funding to boost off-site home production in recent years. Building homes in factories is already commonplace in European countries, like Sweden.
Taking construction indoors brings a host of benefits, said Jeff Lubell, a housing researcher based in Norwich who helped put together the Vermont report. It allows building to happen year-round, through Vermont’s frigid winters. The work is less physically demanding than outdoor construction, opening up opportunities for a wider range of potential workers — a key consideration amid the state’s workforce shortage in the building trades, he said.
Another major potential advantage is bringing down construction costs by building many standardized homes at once, Lubell said.
Mass-producing homes using uniform plans can let builders take advantage of “economies of scale,” Lubell said. Companies can save on design costs and get bulk deals on materials like lumber and windows.
But standardization comes with a major upside: lower sticker prices, because, ideally, savings made during the building process would be passed on to the buyer.
The state itself committed to a bulk purchase of manufactured homes this past summer, part of the Rapid Response Mobile Home Infill Program created in the aftermath of catastrophic flooding in July of 2024.
With the aid of a state grant, Fair Haven is investigating whether the former Skyline company building still has the equipment it needs to start churning out homes again.
“The whole idea of affordable housing — that’s what Skyline did, and that’s what that building was built for, and that’s what it could do best,” Richards said. “The town is absolutely in favor of that.”
Off-site construction requires a lot of upfront investment — to get a factory up and running, for instance — which means it doesn’t weather the booms and busts in the housing market nimbly.
That’s what happened to the Fair Haven plant, which closed its doors in 2011. Manufactured home production had fallen steadily during the 2000s, Lubell said, and the 2008 housing market crash was likely “the last straw” for the factory.
Huntington Homes is still only producing about half as many homes a year as it was in 2007, Webster said.
MHProNews Note: there is more, their full article is linked here and why the tipster that sent that in said “Poor fool” will be explored.
Part III – Additional Information, Analysis and Focused Commentary
In no particular order of importance are the following additional facts, insights, and observations.
1) There have been articles and research reports not radically different than the one in Part II from VT Digger that span decades. That tipster is a longtime and successful industry professional and knows that
2) Part of that discussion should be that Skyline was once an independent producer of HUD Code manufactured home, modular housing, and park model homes. In 1998, Skyline produced, per the information shown below, 17, 286 HUD Code manufactured homes in 1998. That comparatively robust production of over 17,000 new homes was only enough to make the top 6 of the industry’s producers. According to Champion Homes 2024 snapshot from their IR pitch, the corporation effectively absorbed Skyline in 2018. Here is how Gemini put it. “Champion Enterprises Holdings LLC and Skyline Corporation merged in June 2018 to form Skyline Champion Corporation. In August 2024, Skyline Champion Corporation changed its name to Champion Homes, Inc.” Left-leaning Google’s AI powered Gemini cited Champion Homes as the source for those statements.
3) Per Champion’s Feb 2025 IR pitch (which will be the subject of a more detailed report in the days ahead), Champion produced 25,728 total housing units in all of North America in the prior 12 months. Because of how their information is presented (there is an apparent factual error in their pitch, apparently mistakenly claiming that “22.1%” was the HUD Code share of their data, when 84 percent of their U.S. production revenue was stated as being HUD Code manufactured housing. But interpreting their information, perhaps some 80 percent (+/-) of their total production was manufactured housing, which would be roughly 21,000 to 22,000 HUD Code manufactured homes. By comparison, in 1998, Champion produced 68,264 manufactured homes, Skyline produced 17, 286. So, in 1998, there was a total of 85,550 new manufactured homes produced.
4) Restating #3 above, Champion and Skyline combined only produced a few thousand homes more in 2024 than what Skyline produced themselves in 1998.
5) Further refining the apparent data, Champion and Skyline combined (SKY) are only building about 1/4th of the new manufactured homes as a quarter of a century ago. While the VT Digger article mentions that the industry is down since 2000 its analysis as to the causes of that collapse and numerous details are for whatever reason ignored.
6) That said, let’s note that the once far more vibrant Huntington Homes production center is now producing only a fraction of what it did in 2007, per VT Digger.
7) Skyline was financially far better situated than many manufactured home companies to weather the storms of the late 20th and 21st century because they were for years effectively a ‘debt free’ company. Yet, much of their production was vaporized, former production centers went with them in various parts of the country.
8) Let’s briefly pivot to Part II about Senator Josh Hawley and related. As the report linked below goes into in more detail, a revolution or “realignment” is and has been underway in the President Donald J. Trump led Republican Party. Hawley seems to ‘get it’ that while executive orders (EOs) can accomplish a lot they are fleeting and could be easily reversed if Republican (a.k.a.: Grand Old Party or GOP) fail to forge legislation and policy positions that support the winning coalition that Trump managed to forge in the 2024 election cycle, Democrats could slide back in and potentially regain ground among voters that they lost in 2024.
9) That’s not just a GOP or right-leaning view. Pod Save America, which features Obama-Biden (D) era figures that often worked with those Democratic politicos, recently said that they should have done some of the things that DOGE and Trump are currently doing. That’s what’s known as a back-handed compliment.
Amazing. The Pod Save America Obama bros accidentally admit DOGE is a massive Trump win:
“We tried to reorganize the government, we tried to find efficiency, it’s hard to do.”
“Some of this is pretty annoying because it’s the stuff we should have done.” pic.twitter.com/yTg783wde6
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) February 13, 2025
Marc Thiessen: “It was Barack Obama who founded DOGE, the U.S. DOGE service, which under Obama was the U.S. digital service that brought in tech bro’s – kids from Google – as presidential innovation fellows and deployed them in his words as ‘swat teams’ to the government agencies… pic.twitter.com/mwtlBwKcip
— JOSH DUNLAP (@JDunlap1974) February 14, 2025
10) But those quoted POD Save America remarks seem to miss the fact that much of that waste, fraud, and abuse is apparently flowing to left-leaning groups and Democratic supporting corporate, NGOs, media or other organizations. Per the X-posted remarks from POD: “”We tried to reorganize the government, we tried to find efficiency, it’s hard to do.” “Some of this is pretty annoying because it’s the stuff we should have done.”
11) Let’s apply some of these different insights from the broader political-economic developments from Trump-DOGE-and MAGA aligned figures nationally to MHVille. There is potentially a realignment possible in the housing market. During the Obama-Biden term of office, this writer for MHLivingNews and MHProNews presented facts and comments to that administration. They did none of it. Certainly, this author wasn’t alone in presenting information to them, as MHARR and others did too. So, it isn’t that the Obama-Biden (D) administration didn’t know what to do or didn’t have the facts or ideas that they need. Rather, for whatever motives, they didn’t want to change.
12) But that potential has existed for decades, as our “poor fool” commenting tipster remarked about VT Digger. Potential doesn’t necessarily change this reality shown below. In many devices and browsers, the graphic below can be opened to a larger size by clicking the image and following the prompts. Or click here and follow the prompts to see a larger size.
13) To that tipsters point, researchers like Richard Genz have laid out some similar insights as
14) In our recent article on Star Parker’s take on the new HUD Secretary E. Scott Turner she made the observation that hopefully Turner would not make the mistake of doing the same things the same way as others did and expect a different result.
15) HUD has ‘temporarily’ removed the HUD Edge article by Pam Blumenthal and Regina Gray on Opportunities to Increase Housing Production and Preservation. But when asked, one of their team members responded by providing MHLivingNews with that article first published on 9.7.2021 which said the following.
Without significant new supply, cost burdens are likely to increase as current home prices reach all-time highs…
They also wrote this.
The regulatory environment — federal, state, and local — that contributes to the extensive mismatch between supply and need has worsened over time. Federally sponsored commissions, task forces, and councils under both Democratic and Republican administrations have examined the effects of land use regulations on affordable housing for more than 50 years.
It seems that after 50 years, HUD could get this problem right. To learn what Congress did to fix this approaching 25 years ago, see the report linked below.
BTW and FWIW, while HUD’s article by Blumenthal and Gray are missing you can find it on our new report linked above.
16) As Charlie Kirk said, cited above, pointing to the left-leaning POD Save America.
The Pod Save America Obama bros accidentally admit DOGE is a massive Trump win:
“We tried to reorganize the government, we tried to find efficiency, it’s hard to do.”
“Some of this is pretty annoying because it’s the stuff we should have done.”
17) Cutting government down to size is not only theoretically useful, but has been proven recently in what is occurring in Argentina under the tenure and leadership of their President Javier Milei.
🇦🇷 President Milei got the inflation rate from 25.5% to 2.7% in under a year: pic.twitter.com/uSIGf827Pq
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 12, 2024
What @JMilei has done in Argentina has been astonishing. Milei inherited a country with a massive monthly inflation rate of 25.5%. He brought it down to 2.4%. He slashed government spending bringing the country back from recession. And investors are noticing. The future looks… pic.twitter.com/xdMGuZVo4K
— Natalie F Danelishen (@Chesschick01) December 21, 2024
18) This writer read Henry Hazlitt’s classic Economics in One Lesson decades ago. Somewhat like the insights from thinkers like Thomas Sowell, Hazlitt explains in simple language why many of the false promises and scam deployed for years are deceptive and wrong.
19) President Trump, Elon Musk led DOGE, and others in that orbit of the MAGA/America First movement realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch. MHProNews has shared that message off and on for years. We did so again in 2024 via the post below on the Patch.
20) Once someone understand such basic principles it becomes easier to spot a con job. It also becomes more obvious that if a con job or fallacy in some form is being deployed, then what is being obscured is an authentic path or solution. Con artists are taught – never give up the con. Don’t expect the forces within or beyond manufactured housing to admit that they have been deploying various kinds of con.
21) It isn’t that VT Digger’s
It remains to be seen if Senator Hawley’s efforts to help reform the GOP to better confirm to the great “realignment” that handed Trump in 2024 an election victory takes root in Congress. But if so, the industry should be prepared, which is perhaps why MHARR has made a vigorous early and public efforts while calling out MHI by name for having failed during the first Trump term. To learn more about these issues see the linked and related reports.
Again, our thanks to free email subscribers and all readers like you, as well as our tipsters/sources, sponsors and God for making and keeping us the runaway number one source for authentic “News through the lens of manufactured homes and factory-built housing” © where “We Provide, You Decide.” © ## (Affordable housing, manufactured homes, reports, fact-checks, analysis, and commentary. Third-party images or content are provided under fair use guidelines for media.) See Related Reports, further below. Text/image boxes often are hot-linked to other reports that can be access by clicking on them.)
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
Related References:
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