Deltec Homes, an Asheville, North Carolina builder of panelized custom manufactured homes, will participate in an edition of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

Deltec will be building a home, with the help of volunteers, in New Orleans from March 6th to March 13th.

Often, it comes up that manufacturing housing has as problem with how it is perceived by the public.  Even though HUD-code and subsequent innovations have meant that quality has improved, the industry still faces some challenges with getting the public on board with its products.

That is why this matters.  Sure, if you love Reality TV, then this could be valuable as entertainment.  But from the perspective of manufactured housing, this is the kind of “meet ‘em where they are” action that can make people think about a manufactured home in a new context.

Moreover, this is a good story for manufactured housing in a region of the country where it desperately needs its own “make-over.” With the furor over the formaldehyde in so many of the Katrina travel trailers, this is a respite in the Crescent City.

Deltec’s construction of high strength homes certainly fits the needs of residents in New Orleans. Deltec’s homes can easily be built on elevated platforms. They are also resistant to high winds. Many qualify for green building standards.

Deltec builds high quality homes. The price reflect that standard. Prices range from $85 per square foot to as high as $250 per square foot, according to the company. The range is so vast because owners have a lot of choices in upfitting the homes. They can choose to put in Corian countertops or unusual flooring, for example.

The Deltec home will be a LEED-certified home. That is a environmental standard for green home building, developed by the United States Green Building Council. The goal is to develop the built infrastructure into a sustainable system. Deltec Homes also meet the National Green Building standards set by the National Association of Home Builders.

Deltec can’t reveal the location of the home or the name of the family, in order to comply with the rules set by ABC. A spokesman could not confirm if the home would even be located in Orleans Parish.

“The family is kept in the dark,” says Joe Schlenk, director of sales and marketing at Deltec. ” The show gives the family the house, part of it is that has to be done in total secrecy.”

The family will have no tax liability, other than subsequent property taxes.

The City of Fayetteville, North Carolina has proposed new minimum housing standards for the mobile home parks in its community. The rules would make parks uniformly nicer, although park owners are quick to say that they would be expensive.

The proposal comes from the Joint City and County Appearance Commission. A year ago, that same commission voted to ban the placement of mobile homes within city limits that were built prior to the HUD code.

Fayetteville is home to the 82nd Airborne and Fort Bragg. It is a quintessential military community located in the Southeastern part of North Carolina.

It is not surprising, then, that for years a lot of people have placed mobile homes down on the area’s sandy soils. Today, Fayetteville has 50 mobile home parks. That number is down from just 66 recently, and three are for sale right now.

Nonetheless, reforming mobile home parks in Fayetteville would impact a lot of people. The new rules would require paved roads, street lights, six-foot buffers, fencing and play areas. In short, the new rules would ask mobile home park owners to build to the same specs as for stick built subdivisions.

A few park owners have offered that the regulations will lead them to convert their parks to other uses. Ultimately, they say, that could lead to homelessness and other problems.

This is an interesting dilemma. Planning Director Jimmy Teal acknowledges that not a lot of new supply of mobile home parks is coming into Fayetteville. Just one new park has been approved in the last ten years.

Yet manufactured housing is an industry that has been well-served in the past by regulations that were brought to bear on to it by external forces. The HUD Code, which enforced national standards for construction in 1974 (and implemented two years later) predicated an increase in demand for new mobile homes. With the advent of HUD code and the stamp of regulatory approval from the Federal government, financial institutions became more comfortable working with mobile homes. This opened up the doors for new loan products and a secondary market for mobile homes.

That is a macro sense of the forces that might be at play in Fayetteville. At the very least, this is interesting because it means that one City is provoking a dialog on how manufactured housing can continue to serve as affordable housing for the work force.

It is one thing to hear criticism about manufactured housing in places like Brookline, Massachusetts or Kensington, Maryland. You know, places where manufactured housing is seen as often as aberrant US spy satellites (and perhaps where they are as well-received).

It is another thing to hear criticism coming from one’s backyard.

The manufactured housing industry woke up last week to a press release from North Carolina Governor Michael Easley. Having heard enough about formaldehyde fumes in travel trailers in the Gulf Coast, Easley wants some answers. He threw out a few questions to Brad Lovin, the executive director of the North Carolina Manufactured Housing Institute.

This will be interesting to watch.

North Carolina is a state that is normally very favorable for the manufactured housing industry. Many manufactured homes are built in North Carolina. In the 2nd quarter of 2007, manufactured housing builders employed 3,040 people. Mobile home dealers employed another 1,589 (figures from the North Carolina Employment Security Commission). It is not a small constituency.

This criticism isn’t coming from one of the usual critics, either.  Governor Easley is not prone to picking on people just to make a political statement. He likes to attend a few ribbon cuttings when Dell or Google open a new plant in rural North Carolina.  Other than that, he doesn’t play for show.  He will admit that he is normally very reticent of limelight. He’d as much prefer to work on crafting a new piece of hand made furniture. Moreover, he comes from Eastern North Carolina, where mobile homes are often as much as 30 percent of the housing stock.

While Proposition 98 got attention earlier, it is not the only item before California’s voters in June that will consider the future of eminent domain in the Golden State.

Most significantly, an alternative exists to Prop 98 that comes without a concurrent impact for rent control in the Golden State.  Proposition 99 is an alternative.

Both would constrain the use of eminent domain in the state. That follows on the tide of anger among all different groups of people after the Kelo v. City of New London decision. That decision extended the use of eminent domain, traditionally stipulated for public purposes, to include the taking of land for economic development.

What has followed in California certainly builds on the ensuing anger. What is interesting to watch, though, is how the issue of rent control has grafted itself into this debate.

Rent control has a lot of critics with a lot of valid points. Nonetheless, it does matter a great deal to hundreds of thousands of California residents. In fact, it governs the economic terms of life for almost 600,000 Los Angelenos alone.

Proposition 99 also seeks to limit the power of government agencies to seize land in the name of economic development. However, it does not include a rider to simultaneously cease the proliferation of rent control.

Prop 99 doesn’t have the attention, perhaps because it doesn’t have the dollars. Mobile home park owners are among the forces that have contributed to the effort to limit eminent domain. Sam Zell, an owner of Equity Lifestyle Properties (and a few other things), contributed $50,000.

Other big contributors for the California Property Owners and Farmland Protection Act (as Proposition 98 would be called if ratified) include the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., which gave $100,000 to the effort and lent the campaign $200,000; the Western Manufactured Housing Communities Issues PAC, which contributed $150,000; and the Apartment Owners Assn. Political Action Committee, which put in $100,000.

A Western Manufactured Housing Communities Association press release casts opponents of eminent domain in a bad light — as people willing to make farm owners other small businessmen vulnerable to government greed. Their argument sidesteps one of the most glaring differences — the lack of a rent control provision — and instead focus on the assertion that Prop 99 would not create adequate protections against eminent domain.

Prop 99 has some specific requirements:

• no eminent domain for owner-occupied homes
• only for public work or improvements
• government is seeking to abate a nuisance, an environmental hazard, or protect public safety.

Now that the Centers for Disease Control has affirmed long-held concerns about fumes in FEMA travel trailers, change could be coming in the Gulf Coast.

The CDC reports that it has completed tests of 519 travel trailers. Their survey found that formaldehyde fumes exceeded normal levels by a factor of five. About five percent of surveyed residents had breathing problems that the CDC attributed to the fumes.

In acting upon the news, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) indicates that it will seek alternatives for the 35,000 families living in FEMA trailers in Lousiana and Mississippi. Residents will be moved to a variety of housing types, from apartments and hotels to mobile homes.

One option that wasn’t mentioned was the Katrina cottage. While those homes were heralded for their excellent urban design and affordablity, some reports indicate that

communities have attempted to use zoning laws to block the homes from their borders. That is not a surprising reaction. In fact, it mirrors some of the obstacles that face any attempts at manufactured housing.

Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, for example, has attempted to put rules into place that limit Katrina cottages to land zoned for commercial mobile home parks.

In Mississippi, where about 30 percent of households lived in rentals, just 10 percent of Katrina funds for housing rehab have gone to rental units.

All of this could suggest problems when it comes to moving people. While FEMA might decide to shut down the trailers, they might not have a enough alternatives in place to move all of these people.

Even now, four years later, existing biases in zoning are predicating that manufactured housing cannot be fully utilized to answer the needs of residents.  Systemic lack of investment in rental housing does not help.

Many non-profits (like this one) in the area are finding ways to respond.  They are doing great work.  But they cannot do it alone, and they should not have to work against the current of government agencies.

FEMA officers indicate that one big problem will be accomplishing the relocation before the summer. When its hot, the fumes are worse.