With New Leadership at HUD

Today we have news that Alfonso Jackson will resign from his position as Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. While there could be some debate if HUD Secretary is the leading housing figure in the federal government, there is less so that this person is the most important in regard to manufactured housing.

As Secretary, Jackson and his successor have the ability to set standards for the mobile home industry in the United States. Yes, modular homes are not under the purview of this figure — they are regulated at the state level. But, mobile homes are and the regulatory vision that they work beneath matters.

This page has earlier asked what might constitute an ideal agenda for community development within manufactured. This is an opportunity to ask a slightly different question. What should the next Secretary do to preserve the interests of manufactured housing residents? Are there distinct policies that would serve the industry as well?

I will put forward a few. Please send me some of your own.

Tax credits. The 1990s saw a reorientation of site built housing around decentralized development paid for with funding through capital raised by the sale of federal tax credits. Both the low income housing tax credit and the historic preservation tax credit changed the course of housing. Now we have housing that is paid for by government funds, but designed with more local input. Things look better, they work better.

The same capacity should be given to non profits that want to work with manufactured housing. HUD would have to work with the IRS to make it happen. Even a small wrinkle of funding could leverage a lot of activity.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 included tax credits for Energy Star manufactured homes. The 2007 Energy Bill has not yet passed the Senate. That bill would have to renew those credits. The next Secretary should be an advocate for the renewal of those credits for manufactured housing.

Insurance: Something needs to be done. A lot of mobile homes are built in areas where climate change (or something else, maybe it is Horton, if you do not believe in climate change) is wreaking havoc. In Florida, premiums are getting too high for homeowners. With respect to parks, Section 207 insurance did not insure any mortgages for parks or park rehabilitation last year.

Debt for Park Acquisition: We need more pools of money to buy land that have zoning for mobile home parks. That money should be accessible to non-profits and to resident co-operatives. This could work through State Housing Finance Agencies, or directly via HUD. The debt should be collateralized on land.

This could be coupled with some kind of support (tax credits or capital gains tax incentives) to park owners who sell their properties to resident or non-profit groups.

Real Property: HUD should develop national guidelines for getting mobile homes re-titled as real property. We have a variety of rules in states. That would make sense if regulatory authority was mainly at the state level. It’s not. We need to create a means for getting more mobile homes certified as real property because that will lower finance costs and make the product more accessible to more people. Some states provide the designation when a home gets a long-term lease on the land underneath it. Imagine how much easier it would be to securitize real property loans on mobile homes with a uniform lease structure.

Katrina: Now that the Hurricanes have passed and the cleanup continues, HUD needs to be leading the policy debate, not FEMA. For better or worse, the problems of travel trailers in the Gulf have become a weight on all efforts to repair the perceptions of manufactured housing. The industry suffers a lot of harm to its reputation by ceding housing policy on this high-profile event to the first responders.

Those are just a few. Send me a few of your proposals.