Real Homes, Real Property, Real Value

This guest post was written by Lauren Williams, program manager at CFED.

In order for any home to be a good investment for a family, a certain set of conditions must be true: the home must be well built and installed; the homeowner must own, or at least have long-term control over, the land beneath their home; the home must be financed with fair and affordable terms; and, finally, homeowners must be able to sell the home at a fair value when they move. For site-built homes, nearly every condition required to make a home a safe, valuable, appreciable investment is protected by public policies at the federal, state and local levels.

However, because of policies with roots in the travel trailer industry, manufactured homes often lack key public policy protections that would enable homeowners to build wealth through homeownership. The Innovations in Manufactured Homes (I’M HOME) initiative was designed to ensure that families living in manufactured homes do have the opportunity to build wealth over time like their neighbors in site-built housing. To that end, the I’M HOME initiative focuses substantial energy on reforming the policy environment so that, at a minimum, manufactured housing receives the same treatment as any other housing.

Our policy strategy directly supports our efforts to deliver market-driven manufactured housing solutions at scale, whether in the sphere of community preservation and resident ownership, new and replacement development or mortgage finance. Our current federal and state policy priorities focus on the following areas:

  • Integrating manufactured housing into existing federal homeownership and housing-related programs, and ensuring that these programs work well for manufactured home buyers and lenders. This includes not just individual homes but also resident-owned communities.
  • Developing consumer protection laws and regulations that treat owners of manufactured homes equally. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s mandate for policy change provides it with the power to bring manufactured home lending into the mainstream of housing finance. Check out recent federal comment letters on ability-to-repay standards and mortgage disclosure requirements to get a better understanding of how these issues relate to manufactured housing.
  • Promoting manufactured home titling statute reform so that homeowners can more easily convert their homes to real property to access consumer protections and mortgage financing that make owning a home a good investment.
  • Creating policy incentives for manufactured home community residents (or other benevolent owners) to purchase their communities.  Resident opportunity to purchase laws and state and federal tax benefits for selling a community to residents or nonprofit buyers makes it easier for homeowners to gain long-term control over the land beneath their homes.

I’M HOME draws input from and plays a coordinating role across a diverse set of partners including affordable housing developers like Next Step Network Members; organizers who help manufactured home community residents purchase their communities as cooperatives like ROC USA Certified Technical Assistance Providers; lenders; legal service providers and policy advocates like the National Consumer Law Center; and most importantly, homeowners as represented by the National Manufactured Home Owners Association (NMHOA). Though our partners may not share each of our policy priorities, they all play critical roles in shaping and implementing them over time.

For more information, contact Lauren Williams, Program Manager at CFED (lwilliams@cfed.org) or Doug Ryan, Director of Affordable Homeownership Initiatives (dryan@cfed.org).

Next Step at August 2013 NTI

Susan Bond

By Susan Bond

 

 

 

 

 

liberty bellNext Step will offer a day of training at the NeighborWorks Training Institute on August 19-23, 2013, in Philadelphia, PA. This year’s NTI will provide a week of a week of cutting-edge community development learning and professional development in the City of Brotherly Love, an urban center that has lots of evening activities to choose from – parks, restaurants, museums and historical attractions. And if the city full of remnants from the founding of America isn’t your taste, you can always run up the same steps as Sylvester Stallone in Rocky at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. If this doesn’t get you pumped enough in the morning to learn about affordable housing, nothing will!

Register online here.

Amy Barnard at CFED's 2012 I'M HOME Retreat.

Amy Barnard training at CFED’s 2012 I’M HOME Retreat.

Next Step’s course CP135 Successful Construction Using Factory-Built Homes will be one day and will take place on Wednesday, August 21. You will spend the day with a team member from Next Step, the first and only national strategy and scalable approach to bring factory-built homes to nonprofits nationwide. Next Step will show you tools designed specifically to assist nonprofits with the factory-built housing construction process including ENERGY Star certification of factory built homes. The training will cover steps from home ordering to planning to turn key completion of manufactured and modular homes. You will leave equipped to translate your site-built construction expertise into supervising successful construction using factory-built homes. This class is open to all, and is highly recommended for those considering applying to the Next Step Network and current Next Step Network Members.

Again, you can register online here. Tuition for our course is $230. The NWO Slot registration deadline is June 24. NWO Pay-Own-Expenses Deadline is July 29. Pre-registration for Non-NWOs is July 29. If you have any questions, please feel to contact Amy Barnard, our Marketing and Operations Specialist at a.barnard@nextstepus.org.

Executive Assistant Job Opening

Next Step Network has an available position: Executive Assistant
Job Summary: Responsible for administrative support to the chief executive officer and the Board of Directors. Serves as liaison and communication link between the CEO, Board of Directors, staff and other stakeholders, Network Members and funders. Performs a variety of complex, responsible and confidential duties requiring a thorough knowledge of organizational and management procedures and precedents.
Job announcement*.
Job description*.

We will begin accepting applications on June 3, 2013 and will review them until the position has been filled.
Please send resumes and letters of interest to Billie Wells. B.wells@nextstepus.org

Marketing and Operations Specialist Job Opening

Next Step Network has an available position: Marketing and Operations Specialist
Job Summary: In addition to growing and building a strong Membership Network, this position is responsible for technical assistance and training for Network Members to consistently provide high quality home installation in the field.
Job announcement*.
Job description*.

We will begin accepting applications on June 3, 2013 and will review them until the position has been filled.
Please send resumes and letters of interest to Billie Wells. B.wells@nextstepus.org

Can Anyone Build a Home in One Week? It Depends.

Susan Bond

By Susan Bond

 

 

 

 

 

This week’s blog post takes a fun look at manufactured housing in media:

One Week is a 1920 silent film by Buster Keaton. Keaton was a vaudeville actor turned silent film star and comic genius. It was the first film released by Keaton on his own without Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

A still shot of One Week.

A still shot of One Week.

The 1920s saw the peak of many technologies, including film and housing. At this time, prefabricated homes had reached a high point and were sold through Sears, Roebuck and Co. Ford’s innovation process for factory assembly lines helped make prefabricated housing more efficient, and the model is still used today.

One Week was a parody inspired by the industrial documentary Homemade by the Ford Motor Co., which explained what a prefabricated house was and how a buyer can assemble the home themselves with instructions.

One Week tells the story of a young couple coming home from their wedding to build their own DIY prefab house in, you guessed, one week’s time. A rival tries to thwart their marital bliss by renumbering the crates and altering the homebuilding instructions. As a result of this jealousy, and the amateur carpentry skills of the groom, the prefabricated home suffers from serious engineering blunders.

Watch “One Week” starring Buster Keaton.