Stay Informed!

By Lauren Williams on 07/28/2011 @ 04:30 PM

Tags: Events, Housing and Homeownership

In May, we brought together over 80 federal agency staff, nonprofit leaders and other allies to discuss Manufactured Housing and the Future of Affordable Housing at our Bringing it All Home event. This event exceeded all our expectations for numbers of participants, quality of presentations and discussions, and concrete ways to move our agenda to transform the manufactured housing marketplace forward.

Bringing it All Home raised the visibility of our nonprofit partners’ use of manufactured housing in scalable strategies that promote long-term economic security for low- and moderate-income individuals and how federal affordable housing programs can further these efforts. Each session showcased a different partner and was structured so that high-level federal agency officials on the panel could respond to their strategies. Through these conversations, we raised awareness among key policymakers on the importance of fully integrating manufactured housing into the federal response to affordable housing.

As promised, the I’M HOME team has researched and followed up on new ideas and is exploring innovative new opportunities for partnership that were suggested at this convening. We have catalogued the key takeaways from this event in two documents:

The Convening Report provides a quick summary of the event followed by key takeaways from the convening and strategies that will guide the I'M HOME network and nonprofit partners as we move forward.

Some key strategies include:

• Setting priorities to frame a shared comprehensive policy, program and financing agenda
• Cultivating champions at every level of government
• Working from the state and local levels up and from the national level down
• Strengthening existing partnerships and building new ones
• Conducting a targeted, consistent communications and public relations campaign
• Continuing to tell the stories of manufactured homeowners

The Action Agenda for Federal Agencies and Other Partners outlines challenges facing the integration of manufactured housing into federal affordable housing strategies and offers several potential policy changes that could address those challenges, many of which were discussed at Bringing it All Home. The four challenges include:

1. Regulatory barriers prevent affordable housing developers from acquiring the federal support necessary to use manufactured housing for new and replacement development.
2. Less favorable financing terms than site-built homes prevent manufactured homeowners from building wealth.
3. Short term lease arrangements and sometimes arbitrary rules and regulations set by community owners limit the security of tenure of manufactured homeowners in land-lease communities.
4. Two million existing manufactured homes were built before the 1976 HUD Code, many of which are energy inefficient, unsafe and unhealthy for their residents.

Other archived convening materials, including the agenda, speaker biographies and PowerPoint presentations can be downloaded here.

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