Storytellers and Whistleblowers Wanted! The Mobile and Manufactured Home Storytelling Project Truth Tellers Myth Busters Behind the Scenes Revelations Encouraged. ManufacturedHomeLivingNews.com.
Average Sales Prices for New HUD Code Manufactured Homes (errantly called ‘Mobile Homes’), Manufactured Housing Production, Shipment by State, National Totals per Census Bureau, HUD, MHARR, data-MHLivingNews Photo Collage.
Definitions and terminology for factory-built housing are not interchangable. Mobile home, manufactured home, modular housing, and trailer house are all distinctive terms with legal meanings.
Manufactured Home Living News Infographic 12.2022 MHLivingNews Compare Manufactured Housing to Conventional On Site Stick Built Housing Facts Figures Quotes Photos.
For facts in the context of the illustrations and two video interviews, see https://www.manufacturedhomelivingnews.com/saving-time-money-hassles-how-can-you-buy-a-manufactured-home-without-encountering-problems-pissed-consumer-video-interview-of-l-a-tony-
Whistleblowers, Storytelling Volunteers Who Own or Are Buying a Manufactured Home Invited New Manufactured Home Living News (MHLivingNews.com) Announced Project
WINTER HAVEN, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES, January 13, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ — Mobile and Manufactured Home Living News (MHLivingNews.com) posted an invitation for “Storytellers” and whistleblowers who want to share their experiences in a voluntary capacity. That notice was posted on 01.07.2023 at 6:52 pm. It opened with this ‘true’ story-style explanation.
“On Sunday, April 14, 2019, 4:48 PM an email was sent by Robert “Bob” Van Cleef to Mobile and Manufactured Home Living News (MHLivingNews.com). It said in part the following: “I just discovered your site while looking for responses to John Oliver’s report. I really like what I see and thank you for your reporting. One suggestion: Please include a publication date with each article. I was reading some back articles and couldn’t get a clear indication of “when” they were written.”
It would be simple to plead “guilty as charged” to that assertion by Bob to dozens upon dozens of the reports here on MHLivingNews.com. That’s not an accident, it is frankly intentional because many of the reports are intended to be ‘timeless’ insights into mobile and manufactured home living. An article published a five or ten years ago may be as relevant now as then. While prices, for example, obviously change, the rate of savings in buying a manufactured home vs. buying a conventional ‘site built’ house are much the same.”
In time, local news media picked up on Van Cleef’s experiences and did a video interview with him. Articles by Van Cleef drew tens of thousands of readers, and have continued to attract interest years after they were written.
Certainly numbers of others have shared their experiences in mobile home and manufactured home living. The video further below provides clips of examples of that statement. Curious minds want to know. The first-hand experiences in manufactured home living matter.
While most people are happy with their home, that doesn’t mean that everyone is happy with some signficant issue. For instance, in Van Cleef’s case, he repeatedly said that he and his wife loved their home. It was newer and nicer than the conventional house they sold, per the Van Cleefs. But they had concerns over the business practices of the community operator that they found their dream home in. So, topics related to serious issues were part of Bob’s storytelling.
The announcement stated that: “Various forms of manufactured or factory-built housing can be found in continents around the globe. But the mobile home origins of modern manufactured housing were popularized as a uniquely American industry. It dates back to the travel trailer era and is a reminder that there are similarities as well as differences between travel trailers and the ‘trailer houses’ of yesteryear. It would be easy to dive into that history, but let’s do that via the links below and press onto the theme of this article.
It would be a fair statement to say that Van Cleef committed himself to become a volunteer student of this author and the platforms produced by the parent company to MHLivingNews and MHProNews. Van Cleef’s interest, it would be fair to say, were several. As a manufactured home resident and owner himself, he was thrilled with the value proposition, which he would routinely express in his own words. But Bob was also troubled by “predatory” or “vulture” type personalities that had moved into the manufactured housing industry in apparently ever-greater numbers.
Van Cleef became a volunteer advocate for the manufactured home land-lease community he and his wife lived in. He would follow the news, engage with public officials, wrote letters, and would from time to time write articles. Bob, IMHO, was a good student. He became quite adept at understanding not only the surface issues but what was occurring behind the curtain too.
What made Bob ‘a good student’ of the manufactured home industry – its potential, good, and the apparent woes – is his willingness to learn. We might initially see some issue in different ways. But he was open to seeing something differently too. In short, he was coachable on most everything. It would be fair to say that he became more than an 80 percent friend, even though we had sometimes sharp disagreements on certain topics that did not directly relate to manufactured housing.
We know from calls and messages from readers that people yearn to tell their story.”
The balance of the videos, linked articles by Bob Van Cleef, and the experiences of others in mobile home and manufactured home living are found at this link here.
MHLivingNews.com Reader Input
Mike Kapic, an AMAC.us volunteer and the author of the Hunt for Liberty, shared the following three thought-provoking quotable quotes with MHLivingNews which may apply to these surprising insights.
> “You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of reality.” – Ayn Rand
> “If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights.” – Ayn Rand
> “No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.” – Ayn Rand
Where is Manufactured Home Pride?
There is no doubt that millions of people LOVE their mobile or manufactured homes. That became obvious from our travels from border-to-border and coast-to-coast talking to people who own, live in, and are otherwise involved in the manufactured housing profession. While there are several froms of ‘pride’ movements, where is the manufactured home pride movement?
The case can be made that the foundation for that movement is found on MHLivingNews.
From a Recent MHLivingNews EIN Press Release
The interesting and timely Bloomberg-WaPo op-ed provided several consequential realities for Americans, mainstream media, and political leaders to consider. Among them is the notion that conventional housing can’t keep up with the demand for millions of more housing units. Nor can conventional housing builders achieve the price points that manufactured homes or modular housing can.
Bloomberg’s op-ed, per the MHProNews analysis, correctly identifies zoning barriers as a hurdle that limits manufactured housing. A Manufactured Home Living News report (MHLivingNews) spotlighted HUD researchers who stated in 2021 that zoning barriers and NIMBYism are an issue that politicians from both major parties have been talking about for over 50 years.
Mark Weiss, J.D., President and CEO of the Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform (MHARR) told MHProNews the following. “With respect to zoning discrimination Congress, in the 2000 reform law (i.e.: the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act of 2000) strengthened and enhanced federal preemption in order to allow for invalidation of state or local “requirements,” such as discriminatory zoning mandates, that have the effect of excluding mainstream manufactured homes.
Democratic lawmakers involved in the enactment of the MHIA and its “enhanced preemption” clause said the following in a letter to HUD.
“More specifically, these combined changes have given HUD the legal authority to preempt local requirements or restrictions which discriminate against the siting of manufactured homes (compared to other single family housing) simply because they are HUD-code homes. We ask that HUD use this authority to develop a Policy Statement or regulation to address this issue, and we offer to work with you, to ensure that it comports with Congressional intent.” This language from the MHIA is commonly referred to by informed manufactured housing professionals as “enhanced preemption.”
“Enhanced preemption” over local zoning barriers was an important part of the intention of Congress in enacting the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act (MHIA), as the quotation above reflects.
To the points made by Bloomberg in their pro-manufactured housing op-ed, according to the Urban Institute report on manufactured housing examined in a report linked further below, “As of January 2022, the average sales price had increased to $122,500, reflecting strong consumer demand, high inflation, and continued labor shortages. In comparison, the average price of new site-built homes in 2021, excluding land, was $365,900.12.”
LendingTree and other sources have made it plain that modern manufactured housing appreciates at a similar rate as conventional housing, and in some states, went up in value more than conventional ‘site built’ or ‘stick built’ single family housing.
The new MHProNews report linked below also includes a recap of the dozens of the top stories reported in the manufactured housing industry in 2022.
In a related article, MHProNews recently published a report that examined the following from the Pew Charitable Trusts remarks provided to MHProNews.
“Manufactured homes are an important source of housing, and more manufactured homes are part of the solution to America’s housing shortage.” So said Rachel Siegel, senior officer with the Pew Charitable Trusts research on modern manufactured homes.
The new and exclusive remarks by Siegel are related to issues that have recently covered by MHLivingNews and/or MHProNews, with excerpts quoted herein.
Federal Reserve research/authors James A. “Jim” Schmitz Jr. and David Fettig echoed Pew’s praise of factory built manufactured homes. Comparing them to ‘site built’ housing, the research duo wrote that conventional house building is “often called stick-built construction, a highly labor-intensive method of making houses. There is, of course, a much more efficient way to produce housing, a low-cost substitute: factory production of homes.” They elaborate by going into a history that dates back to the 1930s, but which today offers conventional home features for a much lower cost.
A common-sense question asked by some about manufactured homes is some variant of the following. If manufactured homes are such a good value, why aren’t more of them being sold? That’s a fair and intelligent inquiry. There are several possible replies that MHLivingNews has explored based on facts, evidence, and third-party research. For instance. Schmitz and Fettig wrote the following.
“There was a brief period, in fact, when US factory production [of homes] flourished. Factory production of homes soared during the 1960s, reaching 60 percent of single-family production by early 1970, threatening the very existence of traditional builders, especially those constructing smaller houses purchased by lower-income Americans.
In response, monopolies of stick-builders, including the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), developed extensive weapons to sabotage and harm factory producers of houses. NAHB and HUD strangled the production of factory homes. Production collapsed in the 1970s.”
Per ProMarkets, “Jim Schmitz is an economist who has been studying monopoly since the early 1980s. He has been a member of the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis since 1992.” The title of their article on ProMarkets is: “Monopolies: Silent Spreaders of Poverty and Economic Inequality.”
About MHLivingNews
Since 2012, Manufactured Home Living News (ManufacturedHomeLivingNews.com or MHLivingNews.com) has published the expert commentary, third party legal and other research, facts checks, analysis and home buyer shopping tips that the public craves. Millions of pageviews occur at MHLivingNews.
Per Webalizer data on 19-Dec-2022 06:15 CST indicates that the typical visitor of MHLivingNews engages with some 7.46 pages viewed per visit. Visitors have logged millions of page views annually on MHLivingNews.
Some recent reports on MHLivingNews include the following topics.
About MHProNews
MHProNews is the manufactured home industry’s largest, most popular, and highest known engagement by manufactured housing industry professionals. Well over 13 million pageviews has been reported by Webalizer on the largest the baker’s dozen cPanels on MHProNews in 2022. Per that same source, there is an average of some 10.75 pageviews per visitor to MHProNews, a rate several times greater than a number of mainstream media reports according to published online metrics.
Tag lines:
> “Industry News, Tips, and Views Pros Can Use”©.
> “Innovation, Information, Inspiration for Industry Professionals” ©.
> “Intelligence for your MHLife” ©.
> “We Provide, You Decide” © is a reference to comparing and contrasting the published statements of various trade groups.
MHProNews explores remarks or reports by the Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform (MHARR), the Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI), the Texas Manufactured Housing Association (TMHA), the Florida Manufactured Housing Association (FMHA), the Modular Home Builders Association (MHBA), the National Association of Realtors (NAR), the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), the Job Creators Network (JCN), Texas Real Estate Research Center, and others. Additionally, typically 5 times weekly, is a left-right mainstream media recap from CNN Business and Newsmax which provides headline news balance on MHProNews.
The critically acclaimed publication is the first and still only known manufactured home industry Daily Business News on MHProNews market report.
Manufactured Home Communities (MHC) Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), manufactured home industry connected stocks, along with a snapshot of the broader equities, and headline news that span the left-right media divide are provided. Unique looks at what is often mistakenly called “mobile home park investing” are also explored.
Expert insights unpack quarterly and other reports by publicly traded firms such as Skyline Champion (SKY), Cavco Industries (CVCO), Nobility Homes (NOBH), Legacy Housing (LEGH), Deer Valley Homebuilders, Sun Communities (SUI), Equity Lifestyle Properties (ELS), UMH Properties (UMH), Flagship Communities, The Carlyle Group, Blackstone, BlackRock, and others.
Recent reports on MHProNews include the following.
The later explores increasing contacts for expert and expert witness services as attorneys and law firms are probing the controversies in the manufactured home industry.
About MHProNews/MHLivingNews Co-Founder L. A. “Tony” Kovach
Kovach is one of the most vocal and public advocates for the full implementation of the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act of 2000 and its “enhanced preemption” provision that could be used to overcome local zoning barriers. Kovach is also an advocate for more competitive federal lending, in compliance with Congressional mandates, as the linked statement at the end of this press release demonstrates. Kovach believes that implementing existing federal laws that are favorable to manufactured housing is one of the fastest ways to resolve the affordable housing crisis.
Beyond thousands of articles on MHProNews/MHLivingNews, co-founder L. A. “Tony” Kovach has been published or cited by numbers of others. Examples include the Associated Press (AP), Chicago Sun Times, The Hill, PissedConsumer, LawnStarter, WND.com, Moxie Magazine, The Florida Times Union, Sarasota Herald Tribune, Gainesville Sun, WorldNetDaily.com, WND.com, Lakeland Ledger, Baptist Global News, Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), Manufactured Home Merchandiser Magazine, Automated Builder, the National Association of Realtors, the Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI), the Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform (MHARR), public officials including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), and dozens of others.
Kovach is a multiple award winning history buff whose recognitions and accomplishments include the prestigious Lottinville Award in History from the University of Oklahoma (O.U.).
Kovach’s statement to the FHFA on obstacles limiting the manufactured home industry and possible solutions which was published on their website at this link here.
https://www.fhfa.gov/Media/Documents/Kovach-statement.pdf
L. A. “Tony” Kovach
MHLivingNews.com
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