It has always amazed me that government housing agencies seem to look to the newest and untested ways to attack the problem of affordable housing instead of looking at what has been in place and successful for decades and totally scalable.
Ben Roche, sales director for Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg, OR says he appreciated that Gov. Tina Kotek toured the Port of Portland’s Terminal 2 in January to assess the speed and effectiveness of Hacienda’s Mass Casitas modular housing pilot.
He says the project was a good way of bringing attention to prefabricated homes, which have a significant part to play in solving Oregon’s housing shortage, but expressed concern that existing manufactured housing builders in Oregon have been overlooked by the state’s plan to increase Oregon’s housing supply.
“While I can appreciate the governor’s sentiment and bringing awareness to those companies, I find it odd that when one out of 10 new homes built are manufactured homes, her Housing Council completely ignored a segment of housing that’s existed in Oregon for decades,” Roche says.
Roche says three members of the Oregon Manufactured Housing Association, an industry group representing Oregon’s five manufactured housing companies, applied to be part of the governor’s Housing Production Advisory Council, which began accepting applications for membership in February. But none were selected, he says.
Oregon already has five manufactured housing shops in operation. Roche says that when it comes to meeting the governor’s ambitious housing goal of producing 36,000 new homes annually.
“Whether it’s modular or manufactured, most production builders have an assembly line with an infrastructure. They have tooling on site CNC machines, a cabinet shop on site, you know, framing and fixtures for framing squarely walls and tables,” Roche says. “We have the ability to scale up. It’s much easier to take our facilities that build 600 homes a year and turn that into 700 or 800 homes a year than it is for a startup that’s building 10 homes a year and get them to get to 20.”
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Gary Fleisher, the Modcoach
