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For Immediate Release: July 25, 2006

REP. FRANK FLOOR STATEMENT ON FHA MANUFACTURED HOUSING LOAN MODERNIZATION ACT OF 2006

(House of Representatives - July 25, 2006)

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   Mr. Speaker, we have a national goal of increasing homeownership. Homeownership is very important. I always want to make it clear to people that while homeownership is very important, it should not be considered all of our goal in the housing area. A large number of people, for economic reasons and other reasons, will be renters. It is a good thing if we can help people become homeowners, but we should not neglect the legitimate interests of renters.

   In this case, however, we are talking not about renters, we will deal with them in some later parts of our program today, we are dealing here with extending the ability to own homes to people who would economically not otherwise be able to make it.

   We have gotten to a pretty high percentage of homeownership. But if you look at the economics of land, of zoning, of building, if you look at what people earn, if we do not make manufactured housing more easily available to people, we will not be able to break out of the current percentage levels of homeownership. That is, significantly extending homeownership so we get to maybe an 80 percent range or so requires us to make full use of manufactured housing.

   One of the things I am pleased about, when I first came here there was a kind of a war going on, or at least a battle between people of conventional homes, stick-built homes, as they are called, and manufactured housing. I think it is now clear that the demand for housing is such and the economic range is such that these are not competitive entities. There is room for more of the stick-built housing, of the site-built housing; there is room for more of the manufactured housing. We need to give a full range of choices for people.

   It is also clear that manufactured housing hits a price range that we have to make available if we are going to extend homeownership.

   Now, what we found was, as many of us began to push for this a few years ago, we were pushing, I pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to do more in manufacturing housing. The gentleman from Ohio is nodding, because he and I have worked together on this. We intend to continue.

    Part of our effort with regard to the GSE legislation is to push Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to do more in manufactured housing. We have worked harder to make sure that manufactured housing is safer. And this goes back to the former chairman of the committee, then called the Banking Committee, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gonzalez) who helped to make sure that we had legislation that made manufactured housing safer, particularly in those areas where there are hurricanes. We have done that.

   And then we found that one of our own entities, the Federal Housing Administration, was not as responsive to the manufactured housing issues as they should be. So this bill does that. Obviously, manufactured housing is somewhat different than other forms of housing. The problem is, of course, our laws, our loan procedures, our property laws, our title laws were all drawn up with the model of a site-built home on a piece of land owned by that homeowner.

   You need more flexibility when you are dealing with manufactured housing. This provides it. So I am very pleased to join in this bipartisanship effort with my colleagues on the committee to put forward a bill that will be a substantial step forward in making housing available.

   I thank the gentleman from Ohio, the chairman of the subcommittee, and the gentleman from Ohio who is the main author of this bill for giving us all a chance to work together on this.