Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/231807
Danny Ghorba MHARR President & CEO Gives Exc By Jim Visser, Publisher Q1. Thank you for accepting our invitation for an interview and answering several questions about the industry. To start, given your four-and-a-half decades of experience in the manufactured housing industry, what has changed most between the early years and now? A. Of course there have been many changes, but the most notable – and the most significant -- would have to be the tremendous improvement in the homes themselves, along with their placement and the degree of consumer protection and satisfaction they provide. Q2. Can you elaborate? A. Yes. Very simply, the safety, quality and sophistication of the homes themselves and the satisfaction level of manufactured homeowners with their homes have improved remarkably since the inception of the federal program in 1976. And that progress was reinforced by the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act of 2000, which strengthened the essential pillars of the program – uniform, performance-based standards, uniform enforcement and federal preemption – that continue to drive forward the development and progress of manufactured homes as the highest-quality and most affordable source of homeownership available today for American families. Q3. Major changes in an industry are usually not accidental. What, in your view, is responsible for such a major change? A. That's an important observation. Actually, I believe that there are both evolutionary and revolutionary aspects to this, which combined, have enabled industry manufacturers to do what they do best -- provide American consumers with all of the benefits of homeownership, at the most affordable prices possible. Q4. Can you explain how each of these two factors contributed to achieving such major change? A. Certainly, change has been evolutionary, based on ever-improving and advancing technology and products, as well as demand by consumers for affordable homes that are better and more sophisticated than the industry's "trailers" of yesteryear. Change for the industry has also been "revolutionary," with the 1985 formation of MHARR (then the Association for Regulatory Reform, or "ARR"), that broke up the old dysfunctional collective system of manufacturers' national representation that prevailed in the past -- which is and always has been dominated and controlled by the largest manufacturer at any given time -- and led ultimately to the landmark 2000 reform law that transformed our homes to legitimate, affordable housing. Q5. How else did this latter factor help? A. As a comprehensively regulated industry at the federal level, we cannot afford to simply "go along to get along" with regulators in the nation's capital. Furthermore, nothing is ever just "given" to our industry in Washington, D.C. The industry has to fight for every inch of its gains in order to bring about fair and reasonable regulation. MHARR has taken up this challenge by working to level the playing field, by giving a voice to smaller independent businesses and working to reign in the unnecessary, unreasonable and needlessly costly over-regulation of the pre-2000 reform law era, with the resulting savings being passed-on to consumers. The old system and representation would have never allowed this to happen. JANUARY 2014 10 THE JOURNAL Q6. Is HUD now fully implementing the 2000 law? A. No, not quite. But there have been improvements and things are much better than before the 2000 reform law. HUD, though, continues to drag its feet and resist full and proper implementation of the three main centerpiece reforms of that law, namely, an appointed non-career program administrator, an independent and fully functional Manufactured Housing Consensus Committee (MHCC) and the enhanced federal preemption for the industry and consumers. Q7. How do they get away with this, when the 2000 Act is the "law of the land" for this industry and its homebuyers? A. The short answer is industry complacency, combined with continuing remnants and holdovers of the old structure and system that give HUD regulators a pass with their continuing "go along to get along" mentality. But, MHARR keeps pressing these issues, and soon, with a renewed plan of action, will expand and intensify its efforts on all these matters even further. Q8. How so? A. To start, MHARR sought the congressional hearings at which these