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HUD Awards Slight AffordableManufactured Housing The Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform(MHARR) reports that, ac- cording to aMay 21, 2012 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) news release (copy attached), "three affordable hous- ing developments" have been selected as "recip- ients of the coveted HUD Secretary's Housing and Community Design Award," recognizing "excellence in residential housing design." The HUD news release identifies the award winners are a "mixed-use Single Room Occupancy" apartment building (for "Excellence in Afford- able Housing Design"), a homeless shelter (for "Creating Community Connections") and a downtown Boston public library (for "Commu- nity-Informed Design"). All three projects were financed either entirely with public funds or were heavily subsidized through grants and tax incentives offered by HUD and other govern- ment agencies, including urban renewal subsi- dies,HUD RecoveryAct funds and low-income housing tax credits. With all due respect to the HUD Secretary, MHARR maintains that public libraries and homeless shelters are not "affordable housing de- velopments" in any meaningful sense of the term. By contrast, modern manufactured housing communities are. These communities, offering quality, modern manufactured homes, amenities and an affordable lifestyle that is within the means of Americans at every rung on the economic ladder, provide inherently affordable, non-subsidized home ownership for millions of real-world families. Yet, the key role played by manufactured housing is at best ignored by the Department, where it languishes in second-class status and, at worst, is actively threatened by arbitrary, needless and needlessly costly overreg- ulation from within the HUD manufactured housing program. Notwithstanding outdated design restrictions, a needless and needlessly costly expansion of production regulation, a parade of arbitrary "in- terpretations" of the federal standards and rules by HUD regulators that unnecessarily stifle the industry on an ongoing basis, and groundless re- strictions on the availability of both public and private consumer financing, today's modern manufactured homes still offer innovative, tech- nologically advanced designs that provide mil- lions of American consumers with high-quality, truly affordable home ownership at a fraction of the cost of other types of housing (e.g., $35.73 per square foot for the industry's most affordable homes according to 2010 U.S Census Bureau data, as contrasted with an average structural cost of $84.07 per square foot for site-built homes, exclusive of land) without further bur- dening already hard-pressed taxpayers. 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