Harger: Congress just cut thousands of dollars off the only home a lot of Americans can afford

You don’t see much bipartisan work in Congress anymore. So when the Senate votes 85-5, and the House votes 358-32 on the same housing bill, something real is going on.

What’s going on is that lawmakers in both parties have figured out affordable housing is sinking them with a big part of the country. Voters in red districts and blue districts are asking the same question at the same kitchen tables: How is anyone supposed to afford a home? And for once, the people they sent to the other Washington decided they wanted solutions more than they wanted tribal finger-pointing.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law on July 11. The president declined to sign it, and it became law anyway. It’s the law of the land.

It’s not a perfect law by any stretch, and I don’t think prices are going to come crashing down. Most of its 56 provisions are small. Pilot programs. Loan tweaks. Grants. But tucked inside is a provision that may actually help around here. Maybe not in Seattle, though I wouldn’t rule that out. In the suburbs. In Kent, in Auburn, in the communities that are growing and thriving and running out of anything a working family can buy.

I know a thing or two about living in a mobile home

I say this next part fully aware of the stigma and the class perceptions that come with it. You may want to check yourself for thinking it.

After my parents split, both of them lived in manufactured homes at different points over the decades that followed. My dad spent about 15 years in a double-wide. My mom lived in a trailer in Everett for a while after she retired. When my wife and I first got married, we rented a trailer on some property in Federal Way for about a year.

When my grandparents, who owned a home in Wedgwood, hit retirement, they found they couldn’t keep up with the cost of owning a traditional single-family home in Seattle. They moved to the Halcyon Mobile Home Park in North Seattle. It’s one of the last trailer parks in the city, and one of the last truly affordable places to live here.

I’ve eaten dinner in these homes. I’ve slept in them. I’ve paid rent on one. They kept the people I love housed, in the city and the suburbs they’d built their lives in, when nothing else would have.

The steel frame under every manufactured home is there because a 1974 law requires it

Under every manufactured home built in America since the 1970s, there’s a steel chassis. Welded on at the factory, required by federal law. It gets the house to your lot exactly once. Then it sits there. Forever. Rusting under your living room like a trailer hitch nobody’s allowed to cut off.

The new law scraps that rule.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute said the chassis adds several thousand dollars to every unit. Researchers at Pew figured dropping it could cut the price of a manufactured home by as much as 9%.

The bigger change is what these homes can become without it. Two stories. Real foundations. Rooflines and porches and floor plans that look like every other house on the block. Census data puts factory-built homes at roughly $80 a square foot against about $169 for site-built. Half price, before you buy the dirt.

When the house looks like a house, maybe the stigma fades

For 50 years, the law treated these homes like vehicles, so plenty of towns zoned them like vehicles. Parked them at the edge of the map and kept them out of the neighborhoods. The chassis was a big part of why.

Take away the steel, set the house on a real foundation, and a factory-built home is just a house that showed up on a truck. Like your refrigerator did. And your lumber, for that matter.

Which raises a question for our cities and suburbs: if a manufactured home can sit on a foundation and look like its neighbors, maybe it’s time to look at the zoning that keeps them out of whole neighborhoods. That’s a local decision, and I hope lawmakers consider it. But the federal excuse for treating these homes as second-class just got repealed.

The stigma took 50 years to bolt on. It won’t come off overnight. But families who want a manufactured home will soon have options that weren’t available before, and that’s how it starts to change.

Manufactured homes aren’t for everyone, and the skeptics have real points

Factory-built homes have a rough history with resale value. The financing often costs more than a conventional mortgage. And around here, the house was never the expensive part. The median home in King County runs about $837,000, and no factory in the world can ship you cheaper land.

Fair. All of it.

But there’s no easy fix for the housing crisis we’re in. What Congress did instead is the unglamorous thing: it found a 50-year-old rule that was quietly adding thousands of dollars to the cheapest homes in America, and it repealed it. Both parties. Overwhelming votes. No press-release miracle, just one real barrier gone.

I applaud them for thinking it through. And I’ll say it plainly: a manufactured home kept three generations of my family housed for periods of time in the Seattle area. If this law means the next family that needs one pays less for it, and feels less like they have to explain it to anyone, that’s a win.

Nobody’s building a manufactured home in Medina. But a young couple in Marysville, a retired teacher in Centralia, a family in your neighborhood that’s been renting for a decade because every house on the market starts with a seven? This might be for them.

It’s a start. And around here, a start is more than we’ve had.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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