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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
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December 2020 #12257 Page #96
Going Modular Can’t Fix Affordable Housing Crisis By Gary Fleisher sually I am the first person in line shouting the benefits of modular construction to help the affordable housing market, but not this time.
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That’s because it doesn’t matter how you approach the affordable housing market if there isn’t enough factory capacity to keep ahead of the need, it simply comes down to the law of Supply and Demand. If you want housing to be affordable, you need to build more of it. And when housing demand increases because of economic growth, prices surge upward unless supply can keep pace. It isn’t the demand’s fault if supply lags. Even if every modular factory in the world began building affordable housing for the US, they couldn’t meet our present demand. This is where the heavy foot of Federal, State, and local governments enter the picture. Between over-regulating the affordable housing market, especially if it is modular construction, the constraints to build more housing becomes very restrictive. Local government continues to look to increase restrictions in zoning at the same time HUD Secretary Ben Carson is fighting to open all residential zoning to manufactured housing. Then you have very powerful people within every single community in the US that use that power to stop growth. State and local governing bodies are also faced with rising infrastructure costs if they want to have affordable housing projects and also the cost of actually building them. COVID-19 has eaten away most of the money that was earmarked earlier in the year for those projects. There is also the rising costs associated with meeting tougher building codes that have been proven to add over 25% to the cost of new housing. Tighter air infiltration regulations, more energy saving devices, and even the cost of adding sprinkler systems plus the enormous amount of impact fees for public utilities, additional schools, and conservation efforts hurts affordable housing. Continued next page
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