Tony Flanders walked through the front door of the home and pointed at the living room window to the left.
He explained that a thin coating on the glass helps make homes more energy efficient and that the double-wide show model is better protected from cold than base versions.
The Washington Post has a newsletter for important and interesting stories.
Flanders, a housing consultant at the company, was bundled in a dark-blue parka to survive the cold in December.
The double-wide couldn't be sold in Vermont without a federal exemption because it doesn't meet state housing requirements. The federal requirements that govern the mobile homes in which 22 million Americans live haven't changed in nearly 30 years.
The Biden administration wants to update energy-efficiency standards for manufactured homes that it says will save mobile- home owners thousands of dollars and prevent millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions from entering the atmosphere in the coming decades. The new standards due in May have sparked a debate about costs, equity and the future of manufactured housing.
The changes that the Biden administration has put forward include insulation and windows, as well as heating and cooling systems.
The Energy Department's plan goes too far according to some. Lesli Gooch is the CEO of the manufactured housing institute. We don't think this proposal will have the desired effect. It's going to have a negative impact on the supply of manufactured housing.
Mark Weiss, president of the Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform, said that the primary metric was the upfront cost of the home. The new requirements are going to make them more expensive.
Some argue that energy savings and better quality homes with higher resale values would cover any extra costs. They want the Energy Department to set even tighter standards.
There are a lot of low-income people in these homes and the impact on them is the right question, according to the director of federal policy at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. Putting them in homes that they won't be able to afford for the next few decades isn't the solution to the problem.
Many advocates have not been waiting for fixes. Weatherization initiatives, zero-energy modular homes, grant programs and improved mortgage products are just some of the ways they are helping residents lower their utility costs and combat climate change.
- -
A manufactured house is built in a factory, hitched to a truck and shipped all over the country. Traveling trailers gained popularity in the early 1900s. By the mid-century, they were larger, more permanent and had indoor toilets. 100,000 manufactured homes have been purchased by Americans in the last few years.
Because it's an interstate business, manufactured housing has been regulated. The code for manufactured housing went into effect two years after Congress gave the Department of Housing and Urban Development that authority. The last significant update to the code took place in 1994.
The homes are relatively small and use less energy. Almost all of the homes Flanders sells are Energy Star certified, according to the Systems Building Research Alliance, a nonprofit research organization that supports the factory-built housing industry. Some people go beyond Energy Star.
The local code for site-built homes doesn't always apply to top-of-the-line models. In other measures of efficiency, manufactured houses lag behind.
In the most recent residential energy consumption survey, mobile home residents were more likely than single- family home residents to report having too many drafts in the winter. Mobile homes consume 35 percent more energy than detached single- family homes.
The HUD standards have been improved by Congress for more than a decade. The law gave the DOE until 2011 to update efficiency requirements for manufactured houses. But that never happened. The process started but did not finish in time, and the proposal was withdrawn by the Trump administration.
The Trump administration was sued by the Sierra Club. The court ordered the DOE to finalize a rule by May 16, 2022, and it released a proposed rule last summer, along with updated data in the fall and a draft environmental impact statement this January.
The DOE proposal has a two-tiered strategy in which manufactured houses with a sales price of under $63,000 are subject to less stringent requirements. The department designed Tier 1 so that energy-efficiency improvements don't raise the cost of a home by more than $750. Depending on the size of the home, Tier 2 would increase the price by between $3,900 and $5,300.
In 3.5 to 11 years, the department calculates, energy savings would offset the costs. The cumulatively avoided 86.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions is equal to the annual operations of 22 coal-fired power plants.
The government's latest environmental impact statement is subject to public comments until February 28.
I don't like Tier 1. "I think it's a real equity issue, I think it's a real problem," said the founder of Next Step Network. The homes that are cheaper are shipped to the poverty regions.
Emanuel Levy is the executive director of the Systems Building Research Alliance. He said that the miles per gallon were being raised to 100. The affordable buyers are being cut from the market.
How manufactured homes are financed is part of the issue.
The residents of the park buy their houses but lease the land. Home buyers can be pushed into chattel loans if leased land isn't eligible for traditional mortgages. Borrowing for home improvements such as energy-efficiency upgrades is more expensive because of higher interest rates and shorter terms.
The DOE estimated that the cost increase of its proposed changes would result in around 1,500 fewer homes being shipped each year. That's not something that Flanders is worried about.
He said that regulation could push manufacturers to go even further with their offerings, as his customers are already choosing whatever efficiency upgrades are available.
The code could be updated to help weed out lower-efficiency manufactured homes. Flanders doesn't sell those models because they can lead to service calls and unhappy customers, but he still has to compete against them.
There are still unscrupulous dealers. He said that they were trying to get the houses pumped out and make some money. We are not on a level playing field.
- -
Peter Schneider is a senior consultant with the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, a nonprofit that designs and administers decarbonization and energy-efficiency programs around North America. He started trying to make manufactured housing more efficient after the storm. There were 437 manufactured houses that required complete demolition.
Schneider wanted to find replacement homes that met local building and efficiency standards. Schneider tried companies in New York, Pennsylvania and as far away as Indiana. He didn't have any luck.
The Parks of the Future Program in New York was in a similar situation. Dina Levy, senior vice president at the New York State division of homes and community renewal, said they had trouble finding anyone who could make energy efficient manufactured homes.
Schneider said that the industry is unwilling to build anything beyond what they're required to build. They've been stuck building homes that don't meet a standard that was developed 30 years ago.
Schneider, Levy and others have been finding ways around the roadblock. He said that they were forced to be creative.
Schneider suggested an energy-efficiency audit for people living in a manufactured home. An audit can help homeowners identify areas for improvement, such as installing better air-sealing and insulation, or doing more regular heating system maintenance.
The DOE estimates that weatherization assistance programs can save homeowners money. There are often subsidies for those who are income- qualified.
Schneider is trying to develop a program for retrofitting new Energy Star-certified manufactured homes to meet local code, and said that an energy audit makes sense for those in newer manufactured homes. A new modular mobile home is a good choice for manufactured- home shoppers.
Both modular and manufactured homes are built in the same way. According to an article on the website of a factory-built home builder, manufactured and modular homes don't appear that different from one another. The codes they are built to are the main difference between manufactured and modular homes.
Modular homes are generally more energy efficient because they meet local codes. Schneider turned to a modular- home company for help when he couldn't find a company that would meet Vermont code. "VerMods" are what they are called. They are designed to create as much energy as they use with 10-inch thick walls, triple-pane windows and roof-mounted solar panels. Around the state, there are a couple hundred of them.
"This is where we need to go in terms of decarbonization," said Schneider, standing outside a VerMod park in Vermont. There are no fossil fuel connections on site.
Levy's program is going modular in New York. Purchases of manufactured or modular homes can be eligible for traditional financing, even on leased land, thanks to the State of New York Mortgage Agency. The purchase limit is raised for Energy Star model homes.
It can be more expensive upfront. VerMods can be more expensive than the Energy Star manufactured homes that Flanders sells. Grants and other incentives help subsidize the difference. Schneider hopes that paying less in utilities will allow people to put more into mortgages that build equity.
VEIC calculated that the owners of an Energy Star manufactured home in Vermont would pay about $747 a month in housing costs. A zero-energy modular owner would pay around $700 a month, but only $25 of that would be utilities.
Anne said she doesn't get an energy bill. "We don't have an electricity bill until around January or February," said Martell. She says she pays about $500 a month toward the mortgage and $300 a year in utilities. It's great.
Schneider believes that the VerMods can help insulate their owners from future increases in energy prices. He said that the last people who need to be affected by the doubling of energy prices are the disadvantaged communities or the more vulnerable homeowners.
Some people are not happy with their VerMod. Some customers left VerMods after the homes proved less affordable than expected. He's in favor of the modular concept. The modular houses he sells are more expensive than the manufactured houses he sells. He said that in the past decade, modular has gone from making up less than 10% of his business to roughly half.
The VerMods experiment has drawn interest from all over the country. Schneider says his organization is working on zero-energy home projects with groups in Massachusetts, Maine, Colorado and Delaware.
Some trailer parks only allow manufactured homes. Schneider hopes federal regulators can kick-start the process of getting manufactured- home builders to move beyond where they are right now.
He said that they were demonstrating a path for builders. The standard for modular and site-built homes needs to be brought up.
He wants his customers to have the same choices as those buying modular homes. He says that the inch of foam insulation around the outside of modular houses increases the longevity, durability and ultimately value of the home. He said that it's worth several thousand dollars, but the companies he works with don't offer that upgrade.
"That makes sense," he said. "You can't have enough insulation."
There is related content.
An old Virginia plantation, a new owner and a family legacy have been unveiled.
During the partition, two brothers were separated. They have been together for 74 years.
Biden wants to make mobile homes green. It's sparked a debate.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
