Tina Smith Presses Expert On Innovating 'Modular Housing' To Improve Housing Affordability

3 hours ago

During a Senate Banking Committee hearing Wednesday, Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) spoke about modular housing.

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Transcript

00:00And thanks to all of our panelists today.

00:02Let me just start by saying I appreciate the line of questioning that my friend

00:06and colleague Senator Rounds from South Dakota was just offering on our bill.

00:12And Mr. Chair, I would say that I heard you say earlier

00:15that housing should be a nonpartisan issue.

00:19And I appreciate that.

00:20And I think that the bill that Senator Rounds and I have been working on with regard

00:23to rural housing actually completely fits that mold.

00:27It is not a bill that is pushing any partisan interest.

00:35It is a bill that is really focused on protecting and preserving affordable housing

00:40that without which in rural communities people are literally not going to have a place to live.

00:46So I'm going to just follow up a bit on my colleague Senator Rounds' questions,

00:50Ms. Willis, if I could.

00:51And forgive me if I'm repeating because I was in transit as he was asking his questions.

00:56But who are the folks that are living in these rural housing service homes?

01:00Like who are we making sure have a roof over their heads

01:04and a safe place to call home with this program?

01:07Yes, absolutely.

01:08Thank you, Senator.

01:10So we're talking about individuals and families who earn 30% AMI or less or at the poverty line.

01:19So that's who we're talking about.

01:21And these are people who need stable, affordable homes.

01:25So some of them are working families.

01:26Very much so.

01:27Many of them are already working.

01:28They're just working in low-wage jobs or they might be elders, right?

01:32Absolutely.

01:32And that's what we're seeing.

01:33A lot of the people that we're talking about are people in the workforce,

01:38as you mentioned, with low-paying jobs.

01:40We're also talking, and this is maybe a third,

01:43when we're talking about ELI, extremely low-income individuals,

01:46we're talking about, again, 30% or less AMI.

01:50We're talking about 30% of them, or one third, I should say,

01:54who are in the workforce, and maybe another third are our seniors,

01:58and another third students or maybe people with disabilities,

02:02and also single caregivers.

02:06Caregivers as well.

02:07Right, thank you.

02:07I think that that's important because a lot of times we don't really think about

02:10who exactly we are making sure have a safe place to call home with this effort.

02:16And could you just comment briefly on how important it is to,

02:21and we talk about adding affordable places for people to live,

02:25a housing supply problem, but I think we don't talk often enough

02:28about how we need to preserve the housing that we have

02:33so that it doesn't go away exacerbating the challenges that we have.

02:37Right, that's right.

02:38And that would certainly exacerbate the challenge.

02:43Because, again, in terms of what these expire,

02:45we're talking about rural communities and these expiring USDA mortgages.

02:50We want to be able to keep a housing stock affordable to people

02:54with the lowest incomes.

02:56And I know that your bill, the Rural Housing Services Reform Act,

02:59it really allows households to continue to receive rental assistance

03:04even when those property mortgages mature.

03:08And so that's important.

03:09And so that's about the preservation of housing.

03:12And so that's why a bill like the Rural Housing Services Reform Act

03:18is critical to these communities.

03:21Thank you, I appreciate that.

03:24Dr. Glazer, I wanted to talk with you a bit about the challenges

03:28that we have in helping to increase the supply of housing.

03:31I actually think this is another place where Democrats and Republicans agree

03:34that one of the, I think Ranking Member Warren made this point

03:38in her opening comments that if you have an imbalance between demand and supply,

03:42prices are going to go up and that's going to create

03:47the problems that we have here.

03:48And I'm very proud that my hometown of Minneapolis has tackled

03:51some of the zoning reforms that are necessary to make it easier

03:56to build housing, more all different kinds of housing

03:59to address the challenges that we have.

04:00So could you just talk a little bit about how you see this,

04:05you know, how you see this issue and what we should be paying attention to

04:09and maybe just a bit on how we can innovate in the way that we build housing.

04:16Thank you, Senator, that's a great question.

04:18And I think I want to use this opportunity to say a word for modular housing.

04:22In fact, the, you know, we have, modular housing has lots of capacity

04:29to be attractive, it can be differentiated,

04:32we can do lots of great things with it and we can do it cheaply.

04:35Economists since Adam Smith have known that mass production

04:38is a critical path towards affordability.

04:40And yet we make it extraordinarily difficult to produce mass-produced housing,

04:43both because of local zoning rules and because of HUD regulations.

04:47Both of them are at play.

04:50I, the chairman of the Illinois Housing Authority,

04:54is working to make sure that public housing in the city of Chicago

04:56is actually built using modular housing, which I think is an exciting move.

05:00I would love to see a state that decided to champion, you know,

05:03statewide zoning so if you have a thousand square foot hut,

05:05you can put the following four models of modular housing down.

05:08I would love to see something that sort of enabled scale economies

05:11yet again in housing.

05:13And getting back to Senator Kim's question earlier about housing for poor people,

05:17modular housing provides an amazingly good way of providing starter homes

05:21and sort of easy to buy things for people who are not of extravagant means.

05:26Our public housing authority in Minneapolis has been using modular housing

05:30to build scattered site housing in neighborhoods,

05:33thanks to the new zoning laws that we have that are less expensive,

05:37they're high quality, and they also, the construction can be completed

05:41in roughly 75 percent of the time, which also then helps to reduce costs.

05:44Absolutely.

05:46On behalf of the chairman, Senator Ricketts.

Tina Smith Presses Expert On Innovating 'Modular Housing' To Improve Housing Affordability

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