Oregon’s Manufactured Housing Companies ‘Overlooked’ By Housing Plan, Says Industry Veteran

Manufactured Housing could meet up to 10% of Oregon’s housing needs, industry insiders say.

Ben Roche, sales director for Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg, says he appreciated that Gov. Tina Kotek toured the Port of Portland’s Terminal 2 in January to assess the speed and effectiveness of Hacienda’s Mass Casitas modular housing pilot. He says the project was a good way of bringing attention to prefabricated homes, which have a significant part to play in solving Oregon’s housing shortage, but expressed concern that existing manufactured builders in Oregon have been overlooked by the state’s plan to increase Oregon’s housing supply.

“While I can appreciate the governor’s sentiment and bringing awareness to those companies, I find it odd that when one out of 10 new homes built are manufactured homes, her (Gov.) Housing Council completely ignored a segment of housing that’s existed in Oregon for decades,” Roche says.

Roche says three members of the Oregon Manufactured Housing Association, an industry group representing Oregon’s five manufactured housing companies applied to be part of the governor’s Housing Production Advisory Council, which began accepting applications for membership in February. But none were selected, he says.

Oregon already has five manufactured housing factories in operation. Roche says that when it comes to meeting the governor’s ambitious goal of producing 36,000 new homes annually.

“Whether it’s modular or manufactured, most production builders have an assembly line with an infrastructure. “We have the ability to scale up. It’s much easier to take our facilities that build 600 homes a year and turn that into 700 or 800 homes a year than it is for a startup that’s building 10 homes a year and get them to 20.” 

Roche says his industry is looking for recognition that homeowners need some help with down-payments on housing, and that using Oregon’s existing manufactured housing infrastructure will be a better bet on Oregon’s housing future than trying to create companies and factories from scratch. 

“We’re trying to reach out to the policymakers and say, ‘Don’t forget about us.’ We’re still over here producing homes,” Roche says. “We’ve just been a little bit too busy to engage because we had a huge demand for homes the last three years, but we are ready to be a part of the solution.”