In about a year, a new Eugene nonprofit hopes to breathe new life into a former steel plant by bringing in more than 100 workers to make mobile homes for low-income families.
Housing Options Production Enterprise Community Corporation (HOPE) has big plans.
It will be the manufacturer and work alongside St. Vincent de Paul of Lane County, which will operate as the seller. At full capacity, the mobile-home production line will be able to finish two to four homes every work day, staff said. They believe it’s the only non-profit manufacturing facility for mobile homes in the nation.
HOPE was established to respond to the housing shortage for low-income Oregonians, especially the thousands whose homes burned in the 2020 wildfires.
It’s a shortage staff said couldn’t be met by the industry, which was already ill-equipped to serve low-income Oregonians unable to afford or access replacements for aging modular homes past the end of their useful life.
The project was launched with the help of $15 million for the Oregon Legislature.
Oregon is 86,000 units short of the affordable units residents need, the nonprofit housing policy advocacy group Up for Growth estimated in its 2022 report on Housing Underproduction in the U.S.
State Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland, said the shortage is closer to 110,000 to 140,0000.
She secured the state’s funding for this endeavor and introduced House Bill 4064, which prohibits local governments from banning manufactured structures in residential areas.
Her district lost 2,500 homes, mostly manufactured and RVs, during 2020’s Almeda Fire. Few of those homes have been replaced.
“It’s really hard to come up with manufactured homes,” Marsh said. “So, what do we do about this? We do what Terry McDonald envisioned — we start producing more manufactured homes.”
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