Corruption at its Best

This week, the New York State manufactured housing industry association sent a bunch of people to Albany for the annual lobby day. I had never attended previously. In fact, I had never set foot in downtown Albany, let alone inside the legislative buildings. Here’s what I learned, as our group traveled from State Assembly Member to State Senator to legislative counsel and back again, in consecutive half-hour meetings:

Parking sucks. It took me two hours to get from my house near the City to a point a mile away from the parking garages underneath the Egg and the Concourse, and forty-five minutes to get from there to a space where I was able to park;

A certain legislator is a putz;

One of the bills for which we advocated is a provision enabling the surrender of titles for certain manufactured homes. This allows manufactured homes that are installed on private land to be treated as real estate, instead of personal property, for general obligation law purposes.[1] This, in turn, allows owners of these homes to borrow against them using regular home mortgages, rather than predatory chattel loans;

There is nothing wrong with title surrender. A manufactured home is tied down. The owner gains access to cheaper financing options. Even the hardest cases in the Senate and Assembly supports it. Only the DMV, chattel lenders and a few recalcitrant title insurance issuers oppose it;

There is nothing right about title surrender, at least for park owners. Title surrender is only relevant to owners of manufactured homes that sit on privately-owned land. It is not relevant to owners of mobile home parks, because homes in manufactured housing communities sit on rented land;

A more pressing issue for association members is the financing of manufactured homes located in parks. Because these homes are treated as personal property for general obligation law purposes, resident-owners who live in them do not have access to mortgage products generally available to residents of site-built homes. This makes park residents easy targets for predatory chattel lenders. Until 2015, park owners could fill this void with seller financing, but that was shut down by federal law passed that year. The damage was exacerbated by language in the 2019 Nakba legislation passed in New York that regulated so-called rent-to-own contracts. SONYMA tried to fill the breach with a lending product some years ago, but the product has been a flop;

We included a pitch for title surrender legislation in the mix because it was low-hanging fruit. It was a softball that we could lead with. It took time away from more important issues, but you go along to get along. When the topic of title surrender came up, I smiled, nodded, and reflected that politics is Hollywood for ugly people;

A certain legislator is a putz;

It is fun to preach to the choir. The larger group of association members was split in two. I was assigned to the JV team, consisting of smaller mom-and-pop owners and retailers. We met with several Republican Assembly members and senators from Western New York and the Southern Tier who spoke with us about the problems of rising expenses, revenue caps, unintended consequences, and legislation crafted with no input from experts. One said that he was the only legislator in Albany who actually ran a business. All of them offered sincere commiserations, but told us that, without better numbers in the Senate and Assembly, their hands were tied;

The damage caused by the 2019 Nakba legislation will not be clawed back, at least in this legislative session. Democracy is a numbers game;

Politics makes for strange bedfellows. I loathe what the national Republican party has become, but progressive Democrats in the New York State legislature have trashed life for residents of manufactured housing communities in the state. Policies backed by state Republicans are better for our customers and for our industry. Fuck if I will support them at the national level, but at the state level, the Republicans are the voice of less unreason;

Do politics might make for stranger bedfellows than sex hormones? I ran this by an old promiscuous gay friend. He told me that I was not even close;

Many legislators who have never run so much as a popsicle stand presume to regulate the operation of businesses;

Many of these same legislators object, rightfully, when men, Catholic Priests, and other people without uteruses presume to regulate family planning, but do not see the inconsistency of this position with the regulation of businesses by legislators with no business experience;

Most legislators have some kind of toy on his or her desk designed to start conversations. One we visited had a big red button that said “NO”. One had a picture of himself shaking hands with Reagan;

If I were a legislator, I would get a tabletop-sized sausage grinder and put it on my desk next to a take-a-number machine and a big red button that would shout “BULLSHIT” whenever it was pushed;

A certain legislator graciously put aside half an hour of his time to meet with us;

When he met with us, that same legislator refused to discuss the manufactured housing industry. He did, however, spend the allotted thirty minutes discussing alcohol and substance abuse issues voluably;

When members or our group attempted to steer the conversation back to the task at hand, the legislator continued to talk about alcohol and substance abuse;

The legislator is a member of the alcohol and substantive abuse committee in the Assembly. He is not on any committees that deal with issues relevant to housing;

None of the members of the New York Housing Association who travelled to Albany to meet with legislators did so with the intent of discussing the regulation of alcohol and substance abuse treatment;

All of the members who travelled to Albany feel strongly about issues relevant to the regulation of affordable housing in our state;

None of the members of the Association expressed concern about the regulation of the treatment of alcohol and substance abuse in our state;

That legislator is a putz;

The recent redistricting kerfuffle will likely shorten the effective window available for legislation. That might prevent members of the Assembly and Senate from deepening the damage caused by the Nakba legislation, passed in 2019;

One of the bills that we advocated against, which could severely damage the ability of park owners to provide their customers with clean, safe and affordable housing, is a bill that would require park owners who sell their communities to grant a right of first refusal to buy the park to the park’s residents. While attractive on the surface (Cooperative ownership! Tenant-owned housing!), this will have the unintended consequence of scaring investors away. No investors, no capital. No capital, no infrastructure. No infrastructure, no roads, septic lines or water. Enter a younger, pre-embarassing, pre-crazy Mel Gibson, Aussie accent still intact, riding a motorcycle, playing a guy named Max;

The other bill that could hurt mobile home park residents is a bill that would limit park owners’ ability to increase lot rents over three percent up to six percent to offset the cost of capital improvements. A rent cap of three percent was bad in 2019, when the CPI was below two percent. In an environment where inflation is above eight percent, it is apocalyptically crazy;

God willing, neither of these bills will pass while the legislature is still in session this year;

The redistricting issue might also affect both the way certain members vote, as well as who wins certain seats. For example, if a formerly bright red or blue district develops a purple tinge, a hitherto radical member up for reelection might moderate his or her stance on key issues;

A certain legislator is a putz

Albany is heaven for body-dysmorphic wannabe thespians; and,

Parking is a bitch.

[1] Manufactured homes that are set and tied down have always been treated as real property, rather than chattel, for federal income tax purposes. This is the right result, although it is a bad result for taxpayers looking to benefit from accelerated depreciation for personal property.