Andy Barr: “I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I want to thank the gentleman from Tennessee for his leadership on this very…”

“I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I want to thank the gentleman from Tennessee for his leadership on this very important issue, Mr. Fincher, for being a champion for affordability of housing and manufactured housing in particular. I want to thank all of my colleagues who are supporting this important legislation that I had cosponsored, the Preserving Access to Manufactured Housing Act, and it is a bipartisan bill, and that is important. Affordable manufactured housing is a key source of housing for many of our constituents, particularly those living in rural areas, including my district in central and eastern Kentucky, many of those individuals who could not otherwise afford to buy or even rent a home. Unfortunately, due to the regulatory requirements of the Dodd-Frank Act, many lenders have stopped offering loans for manufactured houses. The loans in question are generally fixed-rate, fixed-termed, fully amortized, small-dollar loans that have nothing in common with the bad mortgage loans that brought down the housing market in 2008; yet the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has treated retailers of manufactured homes as ``mortgage originators,'' despite the fact that they do not originate loans. Furthermore, the small-dollar amounts of manufactured housing triggers high-cost regulatory controls since points and fees represent a proportionally larger share of a small-dollar loan than a larger 30- year mortgage on real property.…”