The Time Calls for More Focus at Home Builders’ Trade Group
A document dated June 22, 2009 from National Association of Home Builders vice chairman Bob Jones to the trade group’s executive board outlines six broad issue areas.
- Builder Liability (including the Chinese drywall issue)
- Construction codes and standards (including green building)
- Environment (the climate cap & trade issues)
- Federal tax and trade policy
- Housing finance
- Labor/Safety & Health
Around page 80 of the 95 pages of the memorandum comes a series of Amicus briefs that state the association’s position in litigation for everything ranging from “takings,” to endangered species, to fair housing, to effluent limitation guidelines.
Which is to say that housing’s worst stretch since the Great Depression hasn’t slowed down the onslaught of advocacy issues, battles, and policy challenges the NAHB and many of its trade association peers have had to deal with these days.
As a dramatic overhaul of the nation’s health care complex begins to reel under its own weight even as President Barack Obama pushes to bring a revolutionary new plan home, Obama has begun to have to reckon with America’s capacity to adapt in so many ways at once.
Were the economy not so afflicted, focus on the health care system, energy sourcing and economics, regulation of finance, and rebuilding the country’s infrastructure could get a fair shake. Despite high levels of urgency around each of these issues and challenges, neither exected representatives, agency officials, nor the public at large have the capacity to reinvent everything about everything.
Maybe each of these matters is a high priority. But, for the moment, we’re dealing emergently with events and consequences that put us in triage mode, which trumps or at least disrupts prioritization.
We believe the same goes with the NAHB. The question is how many of the initiatives and endeavors the trade group is allocating its resources to will wind up being academic if the vicious circle of home price deflation, foreclosures, bank losses, profitability declines, job losses, and more foreclosures keeps up at a significant pace?
How many home builders will there be to represent in Washington, D.C., if the focus here doesn’t lead somehow to a stabilization of the value of what consumers pay their life’s earnings to come by. Even as more and more sound and disciplined economic analysis posits that at least a few of housing’s multiple bottoms are coming into plump view.
Here’s Tim Iocono’s well-argued and well-illustrated case for green shoots mixed with grains of salt.
Even Bill at Calculated Risk–who holds that we haven’t seen nearly the end on home price declines–has had positive observations creep into his analysis over the past several months.
As policy and free enterprise do their double-helix thing in the next six to 24 months, the NAHB’s mission walks an increasingly delicate line. Look at one of the lines in Iacono’s piece:
Don’t feel too sorry for the homebuilders – they had a few very good years.
This is a widely held view.
Home builders’ representation of their industry’s interests on Capitol Hill need to drive for what will structurally help economic recovery: jobs, jobs, jobs. At this point, reality looks as if the government and free enterprise are forced bedfellows and they’re going to have to get used to it fast if they want to ward off years of less than anemic economic activity.
We understand that–like home building and home builders–the association is facing one of its biggest survival challenges ever.
Some of the executive committee members Jones’ memo addresses believe that that the seriousness of the challenges call for measures more drastic than prioritization.
Very likely, by the trade group’s Fall Board meeting in Chicago, a dramatic restructuring of the NAHB may surface. Just as some of the big home builders have had to relook at how they rationalize operations in markets–and in many cases, have chosen to exit some–the NAHB may have to look at all of its resource allocation with a sharp eye toward making the best with less.
Advocacy is the what home builders need most. That’s where the group should hunker down and do what it does best.
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True, and well-stated. John, I think you’re on to something with the combined-state term ‘exected representatives’ — as denoting elected representatives who were summarily executed by voters in the 2010 and 2012 elections.