Why FEMA Fails After Disasters — And How Modular Emergency Housing Fixes It

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Show Summary

In this episode, Dylan Silver interviews RJ Fishman, the Chief Strategy Officer at Artanis Capital, who shares insights into the evolving landscape of housing, particularly focusing on manufactured and modular homes. RJ discusses the challenges of home ownership in the current market, emphasizing the need for affordable housing solutions. He explains the differences between manufactured and modular homes, highlighting how modular homes can be built to higher standards and at a significantly lower cost, making them an attractive option for first-time homeowners. RJ also addresses the pushback from municipalities regarding zoning and the misconceptions surrounding modular homes, advocating for a shift in perception to embrace these innovative housing solutions.

Resources and Links from this show:

• • • Investor Fuel Real Estate Mastermind
    • Investor Machine Real Estate Lead Generation
    • Mike on Facebook
    • Mike on Instagram
    • Mike on LinkedIn
    • Artanis Cap’s Website
    • Artanis Cap on Instagram
    • Artanis Cap on X
    • Artanis Cap on Tiktok

  Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

  Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

  RJ Fishman (00:00)
  Traditional FEMA response leaves 40 % of aid recipients homeless. 95 % of kids experience PTSD.

  You’ve got a 400 % spike in emergency room visits. And so you also see this massive band of waste in North Carolina after Helene. The 99.4 % of all trailers went unclaimed, undelivered. And there was a 92 % eligibility to service gap. So 92 % of people who were eligible for aid never saw a penny

  Dylan Silver (02:02)
  Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, RJ Fishman, is the chief strategy officer at Artanis Capital. He’s a fourth generation real estate professional and he has a background in manufactured housing and now active in the emergency community space. You can find him and his team at artaniscap.com. RJ, thanks for taking the time today.

  RJ Fishman (02:03)
  Welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, R.J. Fishman, is the chief strategy officer at

  Of course, thank you Dylan. Glad to be here.

  Dylan Silver (02:26)
  I really want to dive into manufactured housing because when we talk about the on-ramp to home ownership, forget real estate investing for a moment, but just home ownership in general, people are really trying to say, well, how do I get started? And I think more people than in previous times are now looking at some other segments just to become a homeowner. And I personally have done this living in Texas where modular really seems to be

  to be taking off. Are you seeing this as a trend as well where folks who might not ordinarily be thinking about modular homes are now looking into this space?

  RJ Fishman (03:06)
  Yeah, would say before we got into the markets that we’re working in now, so about 16, 18 months ago, two years ago even, we were going to municipalities and saying, you’ve got an average sticker entry point at like $450,000. You have people making 60, $70,000 a year. You can’t get the loan. And so we were saying to municipalities, entitle new opportunities for modular or manufactured homes. Those of course mean two different things. And some people don’t, you know, just to

  real simply, know, manufactured housing, it’s built to HUD code, think traditional trailer park housing, Governed a lot by changes that were made in 92 after Hurricane Andrew. Modular housing is a different code, it’s the International Building Code, International Residential Code, and it’s really more in line with standards for permanent single-family home building. So, you’re still talking about building in a factory, but built for a permanent housing deployment. And so, what we were saying to municipalities was,

  whether you create new land lease models or you simply let people bring in modular homes, you’re talking about bringing the cost of construction down potentially by more than 50%. And so you could get somebody’s sticker point entry into a home without the land, of course, but $150,000, $125,000 and try to tackle what the challenges are for building. So are we using helical screws? Are we pouring piers? Are we doing foundations? There’s a lot of ways to approach it, but in our mind it’s like,

  just get them rolled curbs in off-street parking and it can still be a land lease model. It doesn’t have to be trailer park, what we think of as a trailer park.

  Dylan Silver (04:42)
  With modular homes in particular, you you mentioned that they’re built in a factory, but I’ve seen some ⁓ that are very impressive. I’ve even heard of them being multiple stories and I’ve seen, at least online, some that almost look indistinguishable from a single family home. Is there any pushback from local municipalities that you’ve seen as far as modular homes being put into areas where there are stick-built homes? Are they saying, hey, we don’t want a modular home?

  RJ Fishman (04:54)
  Mm-hmm.

  Dylan Silver (05:12)
  in a community that’s not built for modular homes.

  RJ Fishman (06:03)
  So I think it’s more about the zoning and the ordinances and who’s operating the homes. mean, obviously now we see the administration, we see members of Congress pushing back against the sort of industrial acquisition of single-family homes, which I’m sure for many people that listen to your podcast and for you and your business, Dylan, like that’s a problem, right? I mean, you have guys coming in and big footing entire subdivisions and they’re not being operated under traditional multifamily zoning codes. They’re just buying single-family residents.

  So there’s a lot of NIMBYism just with any changes. And I would say it’s not so much, they just, they conflate modular manufactured. So it’s getting past that sort of like definitional misunderstanding that frankly modular can be built on site. mean, our piece of equipment that we use, like when we’re building an emergency community, we’re bringing this like, you know, 10, 12 foot piece of equipment. You push raw ribbons of steel through it. It cuts it, it shapes it, it stamps it.

  Sort of pieces come out bigger than this but look like this framing with all the screw holes and then all you need is somebody that can swing a hammer and use an electric drill or screwdriver and they’re putting together like an erector set of framing and as you pointed out it can be single family, can be multi-family, it can be single story, can be multi-story, they can stack but we can put together a 3000 square foot two-story home with a steel frame modular frame in eight hours give or take.

  and then it’s just doing the trim out like you would any other home. So there’s a lot of new technology that’s available in that space that frankly just again traditional stick-built wood frame homes you’re not going to see and so everything from like magnesium oxide sheathing to do with mold remediation with fire with waterproofing again to even just using steel frame construction versus traditional wood frame stick built and that you know takes your lifetime on a home from 30-50 years out to 150 years.

  And it’s just, you’re not only dealing with the affordability issue, but you’re also dealing with like, what’s the value of the home long term? How long is it actually gonna sit there? And structurally, how sound is it?

  Dylan Silver (08:10)
  Now, we talk about putting up a home in eight hours, people might say, how’s that possible? But of course, these are really, when they say modular, it sounds like it sounds, I think, to lot of people, they think, okay, it’s almost like Lego blocks, right? So this is in a lot of ways conducive towards emergency situations. We were talking about this before hopping on here. I was actually unfamiliar with this concept that…

  modular manufacturer could be used in emergency context. How long has that been going on for?

  RJ Fishman (08:46)
  So this is really a new vertical that we sort of, I’ll say, invented basically a year ago, year and 12 days ago. So January 8th, last year, 2025, LA catches fire, 10,000 homes go up like that. And we received the sort of challenge from a contact that we had with the nexus to the administration saying, hey, what are you guys going to do about this? I said, well, why would we do anything? I mean, it’s like, what is the reason that we’re doing it? it’s like, you’ve got supply chain. You’ve got the ability to sort of rapidly produce these units. You’ve got.

  third party developers who can step in and manufacture it out to site spec, but using the emergency authority of the executive, whether that’s a governor or the president, to be able to circumvent local zoning, local permitting, local regulatory schemes to fast track construction. And then you can manage them. So why not put those tools together? And that’s what we did in this platform that we call the Emergency Community. And over the course of the year, as we’ve explored that with the Department of Homeland Security, with FEMA, with

  various independent individual states from Louisiana and Texas up to North and South Carolina and Virginia even. What we’ve really encountered, Dylan, is that there’s this whole sort of, first of all, it’s silos of data, right? Because you have so many different government programs, the state level, at the federal level, from HUD and the USDA that deal with rural and urban housing grants to HHS, which is dealing with the challenges, and CMH, of course,

  Medicare and Medicaid and preventable Medicaid expenses. So we look at it as like one cohesive environment in which people can recover and using a community deployment setting you can start to deal with all of these various things that are left behind and the reason that we want to do that is because traditional FEMA response and you know this in Texas you guys are the second largest disaster market in the country.

  Traditional FEMA response leaves 40 % of aid recipients homeless. 95 % of kids experience PTSD.

  You’ve got a 400 % spike in emergency room visits. And so you also see this massive band of waste in North Carolina after Helene. The 99.4 % of all trailers went unclaimed, undelivered. And there was a 92 % eligibility to service gap. So 92 % of people who were eligible for aid never saw a penny out of 400,000 people, tens of thousands of families.

  What we’re seeing is by being able to rapidly develop, rapidly manufacture, and then create an environment in which you can see true recovery, we can start to shift those numbers, create jobs at the same time, but also move families from like 10 % mortgage eligibility 18 months after a storm to 90 % and start to really rebuild the infrastructure in these places where oftentimes they just simply wasn’t there before, let alone afterwards.

  It’s a big, big kind of hairy mess that we’ve been trying to sort of tactically challenge and address in a paradigm that we’re fighting to shift. right now with the administration’s eyes on FEMA reform and the FEMA reform council and the secretary of course all working in tandem, we really see an opportunity here to challenge that existing paradigm.

  Dylan Silver (12:31)
  Now for delivery of thousands of ⁓ modular homes, I’m thinking, ⁓ you don’t know when this disaster is going to hit, but it’s difficult to then ramp up production from nothing. Do you have to have basically thousands of modular homes at a facility somewhere on standby, at least in parts? How does ⁓ delivery of this work?

  RJ Fishman (12:58)
  We’d love to see the federal government or the EMAC compact states, the states that are sort in this emergency management interstate compact system. So again, like Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, the ones that are impacted in Hurricane Alley on an annual basis. We’d love to see them sitting on units the way Florida outside of Orlando has its sort of disaster hurricane preparedness response because Florida, as an example.

  loses about 50,000 homes every single year to weather-related natural disasters. So it seems practical to be able to say with each of these states, here’s the buckets of dollars that you have available to spend, here’s the typical loss that you have, and here’s what having a logistic supply of homes would look like, just the same way they’ve got beds and radios and generators. But having said that, if they don’t want to do that, again, our positioning is we can bring the equipment to site,

  I can stick one of these pieces of equipment with a big ribbon of steel in a shipping container and we can run six miles of raw steel through one of these machines every day and then be framing hundreds and thousands of these units at a time. Again it’s really it’s not the framing that takes time and if they’re already built it’s not home setting that takes time because with helical screws instead of pouring cement you’re talking about compressing a foundation setting period from weeks into again hours literally two to three hours we can have a home on the ground from scratch.

  I’m presuming the due diligence checks out of course for the land. ⁓ But the trim out is what takes time. So you you still have a couple of weeks of you know putting in sheathing and drywall and painting and drying and curing depending on the technology that we’re using. But we also have a sort of supply of manufacturers that are both domestic and international that can help to offset some of these needs. So God willing, ⁓ knock wood. don’t have we have seasons every year like we had last year right now one.

  major American landfall. Obviously the Kerrville disaster, ⁓ we’re still, I think families are reeling from that and we’re still helping. We’ve got like an Etsy shop where we’re still trying to raise money and you know sell merch and support the Kerrville County relief fund that they set up in response to it.

  Dylan Silver (14:56)
  That’s right.

  Did you,

  when that happened, I’m licensed in Texas. And so I of course know people who were affected by this. ⁓ Was there some type of ⁓ response from either yourself or folks like yourself to have a modular home community put out there?

  RJ Fishman (16:10)
  Yeah, and we believe there were about 2,200 homes that everything from actual flood damage to infrastructure inaccessibility to mold remediation problems because you really, especially in the South, you have like 24 to 48 hours to get in and start to remediate mold before a home becomes potentially an entire structural loss based on the risk, the health of living in that unit. as the storm was tracking and as the waters were rising July 4th into July 5th that weekend,

  we were already engaging with folks at the state about a potential response. Now when the legislature got called in for special session, which had some of its own political challenges, had nothing to do with the storm, but when that all came together, the focus was very much on the response systems and less about those housing challenges. And I think those housing challenges frankly have kind of fallen off to the local and municipal level. So while we weren’t able to deploy, what we were able to do is really test the metal of our

  sort of response and recovery planning efforts and initiatives and some of our initial lobbying. And we’re working with the state as we go on here to try and be positioned to be there for the next time. But there’s so much transition over the course of 2025 and even now still, we’re still waiting for the FEMA council to come back with a report and their charge ends in about four days here to do that. But we’re still really waiting to see like, are states going to be the ones leading and deciding?

  disaster response going forward or is it still going to be FEMA and the old school model of stick them in a trailer, give them a motel voucher, see how long they last and hope they don’t end up homeless. But that impacts two and a half million Americans every single year, a million and a half of whom are on aid for at least 18 months at any given time. we think that

  Dylan Silver (17:55)
  Two and a half million

  Americans are displaced out of their home.

  RJ Fishman (17:58)
  Exactly. 94 disasters.

  Dylan Silver (18:00)
  That is a massive

  that’s like 1 % of the close to 1 % of population.

  RJ Fishman (18:04)
  It’s a huge problem. again, about this. So think about 2 and 1 million Americans, 40 % wind up homeless.

  Dylan Silver (18:11)
  Okay, so let’s walk through this. of course, I’m not expecting you to have all the data here, but I had no idea was two. If you said 100,000 Americans, I would have said that that’s a lot. Are those two and a half all due to some type of extreme weather situation? Is that what we’re talking about here?

  RJ Fishman (18:26)
  talking about everything from fires and flash floods to tornadoes and hurricanes. but there are 94 declared FEMA disasters, averaged, of course, every year. Now, like COVID became a FEMA declared disaster, and that had its own band of numbers that was far and away different than what we’re used to experiencing. when you’re talking about things like wildfires and hurricanes and major tornado systems and flooding, it’s about 2 and 1 million Americans.

  Dylan Silver (18:52)
  Okay, so if we look at that, that’s a massive, it’s shocking to me. I’m sure everyone listening is like, that’s a huge number of people. I want to ask you, unrelated to the emergency housing space, so many homes in the US are still being built on, you know, stick-built homes. I think that’s just what we’re used to, right? And you look at elsewhere in the world, and the homes might not be as pretty, but they may be somewhat

  more disaster resilient? Do you think that in general, there may be a push to more disaster resilient homes, like instead of just having like up here and beam home that it can be like rooted in the ground, maybe even I know no one likes concrete, but concrete is pretty indestructible when it comes to some aspects of this. Is there a trend towards more disaster resilient structures?

  RJ Fishman (19:46)
  Yes, I mean we believe that we should be taking the example as you say of other countries and so Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Kuwait, a lot of the Middle East, they have these massive housing visions and they call them like Vision 2030, Vision 2035 where they’re building hundreds of thousands of homes and it’s government-led. So they could be giving folks grants for the land acquisition and the housing building. They could be literally, you know, taking it by the hand or with NEOM.

  with the sort of mega city in Saudi Arabia that, you know, construction’s been a bit of a hairy animal, but it’s ongoing. You know, it’s become an R &D play place for those countries to figure out like, hey, can we like, one of the things they’re doing at Neom, you got a family of four, right? I have four kids, so there’s six of us and we’re done. But, you know, if you have a family of four and you decide you want to have another kid, okay, well great, now we’ve got to buy a new home, right? No, at Neom, they’ve developed a basically you can, like a Lego system, snap on more rooms to a home. So,

  there’s a ton of R &D that we could be doing as a country that we’re not really doing because we don’t see housing as like the same way for example Palantir or Seeker are developing new AI technologies to assist in the war effort and policing like we need to have AI particularly in this case what’s called physical AI driving the future of the existing legacy technology right so instead of just slapping in

  some AI monitoring systems in your HVAC system and calling it an AI powered home, like we need the AI, we need autonomous systems telling us what the future of housing tech looks like. And so yes, we are seeing that. mean, with steel frame construction, you see all of Las Vegas now is all rapidly built steel frame construction and steel frame homes are cat six proof, they’re Richter nine proof, they’re fireproof, they’re waterproof, they’re mold resistant. And there’s new technology like Hydro Block, which is an under fascia panel that

  reduces about three layers of insulation and home wrap work ⁓ and that is a fully waterproof material. It goes under your hardy plank or whatever your exterior fascia is and makes the home literally waterproof. Magnesium oxide sheathing as I mentioned instead of being like an hour and a half fire resistant which is what our typical building codes require. You’re talking about four hours. It’s literally fire proofing a home.

  and that can be both an exterior and an interior replacement for drywall and OSB. So there’s a lot of tech out there. The question becomes, Dylan, like do people want to invest in either at the development stage or at the capex phase with these homes? So if you go buy a home tomorrow that’s a wreck and you’re going to turn it around and build it out for a family, like would you consider that technology? Would you look at magnesium oxide sheathing? Would you look at those options? And so it becomes a question of

  Dylan Silver (22:30)
  Right.

  RJ Fishman (22:33)
  A. Awareness, B. Affordability, C. Delivery Capabilities. And we think that either the emergency context where as I mentioned millions of Americans, tens if not hundreds of thousands of homes need to be built every single year or in the industry context, so all of this direct foreign investment from TSMC in Phoenix, the global wafers in Texas, to Metta in Louisiana, ⁓ the nuclear power plants in South Carolina. Again, these are opportunities to build

  tens of thousands of homes at a time and explore that tech. Explore everything from the AI-led development of these units to monitoring floor plans and usage to putting in fall-detecting floors for grandma or you know they’ve got now an FDA approved dog that can you know live with folks that are sunsetters so people that start to experience dimension Alzheimer’s. It’s an FDA approved device that can be used to monitor them and call for help. I mean starting to make those things the basic components of everything from

  senior living to student housing. That’s where we vision the future. ⁓ It’s just a question of the rest of the country catching up.

  Dylan Silver (23:39)
  Yeah, I mean, it’s almost like people are just accustomed to the way that homes have been built and so are builders. And if it hasn’t impacted you personally, like myself, it’s shocking to think two and a half million people. But I know that in modular home in particular, that there’s a big focus on disaster resilience. mean, you’re talking about emergency communities, but I also know that

  like before there is an emergency that there’s, you modular homes that are being built to be, you know, disaster resilient. And that is a focus. Whereas, you know, if you’re looking at a typical home built by a national builder, I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case. Certainly not in Texas, if I can speak for Texas, for example. And I think, you know, even if it’s in a 100 year floodplain and nothing has happened in a lifetime, then some, you know, black swan event can happen.

  RJ Fishman (24:16)
  Mm-hmm.

  Dylan Silver (24:38)
  And especially if you’re dealing with peer and beam homes where you can see underneath the home, what’s gonna happen when that area of floods? Of course, the homes are gonna get washed away. ⁓ We are coming up on time here though, RJ. ⁓ Thank you for taking the time today. Where can folks go to learn more about you and your team? Also, are there any new projects that you’re working

  RJ Fishman (25:00)
  Yeah, so actually we’re working on a pilot with the Department of Homeland Security and the members of Congress from Western North Carolina have been really working very hard to get that through. So we’re hoping that that’s an opportunity to service the victims of Hurricane Helene that still 19,500 families will have that need for the next two to three years. We have a pilot that we are just breaking ground on anytime now with Governor Youngkin or Governor Youngkin established the pilot.

  ⁓ You know obviously is no longer the governor as of just this last weekend But so that’s nine as you say resilient home is designed to last for a 500 year flood event So again everything from helical screws instead of traditional piers and foundations ⁓ To using new tech in sort of the full tilt building of the home. So We’ve got a bunch of projects We’re working on in the emergency response space in both permanent and and transitory housing and also industry so I would say from our website, which is

  artanis.com. It’s Sinatra backwards if you’re trying to spell it. ⁓ But artaniscap.com. We’re at ArtanisCap on every social media platform and you can learn more there about really all of our verticals from emergency communities to industry communities, Artanis Plus, our senior housing platform, student housing, and sort of how we see the future, the arena, if you will, of housing and really appreciate the opportunity to talk more about it with

  you know folks that are trying to understand what that future looks like and we hope that they’ll follow us into it.