City of Houston Lifts Police Escort Requirement

At midnight last night, June 13, TXDOT removed the permit restriction when transporting manufactured homes within the city limits of Houston. 

As we reported last Friday, TXDOT added the restriction because the City of Houston police department began enforcing an ordinance originally enacted in March of 1972 for “House Moving.” The new enforcement by the city came after a recent interpretation that expanded the ordinance’s applicability from site-built home moving to also apply to manufactured homes.

TMHA has been constantly working on this issue since it was brought to our attention six days ago.  We have been working with our industry members, DMV, TDHCA, TXDOT, the City of Houston, and Gov. Abbott’s office.  We were glad to hear the restriction has been removed. 

TMHA has also been told by one of our members who previously had several homes being transported today with scheduled escorts that when they called to cancel the escorts that the escort company was also made aware that they were no longer providing escort services to manufactured homes.

If you are transporting homes into or through Houston and have not updated the moving permit, we recommend that you do so.  The new permit will not have the restriction on it. The restriction has also been removed from TXDOT’s website on Houston Division moving restrictions.

Regretfully, the past six days has cost the industry thousands of dollars in unnecessary escort fees, and we know of one accident where both a house and transport truck where lost. 

However, we expect today’s return to our normal transporting process through Houston to normalize what has been a recently highly disrupted system.