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The windows of Janet Fournier’s single-wide mobile home in Brunswick are open on this warm summer day. Fournier and her neighbor Tom Benoit point to the wild blueberry fields that can be seen at the edge of Linnhaven Mobile Home Center.
"You can really see them well from — well, I'd say from my street — because it's completely open," Benoit said. "It's beautiful."
Like many of their neighbors, Fournier and Benoit moved to Linnhaven wanting something affordable and easy to maintain as they got older. When they learned that the park's long-time owner wanted to sell, they feared the worst.
Benoit said residents worried that a new owner would...
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Of course, it’s only logical that the residents are going to come up with $28 million to buy their park, right? Besides the basic issues of how they’re going to get a hand-out for an $8 million downpayment and a non-profit personal guarantee on the mortgage of around $20 million comes this very alarming statistic:
Maine has more than 700 manufactured and mobile home parks. Ten are resident-owned communities.
Are you serious? I hate to rain on the tenant-owned-community concept, but that’s a ridiculously small rate of success. Assuming that the resident-owned concept has been around since the 1980s (which it has) and there are only 10 tenant-owned parks in the state of Maine, that’s an average of less than one deal per half-decade. AND THAT WAS BACK WHEN PARKS WERE MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE.
These concepts simply don’t work – and everyone in the industry knows this. I wish the bureaucrats that pass these stupid laws would research the actual facts. It would blow their minds.