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A Wyoming investment firm wants to purchase Friendly Village mobile home park in Gorham as part of a four-state, eight-park deal for $87.5 million. Lawmakers are exploring a bill that would create a three-month moratorium on the sale of mobile home parks
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Week after week, there’s nothing but idiocy coming out of Maine. The good news is that it has among the fewest mobile home parks in the U.S.
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Hundreds of people living at a Sweetwater mobile home park are now forced to find somewhere else to live as the official deadline for their move out arrived Monday. Still, some say they're not going anywhere.
Li'l Abner Mobile Home Park is where more than 900 residents first received eviction notices last November, learning they'd have until May 19 to move out.
The owners of the park have already started demolitions of vacated mobile homes, but some residents have stayed till the end.
On Monday, the community looked as if a tornado had torn through. Some houses stood, and others were already knocked down.
In some spots, the ground was...
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And another park bites the dust.
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BUENA VISTA – Jerry Champlin had a plan to help ease the housing crunch in Buena Vista. Why not build a dozen tiny homes around a central courtyard on a residential lot a block from downtown and rent them out for $1,000 a month?
He bought a small home on a big lot in 2019 and floated his plan. Six years later, he’s about to start renting. But the plan, pushed and shoved by local rules and soaring costs, has changed.
He’s now stacked 21 shipping containers around the courtyard in a community he’s called BV Basecamp. He built 16 units in 17 of those steel boxes and the rest are community spaces for office work, storage and studios.
And...
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Years ago the late Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, had his assistant give me a tour of Airstream Village, the mobile home & RV park that he lived in on the bad side of Las Vegas (the guy had $800 million from the sale of Zappos but was eccentric to say the least). As we were walking to Tony’s property, we passed by an abandoned collection of metal container homes in a field. I asked the assistant “what’s that” and they said “Tony experimented building a residential community out of storage containers once, but in the end he decided they just don’t work and he abandoned it – they get too hot and nobody liked them”.
I trust Tony’s instincts on that one.
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A bill making its way through the Oregon Legislature would prevent new planned communities from banning manufactured and modular homes.
House Bill 3144 would not impact existing communities, only new communities moving forward. Manufactured units would still be subject to the same design requirements of other homes in a community.
“While successfully addressing the crisis will take many types of creative solutions, frankly, this bill is an easy one,” bill sponsor Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland, told the Senate Committee on Housing and Development on Monday afternoon.
Marsh is the chair of the House Committee on Housing and Homelessness. She...
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Another positive industry article (although I don’t agree with the concept that you should be able to place a mobile home on a vacant lot next to a McMansion – which would clearly ruin property values).
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MARSHALL — Residents of the Broadmoor Valley mobile home park said it’s a place they’ve called home — and they were calling for help to keep it from being closed down.
“We are part of Marshall. We are residents from Marshall, and I want to stay here,” resident Anais Rodriguez said during the hearing.
“It would be really hard for me to start all over,” another resident said in a written statement read at the hearing.
More than 60 people, including Broadmoor Valley residents and Marshall area community members, attended a public hearing held by the Marshall City Council on Wednesday night. The city was required to hold the hearing as part...
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And another park bites the dust…
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NORTH PLATTE, Neb. (KNOP) - The need for quality, affordable housing persists across Lincoln County.
Projects like the Mulligan Meadows Housing Subdivision and a number of apartment complexes have made a dent in the housing crisis. Tuesday, the North Platte City Council endorsed another project that would drastically aid in addressing the housing crunch as well.
Nebraska-based Chief Industries has purchased a 43-acre, undeveloped lot along East Philip Street and South Bicentennial Avenue in Eastern North Platte.
“We have an agreement to obtain the 6.13 acres north of the Twin Platte NRD. So, right now we’re going through some design...
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A rare, positive article on mobile home parks. Great!
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MARSHALL, MINN. – Residents of the Broadmoor Valley mobile home park voiced fear, frustration and pleas for help at a city-convened public hearing on the park’s impending closure.
The hearing, a required step under Minnesota law, saw the Marshall City Council appoint a neutral third party to navigate the complex process of closing the park, which has been embroiled in litigation in recent years.
“Marshall, please help us,” park resident Anais Rodriguez said at the hearing on Wednesday night. “We are part of Marshall, we are residents from Marshall, and I want to stay here to continue growing my kids and see them graduate from...
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And another park bites the dust…
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Princeton – Mobile home communities, also known as trailer parks, are facts of life around West Virginia and throughout the nation, but a report compiled by two nonprofit organizations with help from Mercer County residents argues that out-of-state owners are making these parks less than desirable places to live.
In February 2023, Mountain State Justice, a statewide nonprofit legal services and advocacy organization, announced they filed a lawsuit in Mercer County Circuit Court on behalf of the residents in five manufactured housing communities against an out-of-state private equity firm and its affiliates.
The lawsuit’s...
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Yes, as you probably guessed here’s another regurgitation of the earlier West Virginia “private equity groups are evil” narrative, only this time by the “Bluefield Daily Telegraph” which as a subscriber base of … wait for it … a whopping 14,642 individuals. Once again, maybe nobody got the message that Joe Manchin is gone now and West Virginia has a Republican Senate, House and Governor. But who knows, maybe by the time the Democrats win back those three sectors the Bluefield Daily Telegraph might have broken the 20,000 threshold and be a little less irrelevant.
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In addition to rising costs and threats of displacement, U.S. mobile home residents face “serious health hazards,” according to a new report from Human Impact Partners and advocacy group Manufactured Housing Action (MHAction).
As Hope Davis explains in an article in Next City, the report used tenant interviews, information from mobile home operator Homes for America, and public records to understand how poor infrastructure and deteriorating conditions put manufactured home residents at risk from extreme heat and cold, poor water quality, and unhealthy air. “In the report, researchers documented water quality violations at five Homes of...
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As predicted, some goofy website called Planetizen.com (audience of 40,000 subscribers) has regurgitated the absurd article from NextCity.org almost verbatim, in an attempt to brainwash you into becoming a woke idiot. Did it work?
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The eerily quiet lull on Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park’s 112th Avenue is routinely interrupted by the clang of a demolition crane. In just four months, half of the mobile home park in Sweetwater, Florida, has been razed to the ground. An old hibiscus bush nurtured by one family for decades is gone. A handful of mobile homes sparsely populates the once-packed community, giving way to a towering new development and leaving ample space for its inevitable replicas across what used to be affordable housing.
Despite an ongoing class-action lawsuit, tenants have chosen to evacuate their own homes before a May 19 deadline in order to secure a...
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And another park bites the dust…
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In late 2024, the residents of Sweetwater's Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park were told the park would close to make way for an affordable housing complex. Some community members took $14,000 buyouts, but others have stayed and filed a class action lawsuit against the park's owner, CREI Holdings, in an effort to stop the evictions. The jury's still out on what will happen to the remaining residents of the community, but the phenomenon of underprivileged locals losing their homes to a rapidly changing Miami is becoming increasingly common.
The mobile home communities that once proliferated throughout South Florida's urban landscape have one after...
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And an itemization of many parks that have bitten the dust …
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This story is the first in a series on manufactured housing and solutions to help mitigate threats facing mobile home residents, from private equity ownership to climate change.
Four years ago, Valeria Steele’s West Virginia mobile home park was purchased by Homes of America, a subsidiary of well-known “vulture fund” Alden Global Capital. The private equity giant has become infamous for buying distressed newspapers, cutting staff, offloading assets and loading them with debt.
“They don’t make any attempt to sell them,” Steele says. “They don’t make any attempt to repair them. And that’s the norm among a lot of their properties.”
Sure...
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So clearly the folks at MHAction (the radical “free rent” non-profit) has turned their attention to West Virginia and are hoping that an article in NextCity.org (a wokester on-line paper with only 45,000 subscribers) will entice other publications to pump up their fictional narrative that “private equity groups” are now creating “health hazards” by buying up dilapidated trailer parks and bringing them back to life. The only problem is that none of this tale makes any sense. Private equity groups spend big money in the attempt to hit a 20% IRR, which necessitates retention of existing customers, attraction of new customers, enhancement of the property condition to meet lender requirements, and running what was formerly a disorganized mess under mom-and-pop in a business-like manner. I have never seen – in 30 years – a single property that was worse off under a new private equity group owner than it was under mom-and-pop. The narrative that this writer advances that a private equity group would deliberately buy a property to run it into the ground and go bankrupt is absolutely absurd. All this is about, given the players involved, is an attempt to manipulate the West Virginia government into enacting rent control and tenant first-option on sale provisions. Unfortunately for MHAction and NextCity.org, West Virginia currently has a Republican trifecta, meaning the Republican party controls the governorship, the state senate, and the state house – so these wokesters are completely wasting their time.
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Allan Ayotte, 69, lives in a mobile home park in Norridgewock. He retired at 67 years old due to health issues with no pension or retirement funds; so when he saw a mobile home for sale within his budget, he bought it. He lived there for three months before the owners sold the park, and Ayotte says he received notice that rent would be increasing 93%.
Ayotte told his story in testimony for a bill that would prevent just such dramatic rent increases in parks like his, LD 1723, “An Act to Amend the Laws Governing Manufactured Housing Communities to Prevent Excessive Rent and Fees Increases.”
“Less than probably an hour after they posted...
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The logic in this article is so flawed that we have to break it down paragraph by paragraph:
Housing advocates say the problem is part of a broader pattern tied to housing being treated as a commodity and source of investment rather than a human right. Nyawal Lia of Housing Justice Maine and the Maine People’s Alliance, of which Beacon is a project, noted that this shift from locally owned to investor-controlled communities has drastically altered the nature of manufactured housing life.
Interesting premise that mobile home parks are not supposed to see their properties as an investment but a simple provider of a “human right”. Yes, this writer is a full supporter of the “Free Rent Movement” in which the assets of landlords are to be freely given to the people. Marx called this “socialism” – at least that’s the honest term.
“A lot of these communities have had the same owners for a long time — sometimes, for generations,” Lia said. “Residents know them. But then some rich investor comes in and starts just pulling money out of residents’ pockets, and in many cases creating a situation where they lose everything. It’s no way for people to live.”
Sure, a lot of mom-and-pop owners have not been running their parks as businesses for the past few decades. But that all ends with their demise, regardless of who buys them (professional investor or the tenants). Here’s the problem. Mom-and-pop had no mortgage on the park so they could literally charge a rent no greater than the sum of utilities and property tax. But when they die the heirs are going to sell to the highest bidder, and that new mortgage will burden the park with a giant monthly payment that will take the new rent metric to a level many times higher. That’s why, even when the tenants buy the park, the rent goes up hundreds of dollars per month to break even. The only solution? Just take the park away from the owner and give it to the tenants right? Once again, that’s what they simply call “socialism”. Why sugarcoat it?
A recent report by the Genesis Fund documents the accelerating trend of manufactured housing community acquisitions by profit-driven investors and reinforces the bill’s premise: without action, Maine risks losing a key source of affordable housing just as the state faces a severe housing shortage.
So now we’re getting more honest. The goal is to take away mobile home park owner rights because it’s the only way to solve Maine’s housing shortage. And that’s complete “socialism”. No more, no less.
Now that we’ve established the fact that Maine is apparently wanting to enter a new era of socialism in the Pine Tree State, let’s just call it by its name and quit hiding behind a bunch of B.S.
As for me, I’ll just stop buying the only product that Maine ever produced that was worthwhile: L.L. Bean. Their quality has gone down the tubes anyway so it’s no great loss.
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After a lawsuit that spanned almost five years, Pocasset Mobile Home Park residents have asserted their right of first refusal to purchase the park. The Barnstable Superior Court ruled in favor of the homeowners on March 27, allowing them to retain control of the land beneath their homes.
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Yes, this is the latest in this insane saga that has stretched on for 6 years now. Here’s the short summary:
What’s missing from all this? THESE TENANTS ARE NEVER GOING TO COME UP WITH THE $4 MILLION. So the past 6 years were completely wasted enforcing a first option that will never go anywhere – just like 99.9% of all tenant first options. Makes you question the intelligence of the Massachusetts court system, right? A total disconnect between theory and reality.
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Bradenton Beach city commissioners voted unanimously May 1 to direct building official Bill Palmer to determine whether compliance measures are necessary for a parking lot at 205 First St. adjacent to the Pines Trailer Park.
The vote followed a public hearing where representatives for the trailer park owner, Pines Park Investors LLC, residents of the park and their respective attorneys and others shared concerns and context regarding the parking lot.
PPI, managed by developer Shawn Kaleta, purchased the parking lot and the trailer park in 2023 from the Jackson Partnership LLLP for $16.2 million. Under the previous ownership, Pines Trailer...
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And another park bites the dust.
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A bill making its way through the Oregon Legislature would prevent new planned communities from banning manufactured and modular homes.
House Bill 3144 would not impact existing communities, only new communities moving forward. Manufactured units would still be subject to the same design requirements of other homes in a community.
“While successfully addressing the crisis will take many types of creative solutions, frankly, this bill is an easy one,” bill sponsor Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland, told the Senate Committee on Housing and Development on Monday afternoon.
Marsh is the chair of the House Committee on Housing and Homelessness. She...
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Clearly the policy makers in Oregon have lost their minds if they pass this. No person with common sense would agree that the state should have the ability to force a city to allow a mobile home on a vacant lot next to a million-dollar mansion – but that’s exactly what they’re wanting to do. This is not a mobile home park issue, this is an idiocy issue. What a bunch of morons!
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Robin Zorich and her husband have lived seven years at a manufactured home in Woodland Park East, a 55-year-old mobile home park north of Vancouver, Washington. Although she owns the house, she rents the land it sits on.
The couple downsized from their house in Vancouver, where they had lived for 20 years, before moving into the mobile home, believing that it was easier to get around in a single-level home.
Their rent has gone up every year, rising from $610 when they purchased the home in 2017 to $1,300 per month. These days, they’re cutting costs to make the payments.
Yet a reprieve came Sunday when the state House and Senate passed the...
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Everyone saw rent control coming in Washington state, so I’m not shocked. Just disappointed in how stupid the state legislators in Washington are. As a result of their actions, there will be no new supply of housing in the state, nor will anyone put a penny into cap-x since you can’t ever get the money back. And all the mobile home parks will eventually be torn down and redeveloped into better uses that have no rent control (think retail center, etc.). Total idiots.
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The owners of the mobile home park sold the land to a developer, which has been a major sore for its residents.
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And another park bites the dust.
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After decades of deteriorating conditions and hundreds of police calls, a troubled Aztec mobile home park is set for transformation. New owners plan to address crime, blight, and infrastructure issues that have long frustrated city officials.
The San Juan Mobile Home Park, located at 305 N. Light Plant Road in Aztec, was recently purchased by Capital Communities, which operates 70 mobile home parks across the U.S. Built in 1960 with over 85 spaces, the park will now operate under new regulations, and cleanup efforts are already underway.
The new owners have informed residents of their policies, which include the removal of non-running...
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Here’s a story of new owners bringing an old mobile home park back to life. How come we don’t hear more of these stories from the media? These types of owners should be celebrated as the true heroes of affordable housing!
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WICHITA, Kan. (KWCH) - New owners of a Hutchinson mobile home park are shutting down the park as some residents are scrambling and frustrated with an order to leave by the end of the month.
Western Acres Mobile Home Park residents learned of the property’s new owners earlier this year, but some weren’t prepared for what followed.
“It was Premium Management that owned the place; they had the place up for sale and gave us all sorts of promises about what was gonna happen,” said Western Acres Mobile Home Park resident Travis Freeman.
On Feb. 11, residents received a letter informing them they had to move out by the end of April. Many in Western...
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And another park bites the dust.
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GORHAM, Maine —
People who own property at a mobile home park in southern Maine are hoping to purchase the park so an outside owner does not raise monthly lot rents.
Dawn Beaulieu and Carol Cook have been trying to gather support from their neighbors at the Friendly Village of Gorham off Route 22. At least 51% of the residents at the mobile home park need to agree in order to make an offer on the property, which the current owners have put up for sale.
An out-of-state investor, Crown Communities, LLC in Wyoming, has already presented an $87.5 million offer in a package deal that includes Friendly Village and seven other mobile home parks...
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The residents have 60 days to come up with $22 million. And they are going to build a financial time bomb – if they can cobble together the non-profits to pull it off – because they don’t want higher lot rents? Well, here’s the truth: if you buy that park for $22 million you are going to have to raise rents significantly. Remember the article from a few weeks ago in which the residents bought the park and then found out the rent would have to go up immediately by $100 per month just to break even? Same story here.
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About 24 families living at the Lazy Day Mobile Home Trailer Park were served eviction notices on April 14.
According to the eviction letter shared with the Hungry Horse News, people must have their trailers removed by Oct. 18, though the owners of the park have been given financial incentives to move out sooner.
If trailer owners move or sign over the title to the trailer to the park owners by July 18, they would receive a $10,000 payment. If they do the same by Sept. 18, they’d receive $5,000.
If they wait until the Oct. 18 deadline, they will get nothing. The October date is a few days after the six-month notice required by...
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And another park bites the dust.
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Byron Sellers had wanted to get into real estate investing for years, but the deals he came across were always prohibitively expensive. One day in 2017, he was listening to a podcast while driving for Lyft when he heard about something different: flipping .
"I was like, 'Wow, she's saying it just takes $3,000 or $5,000 to start?'" Sellers remembers. His passengers wanted him to switch to music, so he texted the podcast to his wife, Sharnice, asking her to give it a listen. "When I came home, she was excited. It was like: 'Hey, you want to do it? I want to do it. Let's do it.'"
The Sellerses did some research, took...
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“…an unsexy, little-known sector that happens to be recession-proof”
While this article has many incorrect statements, the general tone is positive for the industry – particularly regarding its status as the lowest-cost housing in the U.S. – and, as a result, I’m thankful for it. You would NEVER see an article this honest or positive during the Biden era.
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Drive around the Coachella Valley and you’ll quickly notice: mobile home parks are everywhere—about 200 of them, to be exact. What many don’t realize is these parks represent the largest source of unsubsidized low-income housing in Riverside County.
Nationwide, an estimated 21 million Americans live in manufactured homes, and that number is growing. As home prices soar and interest rates fluctuate, mobile and modular homes are being viewed in a new light—not only as affordable housing, but as smart investment opportunities.
“There’s a new wave of entrepreneurs buying and flipping mobile homes,” said Fred Roggin during a recent segment....
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Another positive article. That’s two in one week. I’ll take it.
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Location: On Colter Street, just slightly west of 27th Avenue at 2728 W. Colter St. in Phoenix.
Description: A seven-story student residence hall is being built where the Periwinkle mobile home park once sat. The razed dirt lot will eventually make way for 189 apartment-style suites that house 733 beds in a building that's nearly 284,000 square feet and 75 feet tall. The building is owned by Grand Canyon University. It is located in a residence hall area called “The Rivers” that also includes four nearby dorms, GCU spokesperson Bob Romantic said.
History: The site was the subject of a months-long intense and emotional controversy at...
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And another park bites the dust.