Mobile Home Park News Briefing

"The costs are going up, plus you've got to get some value on your money," he said. "I'm the fairest person in the world to deal with and most of them know it."

Here’s rent control in action. The rent no longer even covers the operating cost so the park owner has evicted everyone to make way for a more profitable use of the land. And, of course, the socialists hate the fact that this is allowable under law, so they’re trying to stop the guy from kicking them all out. In the end, the park owner will win and the tenants will be gone. Another rent control success story.

And, as always, another park bites the dust.

And another park bites the dust.

Miller isn’t sure they can keep up with rising costs; however, moving a mobile home isn’t as simple — or as cheap — as packing up and leaving. She was quoted $6,000 to move the place less than a mile away to land she owns.

Let’s refute this idiocy on two fronts:

1. It costs a whole lot more than $6,000 to move a mobile home on to private land. You have to build a septic system, a water well, install electrical access, and build a driveway and parking pad. Total package is around $25,000+. And that’s EXACTLY why this person put their mobile home in a “trailer park” and not on their raw land in the first place – because the finish out of the land is more than they spent on the entire mobile home. What these people should do – if they want to leave – is to sell the home where it sits and move on. What idiot would seriously think they can move that cheap home without spending more than it’s worth in relocation costs. It would be like somebody considering shipping a 1977 Buick for $1,500 from Florida to California, when the car only blue books for $300.
   
   
2. This article was written as part of the organized journalistic attempt to help Governor Josh Shapiro’s shrinking public approval rating. Shapiro (kind of like Mamdani) promised the woke idiots all kinds of free stuff yet can’t deliver. Why? Because the Pennsylvania Senate is 100% Republican controlled and won’t pass any of his woke nonsense, including rent control. Sorry Josh, you’re out of luck when it comes to housing. Maybe you should focus on free groceries instead.

WTF. This non-profit just spent $100,000 each for 500 sq. ft. 1-bedroom mobile homes that have to be the ugliest I’ve ever seen (look at the photo). How could they be this stupid? You could have bought a 3 bedroom/2 bathroom traditional single-wide – at over 1,000 sq. ft. – for less than that. These charities have to be the WORST shoppers in the world.

The work marks a turning point for the mobile home park, which the county purchased in February 2018 for $6.5 million. According to a staff report, the county purchased the property with “the goal of preserving naturally occurring affordable housing for the benefit of the whole community.”

Yes, this is the same crazy story from last week, in which the county bought the park to “preserve low rents” and then jacks them up around $120 per month in one whack (most real park owners try to hold that down to around $50 per month by comparison). What a bunch of hypocritical idiots.

Yes, I know the popular narrative for woke idiots is that walls don’t work (just ask anyone in Texas). But the truth is that they are extremely effective. In this case, building a gate shutting off traffic from a nearby mobile home park has been great for the residential neighborhood next to it:

(before the gate) South Oceanside resident Barbara Villasenor said her neighborhood next door began to have problems. She saw more speeding vehicles and more commercial trucks coming through with deliveries and more mobile home park residents parking in her neighborhood. 

The gate appears to be 100% legal. So the park residents are pushing for the city to remove it because only having one entrance and exit “might make it harder for emergency responders”. OK, so you’re telling me that having two access points for the once-a-year ambulance call isn’t enough? Is that really the best you have? What a joke.

It’s a fact that no state has ever enacted rent control unless it is “trifecta blue” – meaning a Democrat Governor, Senate and House. Wyoming has none of those things, being “trifecta red”. As a result, articles like this – pushing for rent control in Wyoming – are a complete waste of time on the part of journalists and readers. Sure, Wyoming has some woke morons, but not enough for anything even remotely resembling the DSA “free housing for all” agenda to ever pass in any capacity.

And another park bites the dust.

The issue is especially difficult because residents own their mobile homes but rent the land beneath them. Residents said many of the homes are old and may not survive a move, while many people also cannot afford relocation.

Yeah, I know I was the inventor of the “Waffle House quote” but what exactly does trailer relocation have to do with anything? These folks bought those mobile homes because they’re incredibly cheap and have zero investment in the land underneath. That’s why they were able to get into the mobile home park for 1/100th of the cost of the single-family home owners down the street and share the same schools. If this park should redevelop, that’s the natural evolution of civilization and the tenants had a great run at a super-cheap price and now need to move on. Even if these homes could be moved easily – like the travel trailer that some think them to be – where would they put them? And any place they would go would be more expensive than where they’re living now, right?

Give me a break – all companies are “soulless” if you define that “having a soul” means keeping their rents ridiculously low when market rents are much, much higher. All these folks insisting that professional investors hold their rents at amateur “mom & pop” levels are in for a rude awakening.

And another park bites the dust.

Did you catch this gaslighting?

So the article starts with a moral outrage over high lot rents:

The board signaled support Tuesday for raising monthly rents from $430 to $550 in 2027

And then, buried later in the article, the bitter truth is revealed: the County owns the mobile home park (not some “evil private equity group” like the article implies):

The work marks a turning point for the mobile home park, which the county purchased in February 2018 for $6.5 million. According to a staff report, the county purchased the property with “the goal of preserving naturally occurring affordable housing for the benefit of the whole community.”

Now what was all that B.S. about how non-profits owning trailer parks keeps the rent down?

The park owner wants $40 million, and the new buyer will surely redevelop the land into some more profitable use. The tenants, meanwhile, want some non-profits to buy the park for them. The usual math problem. At $40 million for 180 lots, that works out to $222,000 per space. That makes zero economic sense. Let the land move on to a better use with higher revenue and the residents need to find new places to live. Only a moron would waste $222,000 per lot to maintain this land as a trailer park.

Let me get this straight. This non-profit spent $3.1 million for a 14-space trailer park. Now they’re buying ten new mobile homes to fill the lots (figure at least $100,000 per house). So in the end they’ll have spent around $4 million for 14 mobile homes on their tiny plots of land. That works out to around $300,000 per trailer. WTF. You could buy these people nice brick homes in a beautiful subdivision for the same amount of money. Did anyone bother to ask the tenants if they’d rather live in a trailer park vs. a nice subdivision? I’m guessing not.

TOTAL IDIOTS.

“I'm 78 years old. I work. I have to,” Berry said. “I should be retired by now, but I can't.”

There are two factors in retirement: cash-in and cash-out. Rather than fight to live in one of the most expensive states in the U.S., why doesn’t this guy simply find a nicer home in a rural area of an inexpensive state like Kansas, quit his job, live on Social Security and – with that expense cut of about 60% -- live like a king. There’s no way that people can be this stupid. If you don’t make a lot of money you have zero business living in Colorado.

But here’s the other thing that nobody appears smart enough to comprehend: this park is costing $44.5 million. Whoever buys it – the tenants or a professional owner – the rents are going to have to go up quantum to make sense of it as a park and not as a piece of raw land to build expensive condominiums on.

I will also add – even dumber than the two points above – is simply that this article is all part of the residents’ absurd attempt to raise $44.5 million to buy the park themselves. I think, at last count, they had raised $10,000. What a complete and total waste of time.

Two important observations:

1. Habitat for Humanity is spending $8 million to “save” 60 families from the “evils of private equity groups”. That works out to $134,000 per household. Wouldn’t these people be better off to be gifted real, stick-bult homes for free? Seems like an atrocious waste of taxpayer money. How exactly did the tenants gain anything from this transaction?
   
   
2. Habitat is only buying this park to distract from the fact that it bought and then demolished Oak Grove Mobile Home Park in Mishawaka, Indiana, which actually displaced 117 households (twice the number that they are now “saving”). That’s gotta be in the running for the hypocrisy story of the year.

Who would possibly expect the woke idiots of Pennsylvania to ever give up on wanting to push their state government to pass HB 1250, which is the dead-on-arrival rent control bill? Look, Josh Shapiro and the socialists of America, it’s never, ever, ever, ever going to happen. The majority-Republican Senate in Pennsylvania have blockaded MH 1250 from the start and it will never see the light of day – no discussion and no vote in the Senate. So please just give it up. You’re embarrassing yourselves.

Plum Borough Council backed residents in a senior housing community faced with rent increases by passing a resolution to encourage action from the state legislature.

There s no weaker word in the English language – when it comes to politics – than “encourage”. It means nothing. It has no teeth. It has no deadline. It’s as ineffectual as sending James Talarico into a cage fight with a grizzly bear. So why even bother to write this article? Because Josh Shapiro, the Governor of Pennsylvania, is desperate for anything that might make him look like the great woke leader of rent control – which he can’t deliver on because the Republican Senate in Pennsylvania refuses to give him the time of day on that topic. Poor Josh is running out of time before the 2008 Presidential Election and his supporters know that. So an emergency signal – maybe like Batman’s searchlight only with a silhouette of AOC on it – has been sent apparently to all young, woke writers to ramp up the volume. It’s not going to work. Sorry, Josh. Your rent control initiative has officially failed.

HUD must handle about 70% of 125 federal actions, rulemakings often take 18 to 24 months, and agency staffing is down more than 30%

Wait, so now you’re telling me that the world’s most ineffective housing act may never actually see the light of day due to a multi-year rules process? WHO CARES? Looks like my nickname “the Road to Nowhere Act” was totally accurate and then some.

The concern for residents is that manufactured homes are different from many other types of housing. While residents may own their home, they often rent the land underneath it. If a park closes, older manufactured homes may be too difficult or expensive to relocate.

Using seniors as a trojan horse to spur rent control, to the benefit of all the non-seniors, is nothing new. But now the socialists are trying to take away the property rights of the mobile home park owners for redevelopment, as well. They know that rent control leads to park demolition and they can’t stuff their will down the throats of the park owners if they can simply redevelop. But what’s really puzzling on this article is how anyone with an IQ higher than a lima bean would believe that what makes mobile home parks different from “all other types of housing” is that residents “own their homes and rent the land underneath”. How does that argument make any difference at all? Let’s look at a high-rise condominium, for example. You own your unit but you effectively communally “rent” the land underneath via a condominium association fee. The socialist argument has always been that the landlord can raise the rent and the tenants have no choice but to move their homes. But what about simply selling the mobile home where it sits? How is that any different from the high-rise condominium owner, who has to sell if the association fee becomes too high? You know the answer: there isn’t any difference.

The second agreement is for the Pima County EELS, an emergency eviction legal service, to receive $976,399 to assist up to 250 households at risk of eviction in the grant’s service area. “We anticipate preserving over 150 homes, creating one resident-owned community, protecting up to 250 households from eviction, and providing education and outreach to 480 residents,” 

At first, I thought this article was about a program to help renovate old, beat-up mobile homes. Then I read farther and realized that was a trojan horse. The real point of this program is to spread the usual socialist mantra that tenants should live for free and that tenants should own their own parks. The Democratic Socialists of America have apparently embedded themselves deep into the Arizona public housing bureacracy.

At a Tuesday meeting, council once again heard from a long line of residents opposed to the plan …

This is exactly why new mobile home parks will never be built: nobody wants to be anywhere near them as they make their property values decline. It’s a fact that is easily demonstrated on Zillow – just look at the price of a house next to a “trailer park” vs. a couple blocks away. And since the city council members represent the residents of the city or town – which is what they are elected to do – it’s perfectly appropriate for them to vote against any concept that includes mobile homes. From a supply-side moat, that’s great for all park owners. But what’s crazy is that there are those who think that you CAN get new mobile home park zoning. I’ve been in this business for over 30 years, and I think I’ve seen maybe one permit issued for a ground-up new mobile home park in all that time. You have a better shot at getting a photo of Bigfoot.

Manufactured homes cost substantially less to build than conventional houses, but zoning, financing and other policy barriers continue to limit where they can go and who can buy them.

There are virtually zero new mobile home parks bult in the U.S. each year based on one item: zoning. Parks are banned in nearly every city and town in the U.S. and getting a variance is basically impossible. That’s why the “Road to Housing Act” will never go anywhere – it’s based on this bizarre idea that mobile home park zoning is attainable. Since it’s not, and never will be, none of this has any importance at all.

Because many tenants are seniors, residents are calling the rent hike elder abuse. They have begun the process of filing a petition with the Nevada Attorney General’s office.

Just because seniors don’t like higher prices does not make it “elder abuse”. Based on that argument, every business in America – from McDonald’s to Walmart – is engaged in “elder abuse”. Additionally, Nevada is not trifecta blue, and has no rent control, so the park owner has every legal right to raise the rents to whatever level they see fit.

As for the tenant’s argument that the “rents have gone up while the quality of the park has gone done” this false claim was immediately shot down by the new owners, who showed they have spent over $1 million in park improvements.

As I have written about many times, woke socialists are trying to use seniors as “trojan horses” for rent control, making it all about the elderly while the young people with jobs slither in under the same rent control laws. But here’s the socialists’ problem in Nevada: it has zero chance for rent control and everyone knows that. Why? Because it’s not trifecta blue.

I sometimes wonder if the idiot woke kids writing this crap are aware that there’s no point in writing rent control articles in any state that is not trifecta blue?

Endless Maine rent control wonderment by woke writers is getting a little tiresome. So Maine is a communist state – we all know that. That it has the among the worst rankings of any state on education, economy and health – we all know that, too. So now they’re going to focus on ruining their affordable housing industry. No shock there.