This article would sober any sane person up to the reality that – instead of publicly shaming higher lot rents – the residents and media need to be pressing owners to actually RAISE rents to fend off re-development. The writer seems shocked that the park is shutting down for redevelopment when there is no current buyer for the land, but then they inadvertently give the reason in the article when they state “lot rent is about $300 a month at Hollywood. The average rent in the county is $1100 according to Rent Cafe.” How much would the rent have had to be for the park to remain open? That’s the important question here.

Yeah, right – they “need this land for the city park system”. That’s the oldest con in the book. I saw the same thing in Springfield, Missouri in the early 2000s when a park suddenly was shut down to make way for a city park. Great excuse for condemnation and all the city has to do is erect a swing set and a picnic table.

Here’s what this story is really about expressed in one quote :“the proposed legislation would increase the allotments dispersed by the Mobile Home Relocation Fund by more than 60% for some cases. It also increases the amount the landlord must pay to the fund for each tenant filing for relocation assistance”. Now I’m all for helping people move homes from the 1990s to new, but what happens with these programs is that the parks that are most prone to redevelopment are also the oldest and contain a ton of homes from the 1960s. 1970s and 1980s. These homes are not really transportable and the cost to move them is more than they’re worth. They need to put age requirements on these type of laws and the older homes should be a small cash payout based on value. Spending $50,000 to move a 1965 home – like they do in California – is blatantly stupid.

“They basically want to try to make it so expensive to live here that it’s pointless,” said a Gardner Estates Mobile Home Park resident who wished to remain anonymous. “That’s why people choose to live in trailers most of the time. It’s lower income families.” OK, that’s not true at all. The owners are raising the rents as part of bringing the parks back to life and getting up to market rent levels, and if a current resident can’t pay the fair price they need to get out of the way for those who can. Mobile home parks are NOT meant to be all about “lower income families” they are simply affordable housing and a ton of middle-class Americans live in them (including some upper class in coastal parks). Don’t define mobile home parks as simply “low income” – that’s the bastion of Section 8 apartments and NOT mobile home parks. Articles like this are insulting to people who live in parks and help to perpetuate the false stigma.

Only in California would you spend $100 million to build a bridge that serves two smaller mobile home parks. And then find out that you still have to tear one of them down. Here’s a memo to California politicians: you’re nuts. They could have bought everybody in these parks a nice brick house in Sacramento – for cash and debt free – plus given them each two debt-free new cars and a $100,000 trust fund and still come out ahead financially. Do these stories of bureaucratic waste drive anyone else nuts?

I have to admit I was excited to read this article, thinking it would provide some smart ideas on saving mobile home parks from the wrecking ball. Instead it was a worn-out piece on the concept of residents buying their own park. As somebody who has sold parks to the residents several times, let me tell you how it really works: 1) it takes a really long time 2) a huge number of the residents who try fail 3) the rents go up just as much anyway 4) only about 1 park per month pulls it off in the entire nation. Give it up, bureaucratic fools. Instead focus on things like giving park owners a pat on the back, give them grants for infrastructure repair, and tell idiots who propose laws like this to stuff it.

Of course they are. Is this writer any good? Unfortunately not.

Down go the mobile home parks and up go the apartment complexes. And why not? They get three times more rent and you can stack them three high on a lot. The best quote from this article was “former resident Martin Martinez said his family moved out of Meridian Estates in November. They found a home to rent and still live in town. The rent they pay is about three times more than their $800 rent at the mobile home park, he said”. How can the media publish articles like this and then publicly shame park owners for raising rents in the next one. Surely people aren’t this stupid.

How dare the park owner raise the rent from $250 to $385 per month? The write of this article would make you think this was the biggest news story since FTX. But then there’s the little problem that even in Wilton, Iowa the average home costs $166,600 and the average apartment is $1,246 per month. That kind of ruins the story, right? Good thing the writer didn’t bother to give even the most remote facts about housing costs in the city. Nice job.

OK, let me get this straight. The park owner files to shut the park down because it’s old and falling apart and the rent is too low to justify bringing it back to life. Then, to be nice, he lets people keep living there because they can’t find anywhere else as cheap. And then they sue him to make him let them live there for free for an eternity. Here’s the classic line from this story “several park residents also commenced tenant’s rights proceedings in court seeking to compel the park owner to restore plumbed water service to park units and abate their rent because of the lack of water service”. It reminds me of the time when Brad Pitt built people homes in New Orleans after Katrina to be nice and they then turned around and sued him claiming their free houses were bad quality.

I’ve never seen this property and I’m just guessing, but is anyone fooled by this story? The owner is more than likely going to build the condos on the vacant land so they can break the development into two phases because of the higher interest rate on the debt to build it. Once the condos are full they will tear the park down and build out the rest. The fact that the writer thinks this is a moral victory is affirmation that journalism schools must not have any business course requirements. The land is infinitely more valuable as condos than as a trailer park – and anyone with basic common sense knows this.

Real smart. This media outlet declares “8 On Your Side is helping a local mobile home community fight an unexpected rent and tax increase, cutting through the red tape and showing them a path to challenging the double whammy”. OK, I’ll make a $10 bet that this park is torn down and redeveloped within a few years. Why would the owners bother with the hassle when they can just tear it down and build a Home Depot or an apartment complex? When residents finally realize that publicly shaming park owners results in parks being torn down they will then realize that the media is simply helping them become homeless. Want to have your park torn down? Apparently just call “8 On Your Side” and let them start the process for you.

FINALLY A GOOD ARTICLE! I am in complete support of any mobile home weatherization project. I have seen first hand how bad mobile homes are at holding heat and there are so many easy fixes that can save residents a fortune in utility bills such as covering windows with plastic, caulking windows, weather strip doors and thermal switchplates. This writer deserves a gold star.

Parks flood if they are in a floodplain. So do houses, apartments, duplexes, retail centers, hotels – everything else that sits on top of land. Why is this of interest to anybody?

Finally a story that makes sense and is a win/win. The state is going to help park owners fix their failing infrastructure so that parks remain parks and residents have a higher quality of life. These are the ideas that really fix the American affordable housing crisis, and help prevent properties from redevelopment. Single family subdivisions have long benefited from these type of efforts, so why not the “high density” form of detached housing?

That’s a very common scam that some park managers engage in: tell the owner the homes are vacant and then rent them and pocket the rent. To guard against this you need to constantly audit your vacant homes with such tools as simply “facetiming” the manager and having them walk into the supposedly vacant homes and prove their vacant. If they refuse then you know that they’re cheating.

The writer hit on a big point that few realize: a typical mobile home factory can build 7 mobile homes per day. Compare that to a single-family home subdivision. If you are trying to build housing fast, mobile homes are the best way to go. That’s why the government bought 500,000 mobile homes in WWII – it was because they could get housing fast. The only issue with this article is the emphasis on “mobile homes”. I think the future of the industry – when trying to solve the affordable housing crisis – is to focus on modular and tiny homes and 3-d printing and everything BUT mobile homes which most people have a terrible stigma against.

$1,032 per month seems like a really high mobile home park lot rent until you go to Bestplaces and see that a single-family home in Steamboat Springs is $805,700 and the average apartment rent is $1,903 per month. So that means that even at the new rent, those folks living in the mobile home park are paying at least 50% less than everybody else in town for housing. Perhaps the bigger story is that people who choose to live in a city as expensive as Steamboat Springs with very little income are making a conscious decision and will be clearly sacrificing housing options in pursuit of scenery, etc.

I wish more groups – such as MHAction and all U.S. media outlets – would take note of articles like this in which relates to the reality of what happens when a mobile home park gets redeveloped into a different use. In this case, most of the residents live in pre-1970 mobile homes which means they have no HUD seal and can’t be moved. So basically the people will have to abandon their homes and start from scratch. This is the byproduct of low rents which make other uses more economically attractive.

For those who thought they had seen enough government waste during Covid, here’s a new classic:

“In 2021, at the urging of 49 organizations made up of mostly local nonprofits, Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia, D-Coachella, requested $30 million in the next state budget to relocate residents from the park. Gov. Gavin Newsom authorized the request in July 2021.”

That’s $30 million to relocate 200 homes in this mobile home park. That works out to $150,000 per household. The article states these people have virtually no income. You could simply transport these people to Mississippi, buy them all a nice brick home for $100,000 cash, give them another $50,000 in cash to get them started, help them get jobs at minimum wage, and they would be set for life with a quality of life a thousand-fold better than what they’re doing.

This article is the very definition of idiocy.

Shame on this city council for even considering building a 47-lot mobile home park in a neighborhood where the median home price is over $300,000. Of course the neighbors don’t want this, and who would blame them? If you have a $300,000 house and they put up a mobile home park next to you, that home will drop to $200,000 or less overnight. If the council is going to screw over the folks that live near this proposed site, they could at least not insult their intelligence and pretend it’s a good thing for them. I’m sure that not one person on th council voting on this lives in that neighborhood.

The good news is that the article clearly identifies that RV parks are not subject to any form of rent control, not even in the six states that have rent control. The bad news is that anyone would think that they would. What’s next? Hotel price control? If you tied the increase in bureaucrat salaries to rent levels, nobody would ever again bring up the concept of rent control.

This is the other side of resident-owned communities that people don’t know about: sometimes the residents later sell it for a profit. Nobody in the media likes to acknowledge it, because it shows that America runs on capitalism. This article is so dumb that it’s painful to read. Here’s the story summed up in one sentence: “residents buy the park, sell it at a profit to mobile home park operator, then whine about them raising the rent”. You can’t have it both ways. They knew the rent would go up but wanted that up-front cash from the sale. These residents have absolutely nothing to complain about.

I’ve never seen this park and have no idea who’s telling the truth, but it always seems odd when the city complains about the condition of the mobile homes when the park is 100% owner-occupied with zero park-owned homes. I’m not sure that people understand that park owners own the land and the tenants own the homes. As a result, how is this guy responsible for the condition of them? Why is the city not giving citations to the residents instead?

Are you seeing a repetitive theme this week? In this article, the writer admits that “it can be hard to find affordable housing in Durango. The average home goes for more than $700,000, according to Zillow”. So if prices are that high, wouldn’t it be better to help pay to relocate these residents to a lesser-expensive metro? Surely they can’t be happy barely getting buy on the extreme prices of everything that goes with living in a $700,000 neighborhood, such as $10 hamburgers. If ROC was buying these parks for $20,000 a space, then you’d say “there’s no other options at that price” but when the lots cost more than a single-family homes a couple states away you have to question what the real point to any of this is? Personally, if I was one of these residents I’d rather have the debt-free nice brick home in Kansas.