Manufactured homes, including those located in parks, represent one of the largest components of unassisted affordable housing in the nation. In Virginia, mobile home parks provide some of the most deeply affordable housing in many of our communities. But these parks are increasingly at risk as many long-time, traditional park owners are aging and looking to sell as they retire. At the same time, large, national real estate investors are increasingly interested in purchasing these previously ignored assets. When parks are purchased, rents rise and frequently tenants also become responsible for water and sewer payments as well as other fees. Since 2020, Virginia’s Department of Housing and Community Development has received 146 notices of Intent to Sell or Purchase Offer from park owners, indicating how active this market has become. Park residents face challenges that typical apartment renters do not. If they own their mobile home, as many do, they have little choice but to pay higher lot rentals and absorb utility bill transfers since they are unable to move their homes. The term “mobile” is a misnomer; these homes are mobile only to the extent that they are transported to their initial location. After that, the cost and impracticality of moving them means that they stay put. Legislation is pending in the General Assembly that offers some relief. Del. Paul Krizek’s House Bill 1397 offers local governments, tenants and nonprofit organizations the opportunity to purchase parks when sales are pending to preserve affordability and improve living conditions. There is evidence that this approach can work. Common Sense Translation: To bring old mobile home parks back to life, the new owners must increase rents significantly. Residents don’t like to pay higher rents. They don’t need to move their homes if they have a better deal as they could just sell the homes where they sit, just like any other single-family home. The real reason they don’t move is because the cost of every other form of housing is significantly higher than living in a mobile home park. When bureaucrats opine on giving the tenants the first option to buy the park they know full well that the success rate for that concept is something like .0000000001% but it gives them an out to pretend like they really do care and to then shift the blame to non-profits who won’t co-sign the mortgage.

Manufactured home residents have testified for more than a year to city leaders and staff that rent and/or leases continue to go up and that many of them are on fixed incomes and increases are making it difficult to buy necessities. They’ve also feared that, as manufactured home parks are being sold, they could be redeveloped. Judy Hatch, a manufactured home resident, spoke at the city’s Feb. 6 planning commission meeting, saying her park has seen an increase of $125 more a month and that, for some people, that equals their monthly food costs. She’s also been concerned about her park’s owner potentially selling and losing her home to redevelopment without anywhere to go. Common Sense Translation: You can’t have it both ways. You either like living in the mobile home park at the new rent or you need to move out. You can’t say you hate the park but also that you hate having to leave. There’s no way that the rents are NOT going to go up and still have the property remain as a mobile home park. This is no different that the grifter that goes to McDonald’s, orders the burger, eats most of it, places a cigarette butt under the bun, and then demands a refund from the manager for selling a dangerous hamburger. The residents are not going to get something for nothing – only the federal government engages in that misguided behavior. You can use the same argument on any U.S. product or service that inflated costs are taking away from food or other expense line-items. It’s an absolute fact that America is completely out of control with inflation and all Americans face tough choices. But is the park owner going to let the residents live in the park and lose money doing it? Absolutely not, so give up on that argument.

Several residents of a Hazel Dell senior mobile home park gambled that rent stabilization legislation would pass — and lost. Their landlord at Meadow Verde had asked them to sign a lease agreement that included a discounted rent increase if they signed by Sunday. Some of the residents weren’t due to sign a new lease for almost a year. The discount tempted many of the residents who live on fixed incomes. But they believed the early rental agreement was an effort to lock them in at rent increases higher than the 7 percent cap in a rent stabilization bill before the Legislature. So they didn’t sign, putting their future in the hands of lawmakers.Then, on Monday, that legislation — House Bill 2114 — effectively died when the Senate Ways and Means Committee refused to vote on it. “We really had a lot of faith in our elected officials on both sides to do what’s right. They failed the people that needed them most,” Bart said. Common Sense Translation: Ronald Reagan summed it up when he said that the nine most dangerous words are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. Rent control is such a bad idea – with plenty of economic stats to prove it – that even crazy, woke Washington couldn’t bring itself to pass it and the residents bet on the wrong horse when they believed the hollow promises of today’s bureaucrats.

Pam has lived at the Dakota Valley Mobile Home Park for three years. She said, "I don't want to go to the homeless shelter. I've been there before." When she moved in, the lot rent cost $395. On March 1st, it will increase to $675 a month. "The first time he raised it, I had to change my life. I was doing senior companions, and I had to quit that job because it didn't pay enough to accommodate his raise," Kifer said. Common Sense Translation: $675 per month is not excessive lot rent at all, in most markets. But if you were in a homeless shelter three years ago it makes sense that you should probably not be in the mainstream housing market and need to get on Section 8 or a similar government program because you really can’t afford to live in the modern world without assistance. It’s also a pretty safe bet that you don’t actually reflect the opinions or financial status of the rest of the mobile home park residents.

Yes, that’s what happens when lot rents don’t make the property more valuable as a mobile home park than as a different use. As I have said in every week’s news review: low rents = redevelopment.

I know that a lot of people will be worried about taking “home rule” away from towns, but that’s one of the issues that brought us into a housing crisis in the first place. If everyone focuses on a very narrow view of what is in their immediate best interest, municipalities tend to end up with, well, with the current housing crisis.

What a frightening woke narrative. Communities definitely need zoning in which the $1 million mansion is protected from having a mobile home move in to the vacant lot next door. Sure, the woke writer of this article could care less because they have nothing to lose – they’d be the one in the mobile home. But you have to protect property values with strict zoning and Houston proved once-and-for-all that a lack of zoning was a bad idea.

Could this be more cringe-worthy and insane? This park looks to be located (based on the photo), literally, in the middle of nowhere. Tiny homes are hot with Millennials but not retired folks. Where would a Millennial get a job in this location – on a farm? I hope there’s a Plan B since working remote is getting repealed by employers. If you could put this in the heart of a city, then it would work fine – but zoning would never allow for that. That’s the basic problem with all greenfield development.

This is one of the dumbest news stories floating around out there. This rent increase was formally approved by the Boad of Rent Control. Now the residents are claiming they know better than the Rent Control Board on what rents should be. That’s not how the law works. There is a legal methodology to life and you can’t later try to relitigate them. It’s like a 49ers fan trying to reopen the Super Bowl days later because the refs made a bad call. The Rent Control Board approved the increase and now you move on. Period.

There are two sides to every story, but the modern media only provides one. Personally, this story sounds pretty fishy (“the owner told them to go to the bathroom and pour it in the yard”) but it would not be the first time a television crew failed to fact-check in their rush to fill dead time on the news.

I’m not sure why the residents thought this park was a future development site – just look at the map for evidence – but if they want to conspire with non-profits to buy something then why not? I hope they have a plan on that 2-year debt, however, as it will be coming due right at the peak of the “commercial real estate apocalypse” when $2 trillion of worthless office building and shopping mall loans comes due (they probably should have used an advisor from the real world when structuring the deal and not an academic). If they ultimately default on the loan two years from now, then they would have been much better off with a professional investor that would never have agreed to those loan terms.

A couple observations:

1. So much for the argument that mobile homes don’t appreciate (when they are sitting in a nice mobile home park) as the tax assessor found that the average mobile home sale went up 87% in price over the past few years.
2. If residents find this tax situation so bad, maybe they should have more empathy for park owners who are seeing the same escalation in property tax on the land only on a massive scale, and that’s why lot rents must continue to go up significantly.

Information from the NMHA indicates that changing public policy to incentivize park owners to sell their property to mobile homeowners, HUD properties and other nonprofits would create more housing security.

Wow, looks like MHAction has a new non-profit competitor called the “NMHA” (which stands for the “National Manufactured Homeowners Association). They support the same woke “free rent” movement and have pledged to annoy park owners and respectable bureaucrats throughout the country. Can’t wait to see this turf war escalate. I’m picturing the rumble from Will Farrell’s “Anchorman”.

Interesting to see how the old “trailer trash” term is making a resurgence in American culture. Wait, I thought that such hurtful slogans were off-limits in the new woke America. I guess not. Once again, mobile home park residents get no respect because they have no political clout.

Here’s the quick answer: modular has zero promise unless it sells at a bigger discount than just 10% (stick-built $300,000 vs. modular at $270,000 according to the author). Until you get to at least 40% off, forget it. Nobody is going to buy a fake Ferrari for roughly the same price as a real Ferrari.

This article is mostly stupid but hidden inside of it was a 3-D printing company name and I went to their website and I was blown away by the product https://www.azureprintedhomes.com/backyard-studio/. THIS is the future of pre-fab housing. Take a look for yourself. Consumers would buy this product even if it cost MORE than stick-built.

PLEASE GIVE IT UP, BARBARA! Nobody is buying any of this nonsense. Look, obviously there are cash-flow reasons for moving into the Malibu mobile home park vs. the stick-built homes that cost ten times more (Pam Anderson and Hillary Duff have done the same thing when their careers headed south) but it’s not because it was a financially genius investment opportunity. 

How do they find people to own businesses in California? I would go nuts if I had to deal with B.S. like this. They can’t charge enough in lot rents to make this compelling.

Residents in a mobile home park are still concerned that the water they use in their daily lives is not safe despite promising results from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. Just 13 days ago, the Ohio EPA inspected the water at the Arrowhead Lake Mobile Home Park in Swanton. Results of the inspection show that there was no bacteria in the water but a residents tells 13 Action News the water is still questionable.

Another case of residents knowing more than the experts. Sure, I’d take the word of a trailer park resident over the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency – wouldn’t you? What kind of idiot news station would run this stuff?

I’m sorry but I do not believe for one second that any park owner would block residents from having air conditioning. In fact, the article cites not one actual example of this, only the theoretical concept that the reason that around 140 people per year die of heat stroke in mobile homes in Arizona must be because evil park owners won’t let them install A/C. The truth is more likely that the tenant does not want to spend the money, or their home does not have big enough wiring to handle the load of the A/C and they then seal their own fate.  But that simple reasoning is not part of the new U.S. “victim mentality” that declares that nobody is actually accountable for anything they do and, instead, it’s always the landlord’s fault.

“The puzzle is why there’s so little (manufactured housing) being shipped when it’s a much better product than it used to be,” said Laurie Goodman, an Urban Institute fellow.

Here’s the reason they’re not selling more new mobile homes:

1. The prices are too high.
2. Nobody has put together financing programs that consumers can qualify for without park owners having to participate in the default process.
3. The outside of the homes are not appealing to the eye.
4. The HUD installation guidelines add $10,000 to $20,000 to the already too high pricing.

Solve those issues and you might sell more homes. Until then, forget it.

20% is simply not enough discount for a consumer to choose a modular home over a stick-built home. It would have to be more like 50% off to get any traction. Every time I go to the annual mobile home show and walk these $150,000 modular homes I think how crazy it is for manufacturers to think that those are going to sell when you can buy a stick-built – without the stigma – for nearly the same price. I must be correct because all of this misplaced “CrossMod” excitement has amounted to nearly nothing in actual sales.

I would think the first order of business to stop the negative stigma is to quit calling them “manufactured homes”. NOBODY wants to live in a “manufactured” home. Everyone wants to live in a “custom” home that does not come out of a factory like a widget. Ferrari became famous by building each car by hand, one at a time. Why brand your product as something that is mass produced by using the name “manufactured”? That has always seemed idiotic to me.

Throughout the book’s chapters, Hormel shows how rural working-class people are immiserated by the structures of capitalism, particularly global “campaigns of privatization and deregulation”.

Thank goodness the “free rent movement” gang has shown up again in the news this week with their endless allegations that capitalism is inherently evil. Of course, the problem is that the only way that housing gets built is capitalists in search of profit. I haven’t seen too many woke socialists building much of anything in America – just criticizing those who actually invest and construct things that they then live in and complain about.

Yuma County Supervisors say the park has multiple code violations they have not remedied. “They need to get them out, they need to collect rent from people who have contracted to pay rent in order to fix the park," stated Jeremy Claridge, representing Bann Mobile Home Park. Lawyer Jeremy Claridge representing Bann Mobile Home Park has started the eviction process for nine tenants, including Sean who has been living in the park for about two years.

Welcome to the new America. A property owner is simply trying to evict tenants who have not paid rent (some for years now) and the city inspectors are colluding to derail that because “gosh darn it, it’s so much fun to stick it to the evil landlord”. What has happened to our country?

It's been an ongoing legal battle, as they fought to stay. But the plan according to property owner and non-profit Western Reserve Land Conservancy is to ultimately expand it into the Cleveland Metroparks in the near future.

I’ve been following this story for a while now, and it’s interesting how private owners can’t close a park to develop it into something else without the media getting out flaming torches and pitchforks while a non-profit can seemingly do anything they want as long as they attach some B.S. reasoning to it. In this case the Cleveland park system suddenly needs this lousy chunk of grass to promote the healthy outdoor experiences of nearby residents (as opposed to wanting to get the eyesore out of the city). You know, private owners could make up similar nonsense but they don’t because they think it’s so stupid that nobody would believe it. I guess that to shut a park down today the key is to say that you are “working to reduce America’s carbon footprint and restore the natural habitat for birds and small animals”.