So let me get this straight: the city and media has hounded this park for years about how much they hate it and now they are crying because it’s officially closing. Kind of reminds me of the old adage “the dog that bites the hand that feeds it”. Maybe city bureaucrats missed out on economics class, but the premise of free enterprise is just that: “free”. If you relentlessly harass a business, it shuts down and converts into a new business that it’s harder to be harassed about. You see this going on throughout American cities today, such as WalMart closing all stores in Portland https://www.the-sun.com/money/7549539/walmart-store-closing-theft-shoplifting/. So here’s a new bulletin for Rochester government and media concerning Bob’s Trailer Park: “you blew it”. Just like Portland.

Yippee, another article that announces that the residents of this park are going to raise $15 million to buy the property:

According to a state notice, the 178-lot community went on the market April 28 for a listed price of $15 million.  The Virginia Manufactured Home Lot Rental Act requires mobile community landlords to provide their tenants and the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development with written notice at least 90 days ahead of accepting any purchase offer.

The odds of this occurring is probably equivalent to the Houston Texans winning the Superbowl every year for the next decade.

If you consider that home “stunning” then you either have poor eyesight or have been looking at the tiny home shows for too long on HGTV. Only in California would someone pay $495,000 for that thing. In Missouri you’d be lucky to get $49,500 for it on the banks of the Lake of the Ozarks.

This is what happens when the park does not charge continually higher lot rents.

This journalist is apparently offended because of the“feudalistic arrangement” between the tenant and the mobile home park owner. My question is “what form of real estate does not have a feudalistic arrangement”? In all property rights, the owner holds all the cards and the tenant has none. Is there some other arrangement the writer proposes? Maybe one in which the owner puts up all the money and risk and then the tenants choose the rent level? Even Karl Marx would tell you it’s a hard sell.

What an absurd article with quotes like “In mobile home parks around the country, millions of tenants and owners are being mercilessly exploited and regularly evicted, often by giant Wall Street firms like Blackstone.” Who wrote this nonsense, AOC? Blackstone and other private equity groups are injecting millions of dollars into these parks and bringing them back to life. That’s like criticizing the doctor that brings the patient back to life and then the relatives complain “I liked him better before”. Give me a break.

It depends on what the promise was. If the promise was to adequately fill vacant lots in mobile home parks, then the answer is “yes”. If the promise was to sell a whole bunch of units and be a neck-and-neck competitor with stick-built dwellings then the answer is clearly “no”.

This comment in the article confuses me: “without affordable places to live, new employees and employers will look elsewhere”. 84% of New Hampshire housing is a single-family home on an acre or more. That is reflected in the home prices which, for example, are $360,000 in Concord. New Hampshire is one of America’s oldest states, and it’s been running just fine with highly restrictive housing. Why would they want to suddenly loosen those restrictions? Sounds like some type of woke narrative to me, or maybe fast food franchises have taken control of the legislature. I doubt that even 1% of the state population would welcome this concept.

Where does California get all this money? Who in the world would give $100,000 per household to all 150+ of the residents in this mobile home park to help pay for their relocation. Not sure if anyone in California has ever been east of the Rockies but you can buy a really nice house in Missouri for $100,000 and have no mortgage or lot rent. Wouldn’t it be smarter just to give each of these families $100,000 in cash and an airplane ticket to Kansas City?

If you want to expand mobile home sales, this is the wrong way to do it:

“As the regulator of interstate commerce and state restrictions, Congress can preempt unreasonable constraints on interstate commerce like New Jersey’s requirement that manufactured homes only go in designated “parks.” Congress can also use its spending power to encourage states or local governments to allow fair competition between HUD Code and site-built homes. As the building code regulator, HUD can enable more novel designs and other innovations to allow greater flexibility in home design that blurs the distinction between manufactured and site-built homes.”

You can’t cram mobile homes down the throats of the population by force. You have to do it by making them actually like the way they look and want to live in one. Until that is achieved you will never see mobile home manufacturing even remotely approximate the 400,000+ units sold per year in the old days.

Transporting mobile homes is a dangerous business. That’s why – despite the high price for the consumer – nobody wants to get involved in it. It’s also the reason that old homes should be demolished on-site and not carted off to the dump.

This is the craziest article of the week. A resident installs no less than 10 security cameras because without them “she doesn’t feel safe”. Then the park owner requires them to be removed because they are an invasion of privacy and against Florida law. Then the resident says that the park owner has ruined her life and the park owner offers the classic response: “I don’t think I would believe her because she’s vengeful and hateful and mean”. It’s a shame that Jerry Springer has died because that would be a great episode.

This article is pretty funny – I would recommend reading it.

It seems odd that the only mobile home parks that qualify for this program are those owned by the residents. What is the deal with the media and bureaucrats trying to force all mobile home parks to be owned by the residents when the fact is that a incredibly tiny number can ever meet those requirements? New Hampshire has one of the tiniest number of mobile home parks in the U.S. so it doesn’t matter much, but it’s sad that bureaucrats don’t see the benefit in helping ALL mobile home parks to get infrastructure repair where appropriate. It would be policies like that which would reduce the number of mobile home parks that get torn down and redeveloped each year.

Yet another example that the scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. Some bureaucrats are making these 100 families homeless because they have decided – on their behalf – that they’d be better off homeless than living in the mobile home park. And, of course, in the background is probably a city council that is having a party and doing high-fives that the “trailer park” is being shut down and the land can now be made into classier and higher tax-paying apartments. What’s the true story? The park sure doesn’t look that bad in the photos..

I love these articles where the city bureaucrats suddenly realize that there might be problems in this mobile home park. They seriously didn’t see these dilapidated trailers sitting there even once over the past 30 years? The home in the photo is 50 years old and it didn’t just pop in there two days ago. Neither did those residents. If you call the police about a problem tenant or squatter in your park they will typically tell you they don’t have time to deal with it given all the other issues in the city. If you try to remove a problem tenant for rules violations, the judge will not back you up. And then, after you can’t get any help from anyone, the media makes out like somehow the park owner is the problem.

As I recall, last week a different group of residents were trying to raise $16 million to buy a different property but had only raised $4,000 by the time the first option ran out. This article is about as stupid as giving newspaper space to a high-school basketball team wanting to raise $10 million to buy a Lear jet to take them to their games. Actually that would have better odds of occurring.

When will the media accept that residents buying their own park has about a .000001% chance of success?

It’s the same old story. You get the one resident that fancies themselves an “activist” and then browbeats city administrators to do things that they know are wrong but are easier than having to listen to them scream. Here’s a quote from the article:

A Landmark Estates resident, who is an activist for improving mobile home park conditions, acknowledges some upgrades have been made to the Warren park but that conditions for many residents are still far less than ideal. “They worked on the water and they are still tearing out homes, but about half the park is still having issues with water pressure”.

The article says that the park owners have spent $500,000 in upgrades to infrastructure and homes so far but apparently it’s still not enough to satisfy this resident. If the park spent $500 million, it would still not be enough, in all likelihood.

It’s a problem in this nation that a few screaming people – that do not share the thoughts of 99.9% of the population – are able to bully good-natured people into making bad decisions just to shut them up. I don’t know the facts in this case at all, but it seems odd that the city gives so much weight – and journalistic focus -- to one resident.

It kind of reminds me of the assistant professor in Boulder that was able to get roughly 40 media outlets, including John Oliver, to do slam pieces on park owners – an accomplishment she raved about in an interview later. And it goes to show how the media is completely unhinged at this point.

And the winner of Dumbest Quote of the Week goes to this MHAction member:

“The general trend is for owners to increase rent and decrease maintenance to maximize profits,” Patrick McHugh with MHAction said. “Many residents are evicted or self-evict, allowing owners to rent out the property at a higher value.”

Why is this dumb? Two reasons: 

1. I do not know of a single park owner who has a goal of increasing rent and decreasing maintenance. When you buy a park, you have loan covenants requiring the property to be kept at a high standard. Most park buyers inject large amounts of capital to bring failing infrastructure back to life. The current playbook is also to add and/or improve amenities to make higher rents equal higher value in lifestyle. None of this is consistent with “decreasing maintenance”. Increasing rent is a given when you buy and improve a park – nobody would argue with that.

2. If the argument is that the lot rent is too high (which is what this article is all about) then how can the “owners rent the property out at a higher value”. I know that some would like America to be socialist by economic system, but in a capitalist system of competition, if the rent was too high there would be no takers. You can’t have it both ways. So MHAction is admitting that the new lot rent is, in fact, not too high. And that defeats the entire theme of the article.

It’s absolute fact that a single-family home next to a mobile home park sells for about a third less than one that is not next to a mobile home park. Just look at Zillow. As a result, nobody wants a mobile home park built next to their residence. They’re not idiots. This is one of those situations where if the mayor or city council owned a home next to the proposed mobile home park, they would shoot it down in two seconds. I absolutely hate hypocrisy (“rules for thee but not for me”) and the bureaucrats in East Blaine should be ashamed of themselves for even floating this hypocritical idea and terrorizing these single-family homeowners with their nonsense.

So a bunch of tenants at Lake Bradford Mobile Home Park go out and hire an attorney to sue the owner over raising rents which, in fact, is completely legal. Their attorney says, it's a battle worth fighting for. "They (the owners of the park) should have to answer to somebody. They should treat these people with more respect, more dignity, more concern, more compassion." But wait, you can’t sue somebody over those things, right?

Maybe these tenants haven’t been reading these weekly news reviews I write. That’s a shame, as you can clearly see that filing absurd lawsuits and attempting to restrict rents is the normal recipe which results in parks being demolished for better uses. It’s a common theme week after week. Park owners are not going to sit there and be bullied, they will strike back with a “land for sale” sign and the lease termination letters go out shortly thereafter.

This is what the U.S. government uses as a safety valve when there are major storms and homes lost. Mobile home parks are actually beneficiaries of these storms as they are the “go-to” spot for FEMA. This is why most mobile home park owners do not fear major weather events.

While this article title sounds like Wooster is opening the door to new mobile home parks, it only makes it possible to allow for new zoning for mobile home parks (which is probably never going to happen) coupled with the ability to “establish regulations that include minimum density, setbacks, parking, open space and basic health and safety needs.” So basically you might be able to build a mobile home park with a 100’ front and rear setback, a density of one unit per 10 acres, and parking for 100 cars per lot – pretty much whatever the city ultimately decides. This is the oldest trick in the P.R. book. You talk about how much you respect the need for affordable housing and mobile home parks and then set parameters that make it actually impossible to build one. Let’s see what Wooster’s final requirements are and how many tracts they allow to be turned into a mobile home park. I’m not holding my breath.

This is one of the most common themes of these weekly article reviews: the false notion that the residents have the ability to buy their own mobile home park and that it works out well for them. The truth is that only an incredibly tiny fraction of these attempts ever succeed in closing on the property, and even then the rents go up just about the same – or even higher – than they would under corporate ownership. It’s kind of like someone who can’t afford to buy a plane ticket suddenly thinking they can get some mystical non-profit to buy them a Gulfstream jet instead. It’s a false narrative and giving people this bad idea is as crazy as the British thinking that King Arthur was hiding in the woods to save them when the Germans were about to invade England in WWII. Read what happened on the first attempt by the tenants to buy the park:

“The initial nonprofits working on securing investment funding pulled out, after the discovery that fire code regulations and overcrowding could lead to the park losing up to 40 homes in future years, making it a hard sell for investors.”

Do you seriously expect the second attempt to do any better?

I don’t know who is calling these woke journalists and spreading this nonsense (although I have my suspicions) but all they are doing with articles like this is to spread false hope and to disappoint people.

North Liberty, Iowa’s stats are $265,100 on a single-family home and $1,870 per month on a three-bedroom apartment. And this article is trying to publicly shame Havenpark for charging a whopping $506 per month in lot rent. WTF. Every single tenant in this mobile home park should send Havenpark a thank-you note monthly for giving them a nice place to live for 70% to 90% less than all other housing options. And instead a few residents want to whine about the rent going up $100 per month from even more ridiculously low levels and make up some goofy story that the park suddenly now has lesser maintenance than it did under mom and pop (yeah, sure). Articles like this are disgusting in their inaccuracy and lack of journalistic merit. I will be delighted when AI puts all these woke “journalists” out of work who can then learn new skills like driving for Grubhub.