Mobile Home Park News Briefing

So let me get this straight. A private company buys an old mobile home park with the intention of tearing it down to build something new. The city fights them tooth over nail and ultimately forces them into bankruptcy so that they can now buy it and do effectively the same thing that the original developer intended. But, of course, it’s OK for the city to do this because they inject the word “affordable” into their announcement every other word or so.

Did anyone notice how odd it is that the city is buying out all the mobile homes themselves as part of the transaction? Clearly, that’s so they can get rid of them later on. Until then, in phase one, they are going to let some nutty start-up build out around 30 units of stick-built housing on the currently unused part of the tract. Of course, they don’t tell anyone that phase two will probably be to tear down the 38 mobile homes the city just mysteriously bought and put stick-builds on those, too.

Another case of the residents playing the patsy for the city’s intended closure of the mobile home park.

In a land lease community (LLC), residents own their home but lease the land it sits on, paying a regular rent to the community’s developer to occupy the site. Without the land component, homes can be 30 to 40 per cent cheaper than if they were a freehold property in the same location.

Looks like Australian journalists may have more common sense than their American counterparts, because this is an article from “down under” and they “get” the fact that people choose to live in land-lease communities because they’re cheaper and not in hopes of home appreciation. But don’t tell the assistant professor from the earlier article because she’d call this “manipulation and exploitation”. You can imagine what Crocodile Dundee would then call her…

If Congress removed the permanent chassis requirement, manufactured homes would be safer, and they would be much more acceptable in traditional neighborhoods.

Few people are aware that the reason that mobile homes sit on a “boat trailer” foundation is because Congress mandates it to be that way – dating from when they did a hostile takeover of mobile home manufacturing in the 1970s. Clearly this was a decision made at the request of the single-family home building special interest groups who did not want their prices to be undercut and thought that affixing a boat trailer to the underside of a mobile home would render it a lesser competitive form of housing. Scandalous, huh?

The city is partnering with Kirksville R-III School District and is planning to use the property to build four tiny homes.

So the city is tearing down a massive mobile home park in order to build only 4 tiny homes? I love the fact that – since a city owns the park and they are demolishing it – there is zero push back from the media on all the families being evicted. This makes me think we need to add to my earlier equation:

LOW LOT RENTS = REDEVELOPMENT = HAPPY CITY GOVERNMENT

Is that REALLY what rent control is all about? Wouldn’t shock me.

Look at the photos then look at the prices. What idiot would pay that much? In Missouri we’d call that “bad shopping”.

The commission is looking to apply for a $13 million piece of the $225 million pool of grant funding. The PRICE grant is part of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s initiative to improve mobile homes or manufactured home parks. Its goals include bolstering the housing supply and weather-proofing and repairing structures, among other things.“Roofing, plumbing, doors, anything that we would do in a normal home rehabilitation,” said Chasta White, the commission’s housing programs specialist, adding that infrastructure repairs are likely to impact multiple units. “We’re looking to do paving, well and septic tank updates … broadband in some areas. We’re looking to do lighting, curb and gutter, painting, all kinds of infrastructure repairs.”

Needless to say, I hope that this occurs. Bureaucrats would be smart to invest in helping mobile home parks to fix aging infrastructure as it reduces the likelihood of redevelopment into another use.

Of course, it’s been a pretty regular political reality to talk about things and never do them, so we’ll see if any of this actually happens. 

A Chilliwack resident is urging city hall to consider the plight of senior owners in Fraser Village Mobile Home Park who may soon be forced to sell their manufactured homes and move. Terry Hanson said he and fellow park residents learned about redevelopment plans for the park across from Townsend Park after reps of Westbow Group held a meeting explaining their intent to build townhouses on the property.

I should start selling T-shirts that say ASK ME HOW LOW LOT RENTS = REDEVELOPMENT. If I sold them to displaced residents only my sales would be in the thousands of units.

Dozens of tenants at a mobile home community in the Flathead Valley just got eviction notices as the new owners change their business model. They have 180 days to vacate. Most are now facing an uncertain future with no other place to go.

Yes, this is the future of many, many mobile home parks if lot rents do not go up substantially. Property owners are not going to stick with a mobile home parking lot if there are more lucrative options. Since you can build apartments stacked two or three high on a single mobile home lot – and rent those apartments for $2,000 per month each – it is essential that lot rents increase significantly and fast.

As I’ve written about for years now, the basic message is “Low Lot Rents = Redevelopment”. It’s not rocket science – simply common sense.

The Novato City Council is moving forward with a plan to revise its rent-control ordinance governing mobile home parks. The changes under consideration would cap annual rent increases on mobile home spaces at the consumer price index (CPI) or 4%, whichever is lower.

Why not call this by its true name: “Redevelopment Insurance”. How can you explain the concept that park owners should not be able to raise their prices more than 4% if inflation is 9%? You can’t. And with the passage of this ordinance, I would imagine that there will be no mobile home parks in Novato within a few years WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT THE CITY LEADERS ARE HOPING FOR.

For some, the purchase of a mobile home offers a low-cost alternative to homeownership. But in many cases, mobile homes lead to exploitation, said Hannah Lebovits, an assistant professor of public affairs and planning at the University of Texas at Arlington. “That specific space in the U.S. creates a lot of opportunities for manipulation and exploitation because we don’t really see that class of people as having power,” Lebovits said. “In fact, we see them as very disempowered and disadvantaged, and that creates opportunities to further marginalize them through systems of exploitation. It’s similar almost if we think about the dollar store model, to where we have these dollar stores popping up in communities that don’t have full grocery stores,” Lebovits said. “And the theory is, well, it’s cheaper because it’s a dollar store, but actually, the per unit cost for most items at a dollar store is significantly higher than at regular grocery stores.Unlike brick-and-mortar homes, mobile homes do not accumulate value over time and create wealth for the owner. The owner is not building equity, Lebovits said. It’s the opposite. The second you purchase that home, you are diminishing the value of the home. The second you begin to live in the home, you’re diminishing the value of the home, which is, again, that economic exploitation,” she said. 

Who wouldn’t expect a woke assistant professor at UTA to declare that mobile home parks are all about “manipulation and exploitation”. Let’s break her arguments down into bite-sized pieces of idiocy to easily refute them. So here goes:

People live in mobile home parks because it’s inexpensive. Yes, mobile homes do not appreciate like single-family homes. Residents are not living in mobile home parks because they are banking on appreciation. What motivated them is that they’re paying around $500 per month for a 3/2 when the surrounding stick-built homes cost $400,000 on average. If they can afford the $400,000 – and look at housing as an investment with huge returns in the form of higher future values – then they should definitely buy that. Nobody is standing in their way. But for most Americans today, $400,000 is a little out of their budget. I guess you could say the same thing about cars. If you bought a $250,000 Ferrari, it might appreciate in value over the years. But if you bought a $25,000 KIA it would only decline in value. So if you can afford a Ferrari – and owning a car is your idea of a smart investment – then that’s what you should do. Definitely. But if your goal is affordable transportation the KIA is the right choice.

Yes, mobile home park owners hold all the cards as far as future land use. It’s their land. Because the residents don’t own the land they pay a fraction of the price of competing housing. If the resident can afford to pay $400,000, they should definitely buy a house that comes with land and that solves the problem. They could also buy an acre way out in the country and place their mobile home on that. Land ownership used to be the American dream, but inflation has made it unattainable. Buying a mobile home, without the land, is attainable. Mobile home park owners are what give residents this affordable option.

Yes, the quality of the products at Dollar Stores is mostly lower than the full-price alternative. But the difference is that everything only costs a dollar vs. $5 or $10 for the same basic commodity somewhere else. They sell the $1 dog bowl at Hermes for $500 if you prefer that. People shop at the Dollar Store because that’s what they can afford, not because they think it’s the place to go to get the highest quality goods.

SO HERE’S THE BIG CONCLUSION: IT’S NOT “MANIPULATION AND EXPLOITATION” BUT A FINANCIAL CHOICE OF THE CONSUMER AS TO HOW MUCH TO SPEND. One of the great things about America is that competition leads to a number of choices and price points, all with good and bad attributes for the consumer to decide. But it’s personal accountability once you make your decision.

I recently flew on Delta and they have three classes of seating options: 1) First-class 2) Plus and 3) Coach. First-class costs three times more than coach. Plus costs two times more than coach. Coach is the cheapest and has very little legroom. If I choose Coach then it’s a decision I make to save money, and I can’t go to the airline later complaining that they used “manipulation and exploitation” to make me buy it. That’s a foundation of the woke initiative – that everyone is a weak and must be watched over. Not buying it.

Hannah Lebovitz is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. Not to be mean, but that’s a pretty lowly rated institution. Here’s what U.S. News and World Report says about it: The University of Texas at Arlington's ranking in the 2024 edition of Best Colleges is National Universities, #236. Its in-state tuition and fees are $11,728;  So I guess you could kind of compare UTA to the Dollar Store of colleges, right? Do the students go there out of “manipulation and exploitation”? Apparently, based on her arguments.

This year, park owners proposed a $100 increase to her nearly $900-a-month lot lease. Park owners can raise rates if they match the Consumer Price Index. Inflation has given license to raise lease prices as much as the market will bear. “Now people have to decide well, ‘do I take that off of my food?’” she says. “’Or do I take that off of my prescriptions?’”

Why is all this “attitude” focused only on mobile home park lot rents? Under Biden we have seen 30% increases in prices in three years. Gas is double and so are groceries. Why are those increases fine but mobile home park lot rent increases (at an actually lower percentage) are abhorrent? I’m sick and tired of this false narrative.

COMMON SENSE MISTAKE: PRETENDING THAT ANY TYPE OF COST IS DIFFERENT THAN ANY OTHER – IT’S ALL THE SAME WHEN YOU HAVE TO BALANCE YOUR BUDGET.

“You can’t move the home, ‘mobile’ is a huge misnomer,”said Dickens. “That home is built, created, made to be placed in one spot and not moved and that becomes a real challenge for manufactured homeowners who are constantly facing economic eviction through the ever-increasing rents. ”Dickens often refers to manufactured homeowners as “prisoners in their own homes” because they do not have the ability to move and are constantly at the mercy of predatory landlords who “seem to want to nickel and dime them through various fees and charges and an ever-increasing rent.”

So let me get this straight. You can’t afford the cost of housing and the only solution is to jack your home up, re-attach the hitch, call a mover, and down the highway you go into the sunset? How about just putting it on the market and selling it like all home and condo owners do? If you move your mobile home the lot rent will all be about the same no matter where you go, and you will have wasted thousands of dollars in moving the home for no purpose. If you live in Washington you’d have to move the home several states over to find a cheaper place to live. Instead just sell the mobile home and move somewhere that you can actually afford, even if that means moving to an apartment in Kentucky.

COMMON SENSE MISTAKE: THINKING THAT MOBILE HOME PARK LOT RENTS ARE CHEAPER DOWN THE STREET BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT AND THAT MOVING A MOBILE HOME IS SMARTER THAN JUST SELLING IT.

Tenants of the Residences on Mill Pond mobile-home park at 40 Albany Road in West Stockbridge can now breathe a sigh of relief following the town’s Rent Control Board decision on May 8 that upped their monthly fees by less than $2.

Here’s a message to the West Stockbridge Rent Control Board: “when the owner tears the park down and displaces all 35 residents, you morons are directly responsible”. What idiot would think that another year of Bidenomics yielded only $2 of additional expenses for the park owner? Inflation is running closer to 10% than 1%. If the new attitude of the Rent Control Board is that rents can no longer provide decent rates of return on mobile home park investing, then there won’t be any mobile home parks left in West Stockbridge a couple years from now. But was that their actual plan all along? Probably. And the tenants fell right into their trap.

COMMON SENSE MISTAKE: TENANTS THINKING THAT BUREAUCRATS HAVE THEIR BEST INTERESTS AT HEART

Classic lie:

Trailers do give a unique issue when it comes to severe weather because they’re just not built to withstand even 70 mile an hour winds, we usually see those flip or start to come apart pretty easily.

Wow, somebody needs to get a hold of HUD because a mobile home going down the highway already has winds of 55 mph to start with and, if it’s going into a headwind of 30 mph, then it’s facing 85 mph winds and will apparently “come apart pretty easily”. I guess HUD needs to require mobile homes to be shipped only at 30 mph and on perfectly calm days!

The truth is that mobile homes are built perfectly fine and do about as well as stick-built homes in a tornado – they both get shredded. I live in the Missouri Ozarks and I have seen first-hand tornado damage and when a 200 mph wind hits a brick house it’s pulverized. Everything is.

COMMON SENSE MISTAKE: THINKING THAT ANYTHING CAN WITHSTAND A TORNADO – IT CAN’T.

If you google up rent control in Washington state, you’ll see the catalyst that drives woke writers crazy:

House Bill 2114 (HB 2114), otherwise known as rent control, that passed the Washington State House of Representatives February 13 on a party line vote, appears to have died in the Senate and failed to pass out of committee.

Look, I know the “free rent” advocates almost choked to death on their kale salad when it turned out that Washington state bureaucrats were not as woke as they hoped, but please give this issue a rest for a few years and then try again. Rent control is just not coming to Washington state at this point. Not even close. Sorry.

COMMON SENSE MISTAKE: REFUSING TO ACCEPT REALITY

Shocker! Gee, never saw that one coming – NOT. When will people learn that the “moat” to our industry is a permanent thing as cities don’t want new mobile home parks and the citizens back that hatred. I talked to a guy that draws engineering plans for zoning variance applications for new parks recently and asked “so how many of these designs have been actually built so far?” and he answered “none”.

COMMON SENSE MISTAKE: THINKING THAT PEOPLE WANT NEW MOBILE HOME PARKS IN THEIR CITY BECAUSE THEY 100% DON’T.

Stark says it does not cap lot rent increases, but it’s a start.“These people have had no voice, had no way to fight back a little bit if they thought the rate increases were extraordinary. So, this gives them that opportunity to mediate that,” Stark said.

For those who think that Florida is a “red” state, please read this article. Giving tenants the ability to force a costly mediation every time the rent goes up – without any legal limitations on rent increases – is just ridiculous. This will cost park owners a fortune in legal fees and for no purpose whatsoever. I have long written about the fact that Florida talks a “red” agenda but is as “blue” as can be when it comes to tenant law. Combined with the simple fact that it’s becoming impossible to obtain or retain insurance in Florida this latest law would suggest that the best years for park ownership there are over. Pretty embarrassing that Ron DeSantis signed this flawed legislation.

COMMON SENSE MISTAKE: EMPOWERING RESIDENTS TO THINK THEY HAVE POWER OVER RENTS WHEN THEY HAVE NONE.

However, in January, Anderson received a notice from the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission that her mobile home encroaches on land where the RTC plans to build the Coastal Rail Trail and, eventually, run a passenger train. She will have to pick up her home and move it by June 2025 or, the RTC said, the agency has the right to move it for her.

Have people completely lost track of the concept of progress? Clearly, more people will benefit from the rail line than those few tenants who have mobile homes that back up to the tracks. That’s how progress works. Every time a rundown block of downtown is renovated, the old residents are displaced. There’s no other way it can be accomplished. And, as usual, the residents want to play the victim and sue to shut the development down or use that concept as extortion to get more money – and the woke media revel in giving them that opportunity.

COMMON SENSE MISTAKE: REFUSING TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT PROGRESS REQUIRES SACRIFICE FOR THE GOOD OF THE MAJORITY.

A few years ago there was a booth at the MHI show in Vegas that sold a storm shelter that goes under the mobile home deck for around $10,000. And now there’s one from Home Depot that’s around $4,000.

Anyone would know that a successful storm shelter is going to require close proximity to your home, like your basement. People are not going to run in the wind, rain and hail to a shelter 400 yards away in the mobile home park. But they will walk 5’ out of their home when they feel the tornado is near. That’s why mobile home park shelters are a stupid idea and these personal shelters are totally the answer. It is then up to the tenant whether or not they want to spend the money on it.

COMMON SENSE MISTAKE: THINKING THAT ANYONE WILL TRAVEL MORE THAN A FEW FEET OUTDOORS IN THE MIDDLE OF A GIANT STORM.

Three residents driving to the capitol is not exactly a groundswell of support. I could get three people to petition for virtually anything from demanding that the average work week be reduced to one day or that only chocolate be served as lunch at all public schools or even that cars should be outlawed and replaced by mules.

The correct title would be:

STATE LEGISLATORS TRY TO HUMOR THREE PEOPLE

People always ask why I am able to predict the future with such accuracy. It’s simply because I try to employ common sense. I wrote about a decade ago that mobile home parks – in the absence of doubling or tripling lot rent – would all ultimately be bulldozed to make way for apartments. The reason is simple. You can stack apartments four or five high on the same ground space as one mobile home park lot. So here’s the reality of that prediction coming to fruition in Fort Lauderdale where one single 200 lot mobile home park can hold 978 new luxury apartments.

The correct title to this article should be:

LOW MOBILE HOME PARK LOT RENTS YIELD REDEVELOPMENT: IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE

Across the country, residents of mobile homes are organizing to buy and cooperatively run their communities, with government help, to protect themselves from landlords known for jacking up rents and neglecting infrastructure.

I respect that “all’s fair in love and war” but can we please remove the most ridiculous part of the above mantra of the “free rent” movement folks: “neglecting infrastructure”? That’s because professional landlords do anything BUT neglect infrastructure. On the contrary they are the ONLY ONES injecting the capital needed to bring old parks back to life. This is mandated under their loan covenants among other items, and I am yet to see a single example of this ever being the case.

I guess the problem is that the “free rent” movement people can’t come up with anything to complain about other than rents going up so they invented that false claim to have at least two points to complain about.

The correct title might be:

“FREE RENT” ADVOCATES DEMAND FREE RENT

However, that’s not really accurate, either. Because the stats prove that tenant-owned communities have rents that rise just as fast – or faster – than those of professionally owned ones. Additionally, the residents get lousy management and failing infrastructure when the tenants are at the controls. It’s all just a game of smoke and mirrors in which spotlight-seeking non-profits offer short-term subsidies that never last (just ask the city of Palo Alto which quietly shut down their resident-owned community after a few years) just to get 5 minutes of fame.

So the truthful headline would be:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FREE LUNCH OR FREE RENT

It seems like a good idea, until you see how much they allocated to the program:

The county has set aside $400,000 in American Rescue Plan Act dollars for the project.

At an average renovation cost of $10,000 (and you know the non-profits will blow that up to around $50,000) you’re talking so few homes that it’s not even really worth mentioning.

The correct title should be:

BOULDER TALKS WOKE BUT FUNDING IS A JOKE

I’m not sure who’s giving legal advice to these residents – or paying the bill – but here are their odds on appeal:

The losing side can then elect to petition the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. However, the SJC only accepted 12 of the 393 further appellate review applications considered in 2023.

I’m sure some non-profit is behind all of this, but when your odds of even having the appeal picked up by the court is 3%, it’s probably not a great idea to spend $50,000+ in legal fees to give it a try.

This case is simple. I wrote about this same story months ago. The bottom line is that the residents did not even come close to having enough verified signatures to trigger the right of first refusal. The judge had no difficulty in telling them so.

The correct headline would be:

RESIDENTS WASTE MORE NON-PROFIT LEGAL FEES IN MAKING FOOLS OF THEMSELVES