I understand that the industry wants to change its negative stigma, but let’s just give up on the old argument on what you call a mobile home. This article is all about a couple prominent financial podcast hosts daring to use the words that all Americans do when describing the industry: “trailer” and “mobile home”. The article states “In all languages, definitions and the meanings of words matter. A “manufactured home” is not a motor home or trailer, and although it is often called a “mobile home,” it is not that either.”

Here's the problem. The people have voted and the winner is “mobile home”. Why do I say that? Because Google analytics show that 90%+ of all searches on-line are using the words “mobile home”. And “trailer” scores just as many searches as “manufactured home”. You can’t argue with those stats. That’s why the people who are the most vocal about using “manufactured home” use the words “mobile home” in all their on-line marketing. Pretty hypocritical, huh?

Those podcast hosts used “trailer” and “mobile home” because that’s how their audiences refer to the product. If I invented a new term for mashed potatoes called "manipulated carb units" and then put that on grocery store shelves, I wouldn’t sell any because nobody would know what I’m talking about. You can’t blame any speaker for using the terms that their audience uses.

Before the internet, the discussion on what we call mobile homes was interesting. Now it’s just stupid.

There’s an old saying that the scariest words are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. Pretty sure that applies to this article. Thank heavens I don’t own a property in Lacey, WA.

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.

Here are the only four paragraphs of this story you need to get to the truth:

Walls and many other Jackpot residents became concerned after the new owner of the park more than quadrupled the monthly lot rent — from $75 to $401. Plus, the owner wants the tenants to purchase the mobile homes, instead of renting, for what many residents say are inflated prices.

“This has gotten blown way out of proportion,” Spence told the Times-News on Thursday. Instead of being the “scumbag” some people have made him out to be, he said wants to help Jackpot grow and clean up the mobile home parks, making them a better place to live.

His plan has not gone over well with many residents who have flooded social media with negative comments, saying the trailers are rundown and overpriced. They say Spence’s plan seems more likely to cause people, including longtime residents, to leave Jackpot rather than stay.

She is interested in purchasing the one-bedroom home, “but not for what he wants.” She worries that because there are few housing options in Jackpot, she might end up living in her vehicle, a Dodge Durango.

So the bottom line is that the park owner is trying to bring the property back to life and salvage one of the last bits of affordable housing in the area. Some of the residents (probably 10%) don’t appreciate this and want him to leave it nasty and cheap. Let the free market decide who is right.

“A pair of Republican-sponsored bills intended to help mobile-home park residents weather Montana’s acute housing shortage drew vehement opposition from park owners, real estate agents and the Montana Landlord Association” not counting every adult with an IQ greater than a lima bean. Come on, people. Residents are NOT going to be able to buy their mobile home park with 60 days notice. Or, in 99.99% of cases, with 600 days advance notice. Or, in 99.98% of all cases, with 600 years advance notice. All this does is slow down and complicate the basic property rights of the owner and the work of the free market.

When park owners do this same thing, all we get is bashed in the media. And when a city does that same clean-up of a rundown park, you would think they had found the cure for cancer. Hypocrisy anyone?

Yes, it’s this same property again. The city of Palo Alto spent $40 million to preserve the park as a park for 100 families. That’s $400,000 per family. Now they’re going to rebuild it into apartments and new mobile homes, and all of those folks they claimed they “saved” only have first option to buy their way back in (which they probably can’t afford). Does anyone else find this peculiarly stupid even for California? Why not give them all $400,000 and tell them to move to a cheaper state – wouldn’t that have been the best decision? Another case of a consortium of non-profits and city managers who are lost on how life really works.

AT LAST, AN INTELLIGENT CONCEPT FOR IMPROVING AMERICA’S AFFORDABLE HOUSING STOCK! This is the kind of thinking that helps everyone – have the state help re-build failing infrastructure and re-populate vacant lots. Note that the entire State of Vermont program is 1/10^th what California is paying for just one 100 household community. Will somebody please give Governor Phil Scott an award?

Let’s focus on just this paragraph to begin with:

“In case readers aren’t yet aware, some out-of-state rich people — through private equity organizations — are buying up manufactured housing communities like mine, Elkview Mobile Home Park, and raising the lot rent to unconscionable amounts. I’ve owned my home for fourteen years and my lot rent never exceeded $225 per month. When one of these groups bought our community in 2022, they gave residents a 60-day notice, right before Christmas, that they were raising our rent from $225 to $525. That’s an 130 percent increase in just two months’ time.”

The average apartment in Princeton,, West Virginia – where this park is located – is $924 per month. So if $535 is “unconscionable” then what adjective applies to $924 per month? “Abhorrent”? “Extremely unconscionable”?

Here’s where all these articles fall flat. We live in the U.S. and our system is called “capitalism” which is completely different than “socialism”. In the U.S., the “free market” is what we rely on, and if people don’t want to pay $525 at Elkview then they should move to a place they feel is a better value for them. But it is not the right of the government to try to tell private property owners what they can charge. That’s a hallmark of “socialism”. Let’s compare this to a hamburger at McDonald’s. If the quarter pounder is $3, and you don’t want to pay $3, then you can go to Burger King and pay $2. But you can’t petition the government to force McDonald’s to reduce their burger to $2. Only mobile home parks face this type of insane criticism – probably because they don’t advertise in the media while McDonald’s does.

What is “sewage overflow” – just an event of a sewer back-up from a clog. Does it only impact two families in a giant park? If this was not a mobile home park, would it even make the news? The answer, of course, is “no”.

The city is spending about $70,000 per household to keep the rent lower by a few bucks? Read this quote from the artidle: “this amount will help keep the lot rents reasonable,” Harris-Shears said. “Residents will still experience an increase in their lot rent, but this stabilizes and reduces that impact.” So the rent will be no lower after the residents buy the park in all likelihood – possibly higher. Here’s a better idea: give each household $70,000 in cash and that will cover their lot rent – regardless of amount – for the next 15 years (if you include interest at 4% in a CD). What a bunch of idiots!

The average price of a mobile home last year was $125,000? Who wrote this article? I’m betting this was generated by AI or somebody who used the search term “modular” instead of “mobile home”. That’s what happens sometimes when you use the search term “manufactured home”. This article was then probably proofed by somebody who lives in Manhattan and thinks that $125,000 is “cheap”. Not sure if any of the data in this article is accurate, but it’s refreshing not to have another article bashing owners for raising rents, so I’ll consider that a win.

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.

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.

$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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?