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.

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 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.

$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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Archway Communities is converting four dormitory buildings at the former Johnson & Wales University campus in Denver into 154 affordable apartment homes.

The nonprofit purchased the dorms for $13 million from the Urban Land Conservancy (ULC), which acquired the campus in 2021 in partnership with Denver Public Schools and the Denver Housing Authority.

Archway will adapt the buildings into studio, one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments for individuals and families earning between 30% and 60% of the area median income. Situated on the historic campus that was once home to Colorado Women's College, the new Mosaic Community Campus currently includes a central quad, community kitchens operated by the Kitchen Network, St. Elizabeth’s School, and a host of other amenities.

"We have found a great partner in Archway Communities to preserve these beautiful buildings for a community beneficial use and provide much-needed affordable housing," said Aaron Martinez, ULC vice president of operations and sustainability.

Archway closed on two of the buildings at the end of 2021 and closed on the second two buildings and its construction financing in December 2022. Our financing stack for the acquisition and adaptive reuse includes $34 million of historic and low-income housing tax credit equity from Hudson Housing Capital and Chase Community Capital, a $16 million permanent loan from Boston Capital and Western Alliance Bank, $7.5 million from the Colorado Division of Housing, and $3.9 million from the city of Denver. The land that the dorms are located on will be held in a renewable 99-year ground lease by ULC to ensure its use for community benefit in perpetuity.

Archway expects to begin delivering units for occupancy in early 2024. “We are extremely proud of our team’s effort to close financing and get construction started here,” said Julie Stern, Archway’s director of real estate. “Our partners at the Denver Housing Authority, Shopworks, Taylor Kohrs, SB Clark, Boston Capital, and Hudson Capital, were key to our ability to make this happen and ultimately to begin delivering much-needed affordable housing to the Park Hill Neighborhood.”

In a separate move, Archway also recently closed on the purchase of Montview Manor, an 88-unit property for seniors in Denver. The sales price was not disclosed.

Archway purchased the building from the Montview Building Corp., an affiliate of theMontview Presbyterian Church.

“This is a naturally occurring affordable housing community that did not have formal long-term rent restrictions,” said Archway CEO Sebastian Corradino. “In other words, it could have easily been converted to a market-rate apartment project. We are proud to have partnered with the Montview Building Corp. to ensure that this property will remain affordable to low- and moderate-income seniors for many years to come.”

Financing for the Montview Manor transaction involved a first mortgage through Impact Development, secondary financing from a Colorado Housing & Finance Authority program designed to support preservation projects, acquisition financing from the Colorado Division of Housing, and grant and loan funds through the Denver Department of Housing Stability.

The State of Washington wants to enact rent control. Why not? They’ve made every other bad political decision they possibly could for years now.

A 41-space mobile home park is shutting down. And it’s the narrative the media fears most. Here’s the key line from the article: “in the eviction letter, sent out this week, it says ongoing infrastructure issues have forced the park to shut down”. That translates to low rents make it economically unfeasible to rebuild the infrastructure. So the media won with their public shaming odyssey with this owner. They talked the owner into redeveloping the land into a more profitable use rather than face the wrath of tenants complaining about higher rents and the media trumpeting that. The media cannot handle the fact that the park owner – if you complain enough – can elect just to raze the property and end the harassment.

Let me get this straight – you’re going to buy a 20-space mobile home park for $2.4 million to make it a resident-owned community. That’s $120,000 per resident. The people in the mobile home park have limited funds. Why wouldn’t it be smarter to move them to a much lower-cost state and buy them a nice brick house for $120,000 in cash, and tell them “OK, you’re set for life and all you have to do is earn enough to cover utilities, taxes, insurance and food. They could then get a job anywhere at minimum wage and have a great life. When I read these articles it always makes me wonder if the writers and non-profits have ever ventured to states like Louisiana where you can buy a nice brick house all day long for $100,000 or so. You can see them on Realtor.com. Why would you be spending huge money to keep people living in a state they can no longer apparently afford?

Does the name “factory-built” housing sound attractive to anyone? In a country in which we always equate hand-built assets as superior, branding anything as “factory-built” seems to me to be a negative. I wish the industry could come up with better names.

I love woke articles like this that portray residents not buying their park as some type of a crisis. The residents tried  to buy it during their “first option” and failed. No reason was given for the failure, but it was probably the fact that the property needed substantial infrastructure repair. The new owner is replacing the roads and utilities, and raising the rents as a result. But all the writer wants to talk about is the higher rent, not all the improvements that went with it. The writer states: “three residents confirmed that their rent increased by $125 following the road completion in Nov. 2022. For resident Sheri Payne, that hike represented a nearly 40% increase over her previously stabilized rent. The writer fails to tell you that the park’s rent is probably $300 per month under market even at that new rent level. Could the residents have completed all this infrastructure work and kept the rents low? Absolutely not. This is nonsense.

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.

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?

For decades, the government has propped up coastal areas by offering flood insurance at huge losses to the U.S. taxpayer, rather than forcing people to move inland who can’t afford the insurance. In this case, the goal seems to be how to maintain people who don’t earn enough money to live in an area to remain in place. Is that really helping anybody? Surely not when the subsidies would give them a higher quality of life somewhere else.

You have to love an article that starts with “how can the owners sleep at night?” That’s probably true – they can’t sleep because they can’t decide whether to redevelop this property into an apartment complex or a big box retail center. When will the media realize that if you publicly shame owners for raising rents and enacting rules then they will take the easy road and simply tear these old things down and build higher uses for the land? Do they still teach economics at colleges that offer journalism?

A family owned a mobile home park. They got an offer from a land developer that’s three times its assessed value as a park. The developer told the paper “It’s an optimal location for alternative use, but that use is yet to be determined”. Everyone is mad. The tenants are mad that the park is being torn down and they are being displaced. This is what happens when residents fight higher rents and the media delights in publicly shaming owners. If the owner had raised the rents more, maybe the park would exist. But he would have had to fight the media’s public shaming, so why bother? Maybe someone should send this article to all of the above journalists?

The best quote in this article came from a resident that said “he’s looking to sell his mobile unit and move to housing that’s more stable. But he has yet to find anything near the rent he pays for his lot, which is $850 a month.” Absolute genius. Harass the park owner in the middle of a blizzard demanding that frozen water lines be fixed, get the State of Colorado and media involved to advance your false narrative, and then whine when the solution is to maybe have to move out. Here’s a message to everyone in the U.S.: mobile home parks are not non-profits and if you harass owners enough, they will simply put up the “Land For Sale” sign and you will be cut loose. If you want a world in which there is no economics then sign up for Section 8 apartments and let the government determine your future.

These reports are great for large, institutional owners, but you have to determine your rents the old fashioned way by calling the competition yourself. There’s just no easy way to figure out where you fit in regards to rent levels.

America has been under a cloud of endless insurance losses for years now – from fires to hurricanes. Given society’s obsession with litigation and the simple fact that insurance companies are businesses and are focused on profits and not losing money annually, there is no doubt that insurance in California and Florida will be endlessly harder to obtain and retain except at huge cost increases. And that will naturally translate into much higher lot rents in those markets. The woke media might as well start writing the articles now to criticize those given rent boosts, as the insurance picture in California and Florida is becoming desperate.