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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

OK, I’m trying to be patient. Maybe some of these writers wrapped up college during Covid and on-line learning didn’t work for them. But this has to be one of the dumbest quotes of all time: “some manufactured home park residents in and around Sequim said they’ve received increased rents on land leaving them with less money to live.” Is there a way that rent could go up and they could have more money to live? This is, yet again, woke journalism in the state of Washington. You simply cannot mandate price levels in a capitalist society. That’s called socialism or communism. When the state government aspires to be less capitalist, it’s time to start moving to another state.

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?

It’s always been a lot easier to build RV parks than mobile home parks. That’s because the RV industry has done a great job of promoting itself (the “Go RVing” campaign) and people in RVs don’t go to school at a cost of $8,000 per kid to the city and county. The failure of the mobile home industry to put any money or effort into PR has created a scenario where the average American has a terrible opinion of the product.

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.

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.

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.

This is going to be a real problem for California park owners as insurance rates are going to skyrocket. No wonder so many catastrophe movies (like San Andreas) are based in California. It’s not just because the studios are there. Between earthquakes, fires – and now flooding – this is becoming the place to buy property with a short shelf life.

This quote says it all: “measures being mulled by senior Biden administration officials include sealing eviction records, standardizing rental leases and promoting a right to counsel for tenants facing off with landlords in housing court. Another possibility could be a federal campaign to curb discrimination against affordable housing voucher holders based on their source of income, a practice challenged as a fair housing violation.” That has to be the dumbest list of all time, and none of those things would improve the position of renters in any way. So here’s my list by comparison: “relax the UBC so that modular homes can be built on vacant city lots, offer tax incentives for residential property owners not to redevelop into a non-residential use, and expand the Section 8 program so that it is available to more people”. Of course, I win. But when you take on the Biden administration, that’s not a very high bar.

It’s the classic tale the media hates most: lot rents are too low and the park gets razed to make way for apartments. If the lot rents had been higher, the park would still be a park, in all likelihood. But the residents would have fought tooth and nail against that, and the media would have jumped on the bandwagon to publicly shame the owner. So the correct solution was to simply demolish the park and make it into a more profitable use. I have tried to explain this to the media for years now, but they refuse to accept the reality of economics. Mobile home park residents nationwide need to accept the fact that mobile home parks can be other types of uses, too, and if rents are not higher then parks will be bulldozed. You can’t have it both ways. I wish that MHAction would stop inspiring people to make themselves homeless.

Boy, they sure showed the world who’s boss. A non-profit recently “went under contract to buy a 20-unit mobile-home park outside of Glenwood Springs for $2.4 million in an attempt to buck the trend of displacement and affordable-housing destruction at the hands of private-equity groups buying Colorado parks.” I guess the park owner is laughing all the way to the bank, while the non-profit puts this grand tale all over its website. Here are some real-life news bulletins for this same Vail newspaper: 1) you could have given those tenants $120,000 in cash each and they would have been much better off 2) institutional investors would never look at a 20 space park (it’s about 20% of the target size of 100 lots) and 3) $2.4 million is a rounding error in today’s America if you want to be a big shot in philanthropy. That might make you sound big at the cocktail party at the Red Roof Inn lobby, but that’s about it.

Lot rent of $518 per month is not in any way unreasonable. Apartments average around $2,000 per month nationwide. Yes, it’s going to keep going up. Yes, corporate owners are going to raise rents as part of bringing old parks back to life. Yes, after all the hikes they make there’s no place even remotely as cheap to live. Yes, it’s called the free market because you’re free to move out if you want to. Yes, even with higher rents the park is full. Yes, there are 10 people willing to pay the higher rent for every 1 that won’t.

When the park has vacancy it will lower rent. It has none and the phone is ringing off the wall. Why are park owners held to a higher level than milk and eggs, which have doubled in the past few years?

It’s pretty sad when the best part of the article is in the comments section, such as this truthful obersvation "it should be illegal for the government to tell property owners how much rent they can charge tenants. They won't charge more than the market will support because they don't want to have vacancies, so there is always a balance between supply and demand. Anytime the government artificially tips the scale we go into the land of unintended consequences.” So let’s get this story right. This idiotic town in California has decided that the park owner can only raise rents by 70% of CPI with a cap of 4%. Just wait for the “Land For Sale” sign to go up and the park to be become an apartment complex or Home Depot store. Where do you find idiots like this?

Only a state bureaucrat would think that they are helping mobile home park residents by making a new law that stops park owners from “requiring a tenant to make unnecessary upgrades” to their homes. Essentially they’re dooming the 98% of park residents who take care of their property so that the 2% with five non-running cars piled in the yard, their home painted three colors and aluminum foil for curtains won’t have to bother cleaning up their act. Then you add on the new law that requires tenants to have first option to buy the park – something that they virtually never exercise and that slows down the sales process by months – and you have the kind of genius thinking that has made America the mess that it has become. Let me make it more clear for these legislators of Montana. If you pass these two bills you are going to simply have park owners tear more parks down and put in things that have less ridiculous restrictions – and nobody would blame them.

OK, I understand that this park is in California. But let’s do the math here. There are roughly 300 mobile homes. They are going to spend around $80 million to relocate these people who are currently living in mostly pre-HUD trailers. That’s $266,000 per household. Has anyone in California travelled beyond the state lines and visited, for example, Arizona, where you can get a nice stick-built home with a garage – and throw in a new car – for less than $266,000? Just buy each household one of those houses for cash, give it to them, and tell them to move to Arizona. What are these bureaucrats thinking?

This article is beyond stupid. Massey’s mobile home park sold because the long-standing mom and pop couldn’t manage the property any longer. The new owner paid a fortune for it and now requires people to pay their rent on time and keep up their property. And those 2% of the residents who take offense to living in civilized society don’t like it one bit. How is this news and why does anyone waste time on these type of stories?

The Dikemans just want to build a nice little RV park. They trusted the city bureaucrats and it blew up in their faces. This is a testament to not only the dangers of greenfield development, but also the need for tighter due diligence and not letting people tell you things as opposed to getting them in writing.

Sounds like the park owner needs to replace the water lines. Needs to give the residents and the city and state the plan and timing, go to the lender and find a hardscrabble way to get it started. In the interim the tenants and authorities need to back off and give them time to get it done. Hiding from all of this doesn’t sound like it’s helping. But, to be honest, the reporter is so anti-business that you don’t really know if any of these assertions by the tenants are even true.