Here we go again:

"We are looking mainly at keeping a trailer park a mobile home park. Maybe if they want to see the first option could be the tenants, give them the opportunity to purchase their land," said Schwarzburg, "If not, it would be good to offer the next buy to demand that it stay a mobile home park," The Texas Organizing Project says they hope Harris County can find a way to help country road mobile home tenants. 

The residents have no money but want to “buy” the mobile home park. Do you see the problem with that? These deals revolve around two things: 1) find a non-profit to provide the down payment and 2) find a non-profit to personally guarantee the mortgage. Then repeat every five years or so for 30 years. That’s just not going to happen. How many of these tenant-owned deals have ever made it to the final payoff of the mortgage? Any?

It would be more honest to simply call the “resident-owned” park concept what it truly is: the “non-profit-owned”. And, like any private sector owner, these non-profits can later simply sell the park off to another buyer when they lose interest in guaranteeing the debt or want their down-payment money back. I have showcased that exact outcome in many of these article reviews in the past.

The residents of Swiss Village Mobile Home Park in Ouray have reached a stalemate in their effort to buy the land underneath their homes, potentially casting doubt on the future of the park.

See, told you so. These deals are not about tenants buying the land but instead about finding non-profits to pony up the down-payment and guarantee the mortgage. And then there’s the small problem that a typical mobile home park mortgage has a 25 or 30-year amortization yet the non-profits only want to go about 5 years before jumping ship – just long enough to get the media attention and headlines. When long-term debt and short-term commitment collide the end result is disastrous.

No, to “save affordable housing” you need higher lot rents. Rents high enough that redevelopment is not as attractive. The “resident-owned” mobile home park model does nothing to reduce lot rent nor to save the park from the wrecking ball – in fact it creates higher rents and increases later redevelopment. Why? Because the residents are lousy at managing the property, collecting rents, and holding costs down. As the income declines, the non-profits that guarantee the debt retract their support, and the property goes back on the open market as a tear-down. Just read about the plight of the “resident-owned” park called Sans Souci in Colorado. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

In ten years, there will be a ton of articles like Sans Souci and many of those parks will have already been torn down. Just watch. This is a non-profit, virtue signaling fad that has no hope of long-term success. That’s why there are so few of these deals in America – the non-profits that personally guarantee the residents’ debt realize that this is not viable over a 30-year mortgage horizon.

The parks are closing and the land is being redeveloped BECAUSE THE LOT RENTS ARE NOT HIGH ENOUGH. It‘s not any more complicated than that. The same people that complain that rents rise too quickly are also the ones that then whine when the park is torn down to make way for a more profitable use. Surely, this can’t be that hard to grasp: THE SOLUTION IS TO FOCUS ON HOW HIGH LOT RENTS NEED TO BE FOR THESE PARKS TO CONTINUE TO BE MORE ATTRACTIVE AS MOBILE HOME PARKS RATHER THAN A DIFFERENT USE. Here’s an analogy. Tom is the best salesman at Ajax Tire company. He tells his boss “you know I’m getting a lot of other job offers at a higher salary than I get at Ajax so I’m going to maybe quit” to which the owner says “how dare you ask for more money, can’t you see how hard my life is?” So Tom resigns, goes to ABC Tire and Ajax later goes bankrupt. Wouldn’t it have been smarter for Tom’s boss to say “OK Tom, we don’t want to lose you, so how much more do we need to pay you?” Yes, obviously.

Last summer, more than 30 families lived in the RV community at Green Oak Ranch. Then in July, the nonprofit Solutions for Change was chosen to take the property over in a lease-to-own deal. That takeover doesn’t happen until Jan. 1, but eviction notices have already gone out.

There’s not a lot of detail in this article, but here we have a non-profit kicking out the residents of an RV park they have just taken over to supposedly “help” the residents. You see the Golden Rule is that “he who has the gold makes the rules”. And if the non-profits are required to personally guarantee the debt or the mortgage defaults, then the non-profit is really the owner and can do whatever it likes. The residents have simply traded a private-sector owner for a non-profit owner. They are no more in control of their destiny with a non-profit than they are with a for-profit, contrary to how these groups may try to spin it.

Now we come to the next part of the problem with tenant-owned communities:

“Our top priority was keeping housing affordable for the people here,” said Ben Ward, president of Olga Dor Homeowners Cooperative in a statement regarding the transaction. “Without this opportunity, many residents couldn’t afford another rent increase. Cooperative ownership lets us manage our community — setting our own rules, overseeing the budget and securing a stable future.”

If the tenants buy the park from the owner at the market price, they have the same debt load as the private sector, right? And the cost of water, sewer, insurance, property tax – and every other expense line item at the park – costs just the same if the tenants own it or the private sector, right? And these costs inflate at the same pace whether you’re a non-profit or not, right? OK, then explain to me how the resident-owned model saves these folks even a penny in monthly lot rent over an outside owner? Of course, you can’t because they don’t.

The only people who benefit from the tenants buying the park are the non-profits who pocket the fees from the transaction and get their five-minutes of fame. The residents are screwed as their own mismanagement yields rents that are as high or higher than a professional owner would charge, but the quality of life is greatly reduced due to poor operations. I again urge you to read about Sans Souci in Colorado for verification of this.

Another “non-profit-purchased” mobile home park which will probably limp along until later resold to a professional owner for all the reasons stated earlier.

Santa’s take on this: Non-Profit Naughty

Hopefully people in Maine are not so stupid as to forget that if you put an unfair cap on mobile home park lot rents the owners will simply tear them down and build apartments (see the Sweetwater article at the top of this column). You can’t get around the free market system, and price controls always result in disastrous consequences.

“Since the lots in question are designated and used for RVs, they do not meet the definition of mobile home lots,” Ubaldi told San José Spotlight. “City staff appear to not understand their own (policy) and state law. We are operating in full compliance with the (policy). There have been no illegal rent increases.”

Sounds correct to me. And then the city’s response shows they knew better:

“I thought we were trying to keep people from becoming homeless and unhoused and parking their RVs on the street, and I would think the city would want to get very much deeply involved in this — because that’s what’s going to happen to these people,” he said Thursday.

Sounds like the old Biden playbook: knowingly violate the law because you know it takes time for the court to react. The city’s goal had nothing to do with the actual law – simply deranged bureaucrats trying to pervert the law for their own amusement.

Many can no longer afford to live there, but leaving would mean abandoning the homes they own, and there is nowhere cheaper to go. 

I wrote an article recently regarding the McChicken sandwich at McDonalds, which has gone up 300% within two years, yet still sells just as well as when it was a dollar. Why? Because even at $3 it’s about the cheapest thing on the menu. In this case, you have mobile home park residents who say “I hate my landlord for giving me the cheapest place to live in my city”. It makes no sense. Shouldn’t the title to this article be “thank heavens they don’t redevelop this mobile home park”?

Are the folks that write these articles aware that housing is only the fifth highest monthly cost for the average American family? The four ahead of housing are healthcare, childcare, transportation and taxes. Why are there no articles addressing how punishing those costs are and how much they’ve gone up under the Biden regime? Once you fix those four, then you can talk about housing, in my opinion.

"We do not want to lose anyone at all in this park. And the only way we can do that is to raise another million-and-a-half," said Cook. There's been little money to be found among agencies and non-profits that work to create housing or prevent homelessness.

Here’s a reality check: raising $1.5 million by passing the hat around the mobile home park is not going to work. This is what I’ve been writing about for years: RESIDENTS DON’T BUY PARKS: NON-PROFITS DO. Finding non-profits that want to chip in cold hard cash is tough, if not impossible. That’s why virtually none of these tenant park purchases ever pan out.

According to the complaint, filed on Nov. 8, Del Cielo’s owners claim that the park has operated “de facto as an ‘older persons’ park,’”—meaning that the park had acted as a senior park without any formal legal recognition—and the park’s leases and rules do not guarantee that the park would remain a senior park in perpetuity. 

We’ve seen a lot of these deals over the decades, in which a “senior” park does not have the legal designation and was literally nothing more than the owner pretending to be a 55+ property. Sounds like the city is screwed in this case, and they better back off before they all get sued.

The Urban Group did confirm that tenants of the park will have priority access to apartments in Li’l Abner III, the adjacent building that’s currently under construction, as well as any future affordable housing built on the park, “including the first month free,” the company added. Li’l Abner’s closure comes as mobile home parks throughout Miami-Dade are being shuttered. They generally occupy large pieces of land and are relatively cheap to buy out, making them sought-after targets for developers looking to build denser, multi-family units or commercial projects.

This is the same article as above (there were no less than 9 similar articles on this same topic) but what’s interesting in this one is that it’s revealed that the Sweetwater park is being torn down to build apartments. I’ve been writing forever that LOW LOT RENTS = REDEVELOPMENT and that’s exactly what’s happening here. What would the lot rent have needed to be to keep the park from being torn down? I’m not sure. But America is going to have to realize that mobile home park land can be used for many other things and that the insanely low lot rents (around $300 per month on average versus $2,000 per month for apartments) means that every park in the U.S. is a potential target for a different use.

“What they are doing now, they are going around and collecting data. They’ll take that data and plug it into a system called crisis track,” said Bradenton Beach Building Department’s Darin Cushing. He said that this data will then be used to determine if the home meets the threshold of suffering substantial damage, which means it would cost 50% or more of the structure’s market value to get it back to its normal condition. If that is the case, Cushing said, “The owners are required to bring that building into compliance with flood code, building code, and fire code as well.”

From the same FEMA that brought you the classic “don’t render aid to anyone with a Trump sign in their yard” now comes a new hit that is at least egalitarian “don’t render aid to anyone period”. How can FEMA take this moment to suddenly change the rules of the game and start declaring properties unworthy of aid when the whole point is to help people out that got flooded? This is the cruelest policy I’ve ever seen.

“neighbors appeal to the "goodwill" of the owner…”

The owner of this park in Sweetwater, Florida wants to redevelop the land into another use. He has apparently taken all the correct legal steps. But the residents want him to chip in 45 MILLION DOLLARS to them as an act of goodwill – plus give them another 6 months to get out. Gee, that’s not asking for much, right?

I know that there used to be an America that had common sense. Deep down, surely it still exists. How did people get this insane? I guess that watching the Biden administration continually violate Supreme Court rulings (the evictions moratorium, student debt forgiveness, etc.) has empowered them to simply ask for whatever meets their fancy and hope that they can coerce it out of good-natured business people without any ramifications.

But, at the end of the day, there’s this one obstacle they will have to contend with: the actual law. I know it’s no fun, but that’s one line of defense they will not prevail on. So, they better start packing.

This story is wrong on so many levels.

FEMA is demanding that all park residents who were flooded in Hurricane Helene raise their mobile homes two feet above the base floodplain elevation (BFE) to get their permits to move back in after Hurricane Helene wrecked their homes. Now the city has agreed to give these victims temporary permits for one year so they can make repairs and move back in while they save up enough to raise the mobile homes up in the air, which they clearly cannot afford to ever do. This is basically forcing them to invest their life savings into short-term repairs only to lose their homes a year from now when they can’t afford to raise them up in the air at a cost of thousands of dollars. In the hard-money lending business that is called “loan to own” in which the lender hopes for the borrower to default so they can take the property away. This proposal is equally sinister.

People complain that mobile home park owners are cruel to raise the rent $10 per month but FEMA and city hall, in this case, are literally destroying these people’s lives – and gutting their savings – with impossible demands that are clearly never going to be successfully accomplished.

Why shouldn’t California follow Maine’s example? It’s a sure-fire way to get mobile home parks torn down while giving the appearance that you are really concerned about the plight of the trailer park tenants. What a great con.

Now, following major damage, FEMA and local fire agency leaders are saying most of the homes do not meet health and safety codes. The homes must now be re-assessed to see if major construction can be done – like raising the base elevation of the home 12 feet.

See a trend here? City fathers are using FEMA as the tool to get their mobile home parks torn down and the residents out of their city limits. They must be celebrating this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get rid of lower income folks from within their city boundaries.

Other than L.L. Bean I’m not that familiar with what Maine provides for America other than a whole bunch of woke nonsense. This new concept of mobile home park specific rent control is so dumb that even an academic from Duke University sees the problem:

Charles Becker, an economist at Duke University who studies the mobile home market, said that while keeping affordable housing affordable is important, he agrees with Rollain that rent control is not the best way to contain those costs. I’m uneasy about outright rent control because it essentially transfers ownership rights fairly arbitrarily,” Becker said. “If it were me, I would build new communities with city [or] county money to let market forces keep costs down.”

So what’s next? I’m sure this concept will be tested in the courts and, if rent control prevails, the park will be torn down and redeveloped into a better use that has no rent control. Of course, it will first be offered to the residents who will fail to raise the money needed to buy it (as already happened before) and will then be homeless. The city gets its secret dream of no mobile home parks and, at the same the time, can pretend that they did it all to save the residents from “evil” landlords.

Residents find red tags on their doors before inspections even take place

Yup, it’s pretty clear what’s going on. Cities are loving FEMA’s stance that opens the door for them to get rid of all those hated mobile home park residents. City managers across America are probably on Google right now trying to figure out how much dry ice you have to drop into clouds from chartered airplanes to trigger major weather events.

The title says it all:

“Montana’s mobile home park residents struggling to stay in their homes as lot rents rise”

So apparently in Montana the only cost that’s going up is mobile home park rent. No, wait a minute, I’m not sure that’s true. In fact, the U.S. Government’s own websites show that rent is only the fifth largest expenditure for the average America household, with health insurance, childcare, transportation and income taxes all coming in ahead of rent. Costs under “Bidenomics” went up 20% across the board for the average U.S. household. So why focus on mobile home park lot rents at all?

Of course, it’s because today’s young journalists are all members of the “Free Rent Movement” and since they lost the election (by a landslide) they’re going to have to try to brainwash the average reader on the few remaining items that haven’t been crushed by the November 5th results. Good luck with that.

FLOWER POWER SCORE: 10

Lennon, who owns eight mobile home communities, said that increase was needed because the previous owner was charging too little for too long — the park has only seen two rent hikes over the last five decades, he said. That left the park poorly maintained, he said, with a backlog of costly upgrades needed. Since his purchase, Lennon has paved roads, added fencing and installed new mailboxes, among other improvements.

Look, all of this “Free Rent Movement” nonsense is simply not going to work. If you deny a property owner’s legal right to raise rents to market levels, they’ll simply tear the park down and put something else on the land that is more profitable. Now it looks like the ‘Free Rent” folks have a new plan: let’s just buy up all the mobile home parks in the U.S. and then artificially suppress the rents. Only one problem: to service the debt, they’ll still have to raise the rent just as much. And then, of course, they’ll have to also raise the rent to account for higher prices on water, sewer, electricity, insurance, property tax, etc. By the end of the movie the tenants pay the same rent if they own it then they would with a regular investor owning it.

But it turns out worse. Because the tenants don’t really buy these properties, non-profits do. The non-profit originators go through the exercise to get up-front fees which they pocket. However, the loans are personally guaranteed by a different non-profit (the lender will not accept the tenant’s personal guarantee as they have no assets) on typically a 5-year loan term. When it comes due, the non-profit guarantor can simply lose interest in the renewal and then the property gets sold back to a regular investor. In other words, it’s a racket. And all the residents get out of the deal is lousy management and poor living conditions from the amateur management of their fellow residents. And all for the privilege of being a promo piece for the non-profits before they cut them loose.

For the truth about these “tenant owned” parks, look no further than the story of Sans Souici in Colorado https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/22/sans-souci-boulder-county-mobile-home-park-challenges/. It details the miserable failure that these deals become.

FLOWER POWER SCORE: 10

For four years we heard the Biden administration talk about how they were going to create affordable housing. Yet, nothing ever materialized (like most of their policies). But here’s a real-life demonstration of why you will never see any new mobile home parks built in the U.S. until the end of time:

One of the night’s most debated items was William Clayton Mills’ proposal to rezone five acres on Bell Road for a mobile home park. Represented by John Dotson, the application faced steep opposition. Justin Kittle, Millie Hopkins, Attorney Andrew Lavoie, and Mike Deal stood firm against it, citing concerns about road conditions and the community’s capacity to handle additional housing. Lavoie’s call for those opposed to stand showed a room nearly full of people against the mobile homes, underscoring local resistance to the project. Ultimately, the board voted to deny the request, with only Commissioner Anthony Simmons and Timmy Rushing in favor. Even with Commissioner Conner stating that some of the people in the crowd didn't even live close to the proposed mobile home park, he still denied approval. 

I’ve applied for small park expansions before, gone to the zoning meeting, and almost needed a police escort to get to my car to save me from being lynched by the angry mob.

So ends the nonsense that you can force America’s cities and towns to build more affordable housing. You can’t. They hate mobile home parks with a passion.

FLOWER POWER SCORE: 10

Owners of mobile and manufactured homes in Maryland’s coastal communities and their insurance agents are having difficulty finding insurance coverage as carriers pull away from the market. The problem is squeezing owners who want to sell their mobile or manufactured homes. They can’t sell to buyers who need home insurance to satisfy lenders, so their pool of potential buyers is limited to those able to pay cash. Local officials are worried that this, in turn, is reducing property values.

The flood insurance business has been a scam from the beginning. It takes in around $4 billion a year nationally yet has losses maybe ten times that amount. So the insurance companies are finally pulling out. You can’t blame them. “Free Rent” folks will claim it’s the fault of evil landlords but the truth is that the insurance industry is simply no longer willing to prop up reckless behavior by sponsoring living in areas that tend to go under water on a regular basis.

FLOWER POWER SCORE: 8

The tenants want to buy their mobile home park to fend off the evil landlord that might buy it. But there’s a big problem:

The homeowner leaders of the newly formed Milner Park Community Cooperative are in active negotiations with the out-of-state investor/owner trying to purchase the Milner Mobile Home Park property. But negotiations currently find the two sides more than $2 million apart.

So the residents are asking strangers to send in $2 million to bridge the gap:

For anyone who might like to help the homeowners purchase the land under their homes, tax-deductible donations can be made through nonprofit Yampa Valley Community Foundation.

Here’s the problem: it’s not gonna happen. Not ever. Not even close.

It might be time for the “Free Rent Movement” folks to acknowledge that their “tenant-owned” fantasy just doesn’t work in real life.

In real estate, cash is king. If you have none, then don’t bother to show up to play. End of story. Standing around with a can on the street corner might score you $10 from strangers, but not $2 million.

FLOWER POWER SCORE: 10