Mobile Home Park News Briefing

KILLINGWORTH, CT — State Attorney General William Tong has launched an inquiry into longstanding property management concerns at Beechwood Community mobile manufactured home park in Killingworth.

Tong has received numerous complaints over the last year from Beechwood Community residents who have seen sustained, escalating rent hikes despite deteriorating conditions, according to a statement.

Beechwood residents, like many residents of mobile manufactured home parks, own their homes but pay monthly rent for the lot of land they sit on which covers various common amenities, including property maintenance.

Beechwood was acquired by Sun...

In the summer of 1998, Ken Hilderbrandt was contemplating buying a bigger boat — or a beachfront trailer on a wave-swept bluff in Montauk overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. 

“There was a [for-sale] sign on the window, rotted off,” Hilderbrandt, 85, told The Post, recalling the dilapidated trailer sitting on a 1,972-square-foot lot of land within Montauk Shores, the former seaside campsite for working-class vacationers, locals and surfers. Hilderbrandt, who owns a jet-ski rental business in Bellport, saw the potential. Sure, it was a fixer-upper off a dirt road — but the million-dollar ocean views pulled him in like a riptide. The asking...

MISSOULA, Mont. — Public comment is now open on a proposal to turn a mobile home park into a resident-owned community in Missoula.

The area is Bonnie's Place in the Franklin to Fort neighborhood.

In a meeting on Monday night, Missoula City Council considered granting more than $181,000 to a Montana nonprofit to help buy up the park.

Neighborworks Montana is leading the project with an estimated budget of just under $3 million.

The deal would preserve housing for 28 households that rent or own homes in the park.

According to city officials, if Bonnie's Place isn't purchased by March 21, it will be sold to an outside buyer and likely...

When my husband and I carefully planned for our retirement, we didn’t anticipate rent gouging. I have been a nurse for 43 years. I’m still working for Veterans Affairs as a nurse case manager. When my husband retired from his career as a business owner in 2019, we sold our home in Salmon Creek to downsize and cut back on our expenses, in anticipation of the need to make ends meet on a fixed income.

We moved to Woodland into a manufactured home we bought. When we moved here the monthly rent for space in this park was $685 a month. When we signed the paperwork, the property management said our rent won’t be increased within the first year....

OLYMPIA — Whether you call it rent control or stabilization, the bill cleared a hurdle Friday as the 2023-2025 state legislative session approached the halfway point.

Two bills friendly to tenants and manufactured-mobile (MMH) homeowners were pushed ahead with “do pass” committee recommendations forwarded to their respective Senate and House rules committees, with the March 8 deadline to make it out of their chamber of origin fewer than two weeks away.

Friday was the tipping point for bills to pass out of committees from fiscal, Senate Ways and Means and Transportation committees.

One housing-related proposal that got the go-ahead adds...

GILBERT, Ariz., Feb. 28, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Roots Management Group has partnered with DoorDash's Project DASH to deliver canned foods and dry goods to Roots residents in need in Arizona manufactured housing communities. Project DASH is DoorDash's initiative to empower food banks, food pantries, and social impact organizations to leverage DoorDash logistics to increase access in their communities. Since Project DASH was launched in 2018, it has powered over 3.5 million deliveries of an estimated more than 60 million meals in the U.S. and Canada.

Roots surveyed residents in seven of its Treehouse Communities to determine how best to meet...

Attorney General William Tong has sent a letter to Sun Communities, Inc. management, opening an inquiry into longstanding property management concerns at Beechwood Community mobile manufactured home park on Route 81, according to a release issued by his office. The manufactured home park has been the epicenter of complaints by residents who claim a steady rise in rentals fees and the reduction of services has placed many residents on fixed incomes in a position where they may not be able to afford to stay in their homes.

Residents of Beechwood and several other area home parks owned by Michigan-headquartered Sun Communities...

The Cheney City Council will introduce a zoning ordinance on Tuesday night that will put residents of the North Cheney Mobile Home Park in the crosshairs.

The ordinance would rezone a lot located off State Highway 904 for mixed-use development, worrying some residents at the mobile home park that it’s just the first step before they are ultimately evicted.

“I don’t want to live in a tent in Spokane,” said Douglas Brunell, a 73-year-old resident and Air Force veteran who bought a mobile home in 2006 and has lived at the park for the past 17 years.

Plans for the property are “kind of to be determined,” said Clifton Trimble, land use planner...

San Rafael R.V. Park moves to evict tenants in wake of Ninth Circuit Court decision

Nearly all residents of the R.V. Park of San Rafael, in California, received eviction notices in early February after the property owner, K&M Family Trust, lost a rent battle in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Donna L. Chessen, trustee of the K&M Family Trust, argued that the City of San Rafael misapplied its Mobilehome Rent Stabilization Ordinance (“MRSO”) to her property, the R.V. Park of San Rafael, representing an illegal “taking.” A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit disagreed.

The court ruled that San Rafael’s MRSO...

ORIENT, Ohio — At least two homes in a mobile home community flipped due to powerful storms that moved through central Ohio on Monday.

The Pleasant Township Fire Department said multiple agencies were called to the Fox Lair Trailer Park on Goosehollow Circle around 4:30 p.m., just as the storms were moving through the area.

The fire department said two homes flipped and people were trapped inside. Everyone was safely taken out of the homes, but some residents suffered minor injuries, according to the sheriff's office.

The sheriff's office said a tornado hit the community, but that will need to be confirmed by the National Weather...

NORTON SHORES, Mich. — Residents of a Muskegon County mobile home park are hunkering down without any running water. 

One resident of Oaks Mobile Home Park is now coming forward after he says the park cut off their water on Monday without telling them.

"What do we do?" said James Barber.

Barber says he has called this place home for just about the last 16 years – yet, at the moment, he says it's unlivable.

"They're treating us like second-rate citizens, like we're peasants. And I'm fed up," he told 13 ON YOUR SIDE Wednesday.

Until the water is sorted out, Barber moved his fiancée and kids across town into a hotel room. 

"So...

MANCHESTER — Several months ago, when more than a dozen state agency officials came to the Manchester Community Library to talk about ways towns could use federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars, interim Town Manager Leslie Perra and town Assessor Gordon Black were in attendance and asking questions about how those dollars might help the town extend sewer service up Main Street.

It paid off — to the tune of as much as $603,756 of the cost of running sewer service and water, from the library north to the Manchester Mobile Home Park. Word arrived Monday afternoon that the town had been awarded the grant, Black said.

That sum, or 20 percent...

The clock is ticking on the future of a bayside community in Bradenton Beach.

Homeowners in the Pines Trailer Park, 103 Church Ave., Bradenton Beach, must decide: Will they buy the park?

The Jackson Partnership LLLP of Bradenton, which lists Richard and William Jackson as partners, owns the land-lease community. In this case, the land lease allows the owner of the mobile home to lease the land where the home is situated. The most common land-lease communities are manufactured home communities.

The partnership made the homeowners association an offer Jan. 25 to buy the park for $16 million, according to some residents.

The offer triggered...

WINTER HAVEN, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES, February 20, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ -- “I actually grew up in one. Sorry for the offense,” said an email from Rob Carson to MHLivingNews. Beyond the apology for using the word 'trailer,' Carson was explaining that he grew up in what might be called 'a mobile home.' is a nationally syndicated WCBM talk radio personality and a Newsmax TV host. Carson was responding to concerns raised in a recent report on MHLivingNews that cited him and financial advice guru Dave Ramsey (Ramsey Solutions), among others, for purported factual and terminology errors about modern manufactured homes. Ramsey confirmed...

LAYTON — As jitters linger about the future of Cedarwood Mobile Home Park, some have left in search of a more stable place to live while others stay put, acknowledging their uncertain future.

“I want to take every last drop of my home,” said Gina Stone, one of those who has remained, even after the forced departure of residents living in 15 spaces last year to accommodate redevelopment plans.

She’s lived at the Layton mobile home park for 15 years, owned the unit she occupies since 2015 and suspects she’d have a hard time finding a replacement home, somewhere as cheap as Cedarwood, anyway. She pays $525 a month for the site where her...

The Blaine Planning Commission approved a second public hearing on whether large manufactured home parks should be allowed in east Blaine. The public hearing is scheduled for the April 13 meeting. 

The commission voted 4-1 during its February 9 meeting to reopen the public hearing after the commission failed to reach a consensus on their recommendation for Blaine City Council. Some commissioners asked for a second public hearing because they wanted to discuss more research they did after the December 8 hearing. 

About 20 audience members listened intently to the commissioners’ debate, which lasted over an hour. Remote participants,...

ROCHESTER — Bob’s Trailer Court is expected to be completely closed by June.

Less than five months after owners of the trailer park at 1915 Marion Road SE announced plans to develop the site into a senior housing complex, most occupants have either been evicted or removed as trespassers .

Four park residents, who sued Pennsylvania-based TSJ Parks LLC after their water service was unexpectedly turned off in November, appear to have agreed to move out of the park by May 31.

“I think this is all that’s left,” said Scott Kramer, a partner with TSJ Parks.

Calls to the tenants went unanswered, and the park is currently surrounded by a fence...

KALAMAZOO, MI -- The city of Kalamazoo signed an agreement allowing a nonprofit the option to buy or lease a site for use as a pod housing community, according to a representative of the nonprofit.

The agreement gives Housing Resources Inc. six months to initiate a lease or to purchase the site identified as a possible location for the pods, Housing Resources Inc. Associate Director Jacob Beach told Kalamazoo city commissioners during the Monday, Feb. 20, committee of the whole meeting.

The city of Kalamazoo signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the nonprofit Housing Resources Inc., that identifies the site, Beach said. Beach thanked...

CHENEY, Wash. -- Dozens of people living at the North Cheney Mobile Home Park are now fighting to save their homes, as a plan to develop the property could force those living there to find someplace new to live.

Many low-income families live at the park, and some say they could be homeless if the redevelopment project moves forward.

"Absolute total frustrations and anger," said Douglas Brunell, who lives at the North Cheney Mobile Home Park.

Living in the same mobile home for 17 years, Brunell is retired and on a fixed income.

On February 13 at the city's public hearing, he found out that he could be kicked off the property if...

The first rule in affordable housing is don’t lose what already exists. That backward step may soon happen in San Rafael, displacing low-income residents at 40 residences, unless the city acts decisively.

In a column last year, I suggested that an overlooked source of affordable rentals are mobile homes. There is no need for expensive construction. Traditionally, most park residents own their not-so-mobile structures, which are inexpensively customized for long-term living. All that’s needed is a concrete pad with drainage, water availability and electricity.

A recent incident at one Marin mobile home park is suddenly a hot topic. The...

After investing $72 million in improvements at Fairfield Lake State Park over three decades, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is losing its lease.

DALLAS — Fairfield Lake State Park, 96 miles south of Dallas, is expected to close permanently by the end of the month because its landlord is selling the land to a developer. 

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department received a lease termination notice from the owners of the 5,000-acre property. Vistra Corp. is selling the land to  Dallas-based real estate developer Shawn Todd and his firm, Todd Interests, for $110.5 million.

Todd announced the land will be turned into an exclusive...

Four years ago, as Houston recovered from Hurricane Harvey, city leaders turned to a decades-old model devised by civil rights activists and Black farmers to create permanently affordable homes at a scale and pace that no one had ever tried before.

The city’s ambitions caught the attention of housing advocates across the country.

“Mayor, I want to say the nation is excited about Houston,” Assata Richards, a third-generation resident of Houston’s Third Ward, told Mayor Sylvester Turner in the November 2018 City Council meeting where the project was unanimously approved.

“Houston could be the largest community land trust and a model for the...

“There’s an investment strategy hiding under the radar that has proven time and time again to be one of the best opportunities for investors, especially in times of uncertainty.” –52TEN–Mobile Home Park Investment Company

The main reason Mobile Home Parks are hot investments is that Mobile Homes are not mobile. It can cost as much to relocate a manufactured home as it would to move a stick-built home. The terms “Mobile Homes” and “Mobile Home Parks” falsely portray these homes and homeowners as portable.

Another reason these investment strategies are popular and able to hide “under the radar” is that mobile home parks and residents are...

(Hartford, CT) – Attorney General William Tong today sent a letter to Sun Community management opening an inquiry into longstanding property management concerns at Beechwood Community mobile manufactured home park in Killingworth. Attorney General Tong additionally submitted testimony regarding two legislative proposals seeking to ensure mobile home parks in Connecticut remain both affordable and well-managed.

Over the past year, the Office of the Attorney General has received numerous complaints from Beechwood Community residents in Killingworth who have seen sustained, escalating rent hikes despite deteriorating conditions. Beechwood...

Zoning laws for thousands of rural and agricultural acres in Volusia County could be changed to allow mobile homes as a permitted type of housing.

The issue is coming up for a second and final reading at Tuesday's County Council meeting, which will begin at 4 p.m. The item won't be heard earlier than 5:01 p.m.

If approved, the ordinance "would allow for mobile homes by right within all rural and agricultural zoning classifications," according to agenda materials. That includes the Resource Corridor (RC), Rural Agriculture (A-2), Transitional Agriculture (A-3 and A-4), Rural Residential (RR) and Rural Agricultural Estate (RA) zoning...