Mobile Home Park News Briefing

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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?