Mobile Home Park News Briefing

OLYMPIA — State lawmakers are considering legislation to slow down rent increases for apartments, single-family homes, and in mobile home communities where hundreds of seniors live on the North Olympic Peninsula.

The bills would add muscle to the Residential Landlord Tenant Act and the Manufactured/Mobile Home Landlord Tenant Act.

The new laws would add roadblocks to selling manufactured-mobile home parks, a last bastion of affordable housing for senior citizens, and insulate mobile home community residents from steep rent hikes.

It also would prohibit predatory rent practices in the home rental industry and beef up state laws protecting...

Nancy DeCamp can no longer bear to enter the home on lot 257. Her sister Tootie lived here, just a golf cart ride from where Nancy shares a place with her husband in their manufactured home community in central Pinellas County. After Tootie died in October, the DeCamps tried, without success, to sell her home. “It’s still Tootie’s house,” Nancy DeCamp said, her eyes welling. “It’s very hard to be there.”

The DeCamps never expected this problem in Caribbean Isles, nestled between Largo and Seminole. Selling in the 55-and-older park, their real estate agent said, was once so easy she scarcely had time to stake “for sale” signs. Then the...

FAIRFIELD — The Fairfield City Council approved a conditional permit for Leisure Living Estates during its meeting Monday, but has asked the owner of the trailer park to clean up several nuisances in the next three months.

Leisure Living Estates is a trailer park, or manufactured home park, on the west edge of Fairfield that is owned by Don Davis of rural Mt. Pleasant. In March 2022, Fairfield City Administrator Aaron Kooiker sent a letter to Davis indicating that the city had received complaints about the lots at Davis’s trailer park.

“On the majority of these lots, you will see dilapidated trailer homes, some of which do not even appear...

WATERFORD – A year after a Norwich developer floated an 8-30g proposal to build 47 manufactured homes on Clark Lane, neighbors showed up at a public hearing to oppose the project a second time – again citing environmental, safety and density concerns. 

Mark Branse, an attorney with Halloran Sage, who represented Kingstown Properties at the Conservation Commission hearing Thursday night, said the homes will be rentals and will include 14 affordable units – comprising 30% of the development under the state affordable housing statute.

The complex is slated for 8 acres that stretch behind a dozen houses that front Clark Lane just north of the...

Manufactured homes — also known as factory-built homes — are an increasingly popular housing option that can be more affordable to buy and own than site-built homes. If you are thinking about buying a manufactured home, you should consider how your home will be titled.

In contrast to a site-built home, a manufactured home is built in a factory before being delivered and permanently installed where you live. Depending on who owns the land you live on, you can title your home as personal or real property.

Real property, often called real estate, refers to land and any structures affixed to the...

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (WSBT) — A mobile home park shutdown is causing its 41 families to scramble to pack up and move.

The management tells them it is due to mounting maintenance expenses.

People living at Hollywood Mobile Home Park have 180 days to move out.

Those WSBT spoke with say they are not getting any move-out assistance and have to pay rent, all while trying to save up for a new place.

Homeowners at the trailer park want answers to the “blindsiding” news.

Some have lived there since the 60s.

In the eviction letter, sent out this week, it says ongoing infrastructure issues have forced the park to shut down.

Residents say otherwise.

"If...

In June, the residents of the Dotsero Mobile Home Park lost their $5.8 million bid to purchase the property they live on and become a resident-owned community. Instead, former owner Jim Condit accepted an all-cash offer for the same price from an outside buyer called Three Pillar Communities, a California-based company that invests in manufactured housing across the country.

According to its website, Three Pillar Communities operates 53 mobile home parks in 10 states as of Sept. 2022. The Dotsero park is the company’s third acquisition in Colorado, following the Fairplay Mobile Home Park and RV Retreat located in Johnstown.

Three Pillar...

A walk can be a good time to reflect on a journey.

On a stroll through the Durango, Colorado, mobile home park she moved to when she was 13, Alejandra Chavez stops at the unit her parents owned.

“They bought it for $3,000,” she says.

Chavez moved to southern Colorado from Mexico to live with her parents, who worked multiple jobs to make ends meet.

“The American dream is hard,” she says.

Chavez says it can be hard to find affordable housing in Durango. The average home goes for more than $700,000, according to Zillow.

For many, a mobile home is one of the few affordable options when looking for a place to live.

“We work in restaurants,...

The future is uncertain for the residents of Three Mile Mobile Home Park in Glenwood Springs.

Social-justice nonprofit Manaus has been working to secure financing and purchase the park for $2.4 million so they can sell it back to the residents under a relaxed timetable, but a volatile real estate market has made for a difficult process. (Aspen Public Radio received a $5,000 grant from Manaus in 2022.)

Many residents in the park own their units but pay a fee to rent the land underneath.

To purchase the park as a resident-owned community, Three Mile residents are entitled under the Mobile Home Park Act to 120 days to secure loans, make an...

Riverside County will begin demolishing or removing some trailers at Oasis Mobile Home Park, and putting up barriers to prevent new tenants from moving in, under an agreement approved Tuesday by the board of supervisors. It's part of an effort to ultimately close the park, which has been beset for decades by health and safety hazards, including high arsenic levels in the water system.

Supervisors voted 5-0 to approve a memorandum of understanding with the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians that will enable county authorities to do new enforcement at the mobile home park, which is within the Torres-Martinez Reservation.

Measures will...

A home ensures stability, diversity and safety for community members. In San Juan County, affordable homes are becoming increasingly difficult to find.

In 1948, the United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, recognizing adequate housing as a component of the human right to an adequate standard of living. However, housing once considered a human right is now more often treated as a commodity, slowly fraying the very fabric of communities across the nation.

According to multiple local housing experts, much like the rest of the country, there’s a critical housing emergency unfolding in the San Juan Islands, and it’s only...

ASHLAND – Five years after a group of tenants and the owner of a local mobile home park fought to keep the residential neighborhood open when the local school district sought to purchase the property for school expansion plans the owner has sold the trailer court and residents must be out by summer.

Brandon and Susan Parmer sold El Rancho Mobile Home Park at 2102 Furnas Street in Ashland to an investment company called Ashland Development, LLC.

Two days later, a letter was drafted to residents of the trailer court, which has been a part of the Ashland landscape for decades. The tenants of the 32 units making up El Rancho were...

A Carbondale-based social justice nonprofit group in December 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.

The Roaring Fork Community Development Corp. — the affordable housing arm of the nonprofit Manaus — intends to transfer ownership in coming years to 3-Mile Mobile Home Park’s residents, who own their trailers but pay rent for the land on which they sit.

The sellers are the children of the late Ben Krueger, a longtime Vail Valley resident...

The White House is weighing a range of executive actions to authorize and expand protections for renters, who pay a high share of their income toward housing nationwide and face little prospect of relief from the new Congress.

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.

A...

Owners of local condominiums and manufactured homes will now be notified when construction projects are proposed near them in the City of Sequim.

Previously, land and property owners within 300 feet of the proposed project would be notified of an application and pending meetings and comment periods.

City staff said they’ve received requests for the change as condo and manufactured homeowners own the structures but not the land — so they weren’t being notified.

Sequim city councilors unanimously approved an ordinance change at their Jan. 9 meeting to update Sequim Municipal Code (chapter 20.01).

Councilors directed staff on Dec. 12 to make...

Recognized as the industry standard for manufactured home community market analysis for more than 20 years, JLT Market Reports provide detailed research and information on manufactured home communities located in more 187 primary housing markets throughout the United States.

Datacomp, the publisher of JLT Market Reports and the nation’s #1 provider of market data for the manufactured housing industry, announces the publication of its January 2023 mobile home park comps with occupancy and other vital data on manufactured home communities from 14 markets in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Utah.

Recognized as the...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — When Mike Runnells moved to Bullitt County in 2020, it was his refuge from a divided city. The Army veteran had been living in Louisville’s west end, where the highly controversial police shooting death of Breonna Taylor had led to ongoing, nightly protests that sometimes brought crowds of police and protesters past his Portland home. 

•  Residents of Live Oaks in Mt. Washington have seen regular rent increases and ownership changes
•  With each new owner, new rent and regulations follow
•  Some residents have rent-to-own agreements with a previous owner, but they aren't being honored
• The Census...

The water issues prompted inquiries from both the Summit County Public Health Department and the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, or DOLA, which issued a cease and desist order against the park’s landlord on Jan. 3 that was then enforced by a motion filed by Attorney General Phil Weiser on Jan. 12. 

DOLA told Farmers Korner landlord Lori Cutunilli it received a complaint Dec. 23 that certain residents at the mobile park had been “without running water and/or...

Construction has been going forward full steam ahead at the west end of Hafen Lane in Mesquite. Nearly two years after receiving approval from the city, the Mesquite Trails RV Park is beginning to really take shape.

The site grading on the 20-acre parcel is completed, and the utility connections for the 193-space RV park have been installed. The first of three buildings to be built on the site has gone vertical. Work has also begun on the central recreational hub of the park including a large clubhouse, swimming pool, pickleball courts and various other recreational amenities.

The entrance of the park will be off of Hafen Lane. A new road...

You have to wonder how some people sleep at night.

Especially people like the owners of Valley Community, the trailer park at Fruitvale Boulevard and North 16th Avenue in Yakima.

Since taking over the small park in 2021, Hurst & Son — a Port Orchard-based company that deals in real estate investment, property management, construction — has raised rent from $350 a month to $600 in the past year. They’re also limiting tenants’ water use, and they no longer pay for garbage services.

Why? No reason, apparently — they just can. The YH-R tried repeatedly to reach the company but got no responses to numerous emails and phone calls.

Residents...

ACAMPO — Nearly 200 people were evacuated from a mobile home park on Sunday and Monday after another round of atmospheric rivers brought heavy rain and flooding to the area. A mandatory evacuation was ordered for the park early Monday afternoon.

The San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office said it closed Woodbridge Road east of Highway 99 just after noon on Sunday due to localized flooding. By 2 p.m., Sheriff’s Office deputies, along with crews from the Lodi, Woodbridge, Mokelumne and Lathrop/Manteca fire departments began evacuating about 175 residents from the Arbor Mobile Home Park, located at 19690 Highway 99 frontage road.

Closer to 7...

Dec. 6 was a big day for Santa Rosa mobile homeowners who’d spent months or even years advocating for tighter limits on rent increases in their parks.

After almost two decades, the City Council voted to update and restrict how much mobile home park owners can raise rent each year on the land under residents’ homes.

Previously, Santa Rosa’s mobile home rent control, which is governed by different laws than other housing, was tied to 100% of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the measure of prices for goods and services paid by consumers with a 6% cap. For 2023, that would have been 5.7%.

After negotiations between residents and owners...

RIVERDALE — The owner of the Riverdale mobile home park that’s being vacated to make way for development is offering residents $1,500 to $3,000 if they depart early.

Some residents have expressed concern about the financial hit they may face on leaving Lesley’s Mobile Home park given the typically higher cost of renting apartments and other housing types. “As we prepare for the park to officially close on May 31, 2023, park ownership is offering to help alleviate some of the financial burdens of vacating the park,” reads the letter park management sent last Friday, supplied by a former resident.

Per the offer, tenants may get $3,000 if...

WOODBRIDGE, Calif. — Crews were able to evacuate 175 people from a partially-flooded mobile home park in Woodbridge Sunday.

South San Joaquin County Fire Authority, Lodi Fire Department, Lathrop Manteca Fire District, Manteca Fire Department, Woodbridge Fire District and more were at the Arbor Mobile Home Park on Frontage Road to help evacuate residents and animals.

It was one of many calls that first responders have answered as some people try to leave their homes due to flooding from a barrage of winter storms.

South San Joaquin County Fire Authority said their crews were using hoses to move water away from homes in order to...

LEE COUNTY, Fla. — Since Hurricane Ian, the Indian Creek RV Resort and Manufactured Home Community in Lee County still has zero water and zero electricity access in the park. 

“We moved here two weeks before Hurricane Ian and now we can’t move back in,” said resident Mike Jablonski. 

The park, according to residents, houses about 1,500 lots that were mostly full before the hurricane. 

“That’s 1,500 people now displaced,” said resident Clara Maggio.

The people in the park own their homes or RVs for the most part, but lease the lots at the park located on San Carlos Blvd, just over three miles from Fort Myers Beach. 

“That means they (Sun...