Lobbyist Chester Baldwin summed it up:

“There is no such thing as affordable housing in the state anymore because we have put so much cost and regulation onto housing – that housing is expensive,” he said. “No one can build it affordably.” 

Does anyone but Baldwin in the entire State of Washington have any common sense? Apparently not.

No offense to the bureaucrats but when you can buy a 29-space park in Massachusetts for $600,000 ($20,000 per space) you know it has some significant cap-x problems in store for the new owner.  I hope they have a plan to pay for those, (and I bet they don’t). I assume the bureaucrats did zero due diligence and are about to find out the hard way how infrastructure and 1001 real-life things work when they have no money to pay for them.

Am I crazy or is this perhaps the ugliest home ever created? How in the world can the U.S. designers screw up 3-D printed homes so bad when overseas they look so good. I feel like it’s the 1980s when U.S. car designers deliberately built some of the ugliest models ever made and foreign car companies stole all their market share.

Here’s the ugly truth: nobody is going to buy a modular home if it’s only 16% cheaper. The negative stigma and appearance of modular is worth way more than 16% to the consumer. Until the price of modular is more like 50% less than a stick-built home it will likely never get off the ground in a big way.

"Shark Tank" star Barbara Corcoran, a renowned real estate mogul, surprised many when she acquired a double-wide trailer in Los Angeles.

I’m sorry but a “real estate mogul” would not have bought a mobile home in Malibu for $1 million but instead one of the real houses next door which start at $10 million. These articles are making her look dumber by the minute and she needs to quit talking to the media. Nobody is buying this nonsense.

Wow, the “before” photo to the “after” photo of the above article. The bureaucrats are going to spend $90,000 per household to let the residents continue to live in old trailers indefinitely. Do you think the residents might have been better off getting $90,000 checks to buy brick houses in a less-expensive area? I guess nobody realizes that the $90,000 per lot will not get them nicer, newer homes or needed improvements – just the luxury of saying they own the land (and the resulting worry of paying for it). Ronald Reagan wins again.

What San Jose, CA is doing should be concerning for any property owner. They are basically taking away inherent property rights and not even being coy about it:

“I think this is a clear statement of intent from the council that these should remain mobile home parks,”said Mayor Matt Mahan. “And should a developer propose redevelopment, the bar would have to be extremely high.”

I hope that the San Jose mobile home park owners pool their resources and sue to block this action from a city council and Mayor that clearly have elevated their opinion of their powers to a ridiculous level.

Yet another article aimed at brainwashing you that residents can only live in a land of unicorns and rainbows if they band together, pool their resources, and buy their properties from evil park owners. And, of course, it’s another article based out of California. Clearly the folks that do resident-owned community deals are working around the clock to get these articles published but it’s still not going to fix the inherent problem that the success rate is about as big as a 3’ tall person making the NBA, and then winning Powerball after hitting a half-court jump shot.

The park manager summed it up well:

“At Paradise Cove Resort & RV Park, we have a majority of our residents who live here peacefully. We also have some instigators who want to make it more difficult to do business and maintain the peaceful environment which we have known here for so many years. It is a shame that the contemplated reporting will be highlighting the efforts of the instigators”.

A couple people are mad because the rent went up. So, they are using the media to ignorantly harass the owners.

I will bet you $100 that this property gets redeveloped in the near future. Who would put up with this abuse?

A quick search on Bestplaces.net shows that the average home price in Petaluma, CA is $839,600 and the average 3-bedroom apartment is $3,850 per month. That’s what makes this article so asinine:

As at most parks, the residents of Little Woods own their mobile homes but must pay a base rent for the land underneath the home, with rents ranging between $457.13 and $1,195.00 per month – though most pay roughly $500 a month, according to documents submitted by the owners to the city. This means that under the proposed rent hikes, residents face increases between 128% and 352%.

The reporter is distorting the facts here, as the percentages are meaningless and all they prove is what an outrageous deal the tenants had before the change in ownership. Those rents could double yet again and still be way under market levels. Why should mobile home park lot rents be at $500 per month when apartment rents are 700% higher?

You have to be crazy to own property in California.

“From the outside, it looks like a home you might find in any trailer park. But step inside and the reasons behind the $1.4 million price tag reveal themselves, including luxury finishes and a huge private deck that offers sweeping canyon and ocean views”.

So let me get this straight. You slap a $50,000 kitchen on an old singlewide, toss in a $10,000 deck, and the $15,000 value of the home leaps to $1.4 million? Pretty bad logic. I admit the view is good, but there’s a million real houses that can beat that overlook and sell for a fraction of that price. One good reason that Millennials are lousy home shoppers and pay way too much is simply that they read too much nonsense like this.

Look, when somebody buys a mobile home in those two old parks in Malibu it’s typically a sign that their career is ending. Hillary Duff lived in one of those mobile homes, as did Pam Anderson – but only when their ability to fund a stick-built home deteriorated along with their incomes and desirability as stars. I know nothing about Barbara Corcoran, but this article is the same nonsense that we would be told if we caught a celebrity driving an old Ford Taurus in a parking lot who would then proceed to tell us how they fell in love with the car’s styling and now prefer it to their old Ferrari. Give me a break.

Washington state is apparently pushing a new woke initiative: live rent free and still get service just like a real, paying customer.

While landlords have a duty to keep units habitable, if they don’t, tenants must be current on rent and utilities to enforce a demand for repairs, according to RCW 59.18.080.

If you recall, last week there were a number of articles trying to brainwash you into believing that Washington state should do more to force park owners to sell to the residents. Gee, I wonder if that’s what this new push is all about?

Demand for mobile homes has surged in recent years as people struggle to find affordable housing. That’s also made mobile home parks attractive to investors, who are snapping them up and raising rents. In Washington state, some mobile home residents are fighting back, offering to buy the land themselves. But experts say few resident communities will win the bidding war without more help from the state.

Yes, you knew it was coming after the earlier article. The media mob runs in packs like wolves and this story is an extension of the earlier one that is trying to brainwash you that Washington state needs to require park owners to sell to the tenants. In other words, back to the same tired narrative based upon a fantasy that resident-owned parks are the solution – not bothering to mention that these deals rarely matriculate and only about .007% have ever successfully been put together on a national level.

I can brainwash, too. This idea is stupid. This idea is stupid. This idea is stupid. Are you convinced yet?

Look at these photos and tell me who in the world is idiotic enough to pay $2 million for a mobile home in a setting like that? By any unit of measure these are the worst values in American real estate. No offense to Montauk fans but is that really the best you can do with $2 million on the East Coast?

In a 28-page suit in federal district court, park owners challenge the ability of the city to regulate, saying steps taken amount unconstitutionally depriving them of their right to an adequate rate of return. The suit cites hefty inflation and the city's effort to shield residents from it by reducing the cap on rent increases to below inflation. They argue they're being required to run their business at a loss. The suit also challenges the constitutionality of requirements that should park owners wish to close a park that they find comparable space in another park for the home or purchase then from tenants at 'in place value.'

Observation #1: you have to be nuts to own property in California.

Observation #2: thank heavens these park owners have the guts to fight this unjust treatment.

I know nothing about this case and have never seen the property, but I had a similar experience in Texas in the 1990’s. Turned out that the city had never bothered to subtract the individual tenants’ meter readings (for which they paid the city directly) from the master meter reading. They’d been doing that for decades. The amount they had overcharged the park was probably a million dollars. Cities make mistakes and – with scale – those mistakes can be gigantic. Before they shut this park owner’s water off, the water dept. better investigate what he’s saying because if he’s correct his damages against them will be crushing.

The headline says it all:

When 80-year-old Gordon Hastings moved into Glenbrier Park 15 years ago, he paid $320 monthly rent. Now he pays more than $700.

But here’s the problem. That’s only around a 5% per year increase – and that’s not much more than inflation.

The cost of virtually everything is America has gone up more than 5% per year since 2008.

Does nobody have basic math skills anymore? Do these journalists at least have access to calculators???

Here’s the basic article boiled into two sentences:

The sales prices of new mobile homes rose much higher than those of traditional, stick-built houses, according to a recent report from LendingTree. The online financial services marketplace found that the average sales price of mobile homes shot up 77.1% between 2017 and 2022, compared with 46.7% for single-family homes (excluding the land).

The problem is that the reason that mobile home prices in this study are up is probably not re-sale but new home prices that nearly doubled from manufacturers between 2017 and 2022. Virtually nobody bought a mobile home in 2017 and then sold it in 2022 for a 77.1% gain, right? The numbers for mobile home sales in this report are probably based on new home sales only, which is probably the only data that the government could attain.

If the roles were reversed – and an all-age park wanted to convert to senior – the city would agree in a heartbeat.

What’s at stake here is nothing more than protecting city dollars. The city does not want to pay the cost of tuition of the tens of students that would move into the park at $10,000 per year per kid in school costs. Seniors don’t have any such expense and that one item could saddle the city budget with literally a $1 million a year loss in tuition alone (assuming just 100 kids) from this one park.

So, could we please cut out all the virtue signaling and just tell the truth?

Replacing an equestrian center with a mobile home park is kind of like tearing down a Rolls Royce dealership to make way for Kia. That being said, all real estate has a higher and better use. And horse stalls do not rent for as much as mobile home park lots (which rent for less than apartments so that’s where this property probably ends up in 20 years).

This was not a hard one to call – just read my predictions in past issues. When you pay $25 million for 12 acres (which works out to $2 million per acre or $46 per square foot) the buyer is going to tear the park down, not introduce a new mobile home park prototype with a lot rent of $5,000 per month. There should never have been any question as to the future of the property.

In some cases, development can be delayed or eliminated with higher lot rents, but in this case that was not an option because of the park’s location. Some parks were born to be a temporary use, and this tract is one of those situations.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law that offers additional protection to mobile home park residents, who often face eviction or sharp increases in land lease costs when mobile home parks change hands. As Lacey Leonardi explains for Spectrum Local News, “Landowners cannot be prevented from selling. The new law means homeowners in the parks – most of them own their trailers and rent their spaces – now have the first right of refusal to purchase the land.” Manufactured housing provides a significant pool of affordable housing in the United States, but residents often lack protections when park owners decide to sell or hike prices. According to a press release from the governor’s office, the legislation also authorizes mortgages and mortgage pool insurance for manufactured homes. “This legislation will help homeowners in manufactured home parks safeguard their affordable communities, without unduly hindering unopposed investments in manufactured home parks,” the press release states.

When virtue signaling bureaucrats get together at the National B.S. Convention one of the top ten concepts is giving a “right of first refusal” to people who cannot even remotely afford to buy the property. Resident-owned communities account for something like .009% of all mobile home parks in the U.S. And probably only .001% of those were accomplished within the first refusal time frame, but instead were enabled to get the deals closed via multiple extensions from an accommodating seller.

Kathy Hochul forgot to mention that the reason that so many mobile parks are being torn down and redeveloped right now in New York is because it passed rent control so there’s no reason not to knock them down and build new real estate uses that are not encumbered by those rent controls. If you really want to help mobile home park residents (not just pretend to be doing that) you should repeal the very rent control that is causing the wrecking ball to swing wildly, leaving those residents homeless.

More government and non-profit stupidity in action. Cotati, California is going to stop a park from changing from senior designation to all-age because they are afraid that having freedom of competition will force rents higher:

Concerned that an all-ages conversion could drive up rents if dual-income families were to move into the retirement-aged community, Countryside residents called on the city council to act before a state mandated six month grace period on the all-ages conversion expired in February, 2024.

Smart move. So now it’s pretty much guaranteed that the park will be torn down to make way for more profitable uses.

Another story about a mobile home park being torn down to make way for a more profitable use for the land, probably because the rents were ridiculously low. Predictably, the park owner is blamed for the demolition and the resulting “homelessness” – but also would have been equally blamed if they had raised the lot rents high enough to keep the park intact. There’s no winning with the American media today so why worry about it?