Olympian achievement

The Associated Press reports on a success story from Washington state, “Olympia [Wash.] mobile home park residents become owners“:

Ten months after being told to pay $95,000 each for their lots or leave, the 30 residents of the College Street Mobile Home Park formed a cooperative and raised $1.7 million to buy the property with the help of federal, state and county grants and low-interest loans.

Participants are expected to sign off on the deal Sept. 12.

Without the deal, “they would have had to move out and move their homes, probably to the dump,” said Ishbel Dickens, a public-interest lawyer with Columbia Legal Services of Seattle. “It’s a win-win for everyone. The majority still have mortgages on their homes. They would have lost all their investments and still have had to find a place to live.” …

… Now renamed Hidden Village, it’s the first in the state to benefit from a new manufactured-home program established by the state’s Housing Trust Fund. The former owners are also the first to receive a tax waiver that was approved by the Legislature this year to provide more incentives for park owners to sell to residents rather than to developers.

The legislation follows exploding land values that led to the closure of hundreds of trailer and manufactured-home parks nationwide as landowners cashed in by selling to developers. In Washington, 89 mobile home parks were closed between 2002 and 2006, The Olympian newspaper reported.

This is smart policy and a smart investment by Washington state officials.

Thirty residents are spared from homelessness and financial ruin, becoming instead property owners with a stake in their community, now building equity for their financial security. The landowners who were looking to sell the land and get out of the business were able to sell the property for a tidy sum, with a tax waiver tossed in to sweeten the deal.

Everybody’s happy and the city now has a community full of homeowners contributing to its budget rather than 30 desperate, homeless residents in need of public support.

Everybody wins. So again, why not do this everywhere?