Another post about manufactured housing

May 22, 2012 By Fred Clark 35 Comments

I know I’ve written this same post every few months about manufactured homes (or “mobile homes” or “trailer parks”). But it keeps happening. It’s always happening.

All that changes are the names of the towns, of the parks, of the councils and legislatures, and of the desperate homeowners explaining to reporters that they just don’t know what they’re going to do.

Writing for The Nation, Laura Flanders notes the vital importance of manufactured housing for Americans over the age of 65. Manufactured homes, Flanders writes, are “the largest source of unsubsidized housing still affordable for the middle class.”

That’s how she introduces her story, “Affordable Housing for Seniors in the Cross Hairs in Chicago,” which focuses on the familiar theme of economic insecurity, anxiety and a lack of legal or market protections for those who own manufactured homes, but pay rent on the land those homes sit on.

Flanders introduces us to Sam Zell, a “billionaire property baron” who owns “hundreds of manufactured home communities that cater to senior citizens” through his company, Equity Life Style Properties.

The seniors who live in ELS communities have bought their homes, but they rent the plot on which their houses stand. Since Zell started buying up manufactured home communities, he has made millions by cutting services and raising rent. For retirees like … Helen Honeycutt, who came to Chicago from an ELS community in Los Osos, Calif., acquisition by Zell has turned what she thought was a well-planned retirement in a rent-controlled community into an insecure experience that threatens her nest-egg home.

“When we paid $85,000 for a manufactured home fourteen years ago, we were looking to have no mortgage, low overhead and a lifestyle we could afford,” Honeycutt told me in Chicago. When ELS bought the property ten years ago, they started hiking rents and pressuring the county to eliminate rent control.

“Now I live in constant fear that the county will give up the fight against Sam Zell’s deep-pocket lawsuits and we’ll be priced out,” explains Honeycutt. ELS says their tenants can move if they don’t like it. “But my home is a 1,900-square-foot triple-wide. It’s old. I can’t move it two feet.”

Again, this is why Zell’s “free market” claims are hogwash. Mobile-home land rents are not a free market. “Tenants can move if they don’t like it” only applies when tenants can move. Many of these “tenants” cannot move their homes at all, while others can only do so at great expense. When that is the case, there is no market mechanism to restrain rent increases.

And when there is no market force restraining those increases, and no legal protection for homeowners against them, then people like Sam Zell become gazillionaires by rent-gouging the elderly.
[Read more...]

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#Occupy the trailer parks

February 6, 2012 By Fred Clark 7 Comments

Stimulus plan: Government-backed low-interest loans for manufactured home communities to allow homeowners to purchase the land beneath them.

These people pay their rent, so they can afford the loan payments. When you own a not-so-mobile home but rent the land it sits on, you face the prospect of imminent upheaval, homelessness and the loss of all your savings if your landlord decides to sell the land, hike the rents, cut services, or do all three at once. Helping these communities own the land in trust will protect them better than precarious and contested rent-control legislation, and it will mean that their homes build equity instead of depreciating, helping millions of Americans achieve a financial security they do not now enjoy.

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Massachusetts: “Mobile home park rent control board up for vote in Easton (Mass.)”

Many tenants have lived here for years. Most are elderly or families of modest means.

The roads are filled with potholes. A fire hydrant is not functioning. A broken water pipe was only recently patched up. The park lacks the community center commonplace in most other mobile home parks.

The residents have been willing to wait for the problems to be repaired as long as rents were stable.

But on Aug. 1, after a five-year court-ordered rent freeze lapsed, their landlord, New York-based Morgan Management LLC, raised rents from $330 to $468.69 a month.

“That’s’ a 33-percent increase because we didn’t have rent control. That’s a lot of money,” Scot Walsh, president of the Easton Mobile Homeowners Association, said.

Missouri: “Columbia Regency residents remain uncertain about future of mobile home park”

The closure of Columbia Regency mobile home park has put new pressure on the [Columbia, Mo.] City Council before their Nov. 21 vote on the rezoning of the property.

If the council approves the rezoning, each trailer owner will receive $1,200 from Aspen Heights, the buyer, and an extra two months to move out. If the council rejects the rezoning, residents won’t receive the money or the extra time, and they will possibly have to move out anyway.

California: “Mobile home owners organizing to protect rent control”

With the repeal of rent control in Capitola mobile home parks last month, pressure is mounting on mobile home owners elsewhere in the county.

In Watsonville, [Calif.], a dispute over rent increase at a Green Valley Road park has led a park owner to file a $400,000 claim against the city.

Other mobile park residents are seeing services cut and rents increasing as well, according to Bill Neighbors, a Watsonville mobile home owner and chairman of the Santa Cruz County Mobile and Manufactured Home Commission.

… The Capitola City Council repealed its rent control ordinance after spending more than $1 million over 10 years to defend it.

California: “County Planning Commission Pursues Ordinance to Manage Closures of Mobile Home Parks”

If owners of mobile home parks decide to close and sell their land, they will have to apply for a closure permit and could have to pay homeowners the market value for their units, under an ordinance proposed by the Santa Barbara County Planning Commission that will go before the Board of Supervisors.

There are 20 such parks in the unincorporated areas of Santa Barbara County that provide thousands of affordable homes. State law allows counties and cities to manage park closures and mandate reasonable compensation for relocation to the homeowners.

Iowa: “AG presents proposal to protect tenants of mobile homes”

It lacks the teeth of last year’s failed proposal, but Bill Brauch, assistant to Attorney General Tom Miller, said this proposal stands a better chance of passing the Legislature.

The measure, approved 2-to-1 by a Senate subcommittee on Monday, outlines a set of conditions that would need to be met before a landlord could legitimately terminate or not renew a tenancy, it would require a one-year lease for all mobile-home park tenants, and it would give tenants 14 days — rather than the current three days — to pay rent after receiving a nonpayment notice before they’re evicted.

Florida: “Naples Estates residents frustrated at 13-year legal fight to purchase community”

It’s been more than 13 years since senior citizens at Naples Estates sued to win the right to own their mobile home park, but they’re still waiting to buy it.

After hearing days of testimony from appraisal experts, a Collier judge last year set the price for the close-knit East Naples park at $14.4 million, well over the $11.8 million the residents were hoping for.

Since then, more residents in the age 55-plus park have died, others have given up or moved away — and the lawsuit has been at a standstill.

Colorado: “Fort Collins forum: Mobile-home owners ‘most vulnerable’ in the U.S.”

Debra Goodson, a former resident of the soon-to-be-closed Bender Mobile Home Park at 912 Wood St., north of Fort Collins, said the family was “devastated” when she, her husband and 7-year-old daughter learned they’d be moving.

“We had no savings and a very short time to figure out what we were going to do,” she said.

About 32 families are being displaced when the park closes this spring. It is to be replaced by a development with homes valued up to $450,000. In 2008, 12 families were displaced when Grape Street Mobile Home Park closed; in 2006, the closure of Dry Creek Mobile Home Park eliminated the residences of 130 families.

 

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Judge says Alabama cannot steal immigrants’ homes

November 24, 2011 By Fred Clark 36 Comments

This is good news: “US judge stops Ala. from enforcing part of law.”

A federal judge in Montgomery has stopped state officials from using Alabama’s [harsh]* new immigration law to prevent immigrants from renewing required permits on manufactured homes.

U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson issued a temporary restraining order Wednesday evening that allows Alabama residents to renew registration of manufactured homes without requiring that they prove that they are in the country legally. The deadline for renewing the registration without being fined is Nov. 30.

Attorneys for a coalition of civil rights groups said earlier that by refusing to renew the permits, state officials could force people to abandon their homes.

Many of Alabama’s Sooners own manufactured homes. They bought them and paid for them. They own them. But under Alabama’s clumsily harsh new immigration law, Sooners are not allowed to renew the annual registration the state requires for such homes — allowing the state to, well, steal their homes.

Let me say that again: Alabama has passed a law allowing it to steal people’s homes. Thankfully, Judge Thompson has suspended that part of the new law — at least for now.

Iulia Filip of Courthouse News reported on the civil rights groups’ lawsuit earlier this week:

A federal class action claims Alabama’s harsh new immigration law unconstitutionally denies state-required registration to mobile-home owners who cannot prove they are legally in the United States. The plaintiffs say Congressman Mo Brooks personified his state’s animus against undocumented immigrants, saying, “As your congressman, on the House floor, I will do anything short of shooting them.”

The class claims the law denies essential housing services to Alabamans and violates federal housing and immigration policies.

Named plaintiffs, the Central Alabama Fair Housing Center, the Fair Housing Center of Northern Alabama, the Center for Fair Housing and two John Does, sued Alabama Revenue Commissioner Julie Magee and Elmore County Revenue Commissioner William Harper, in Federal Court.

The Does sued on behalf of all Alabama residents who own mobile homes and lack proof of U.S. citizenship or legal immigration status, with a subclass of Latino homeowners.

Under Alabama law, people who own or maintain a manufactured home must pay an annual registration fee and display a current identification decal on the home. Stickers must be renewed every year by Nov. 30. Violators face progressive fines and jail time.

But the plaintiffs say Alabama’s new immigration law makes it impossible for undocumented homeowners to register their homes and avoid the penalties.

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* The original word there, the standard adjective in most news reports on Alabama’s law, was “tough.” I call BS on describing harsh and punitive laws as “tough.” That’s a word with generally positive connotations and it’s routinely being applied to measures that don’t deserve such praise.

Toughness is a Good Thing, readers think. After all, what would the opposite of a “tough” law be? And so politicians grandstand with new measures that promise to be even “tougher” on immigration or on crime.

Those measures aren’t tough — they’re simply blunt, clumsy, recklessly indiscriminate and counter-productive. Let’s stop pretending that’s the same thing as “toughness.”

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Crops without plowing

August 31, 2011 By Fred Clark 48 Comments

Via ABL on Balloon Juice, this quote from loathesome con-man “historian” David Barton in a Sept. 2009 Texas textbook review (.pdf link):

Multiple locations in the TEKS even suggest that it is people from “racial, ethnic, and religious groups” who “expand political rights in American society.” This is an absolutely false premise. Only majorities can expand political rights in America’s constitutional society. In fact, in every case where a constitutional protection has been established for a minority, whether of race, gender, social status, or age, each protection was extended by the consent of the majority of eligible voters at that time.

Frederick Douglass saw things differently:

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.

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Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang:

If you believe that blankets keep you warm, then it’s inconsistent of you to believe that emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere cannot possibly cause a rise in the Earth’s temperature. And if you still don’t believe it, then I politely invite you to go to Venus.

That’s the punchline. Siegel’s set-up is an extremely patient introduction to the basic science of climate change. It’s a good post to bookmark if you’ve got a relative who’s spent too much time watching “Nickelodeon for people with dementia.”

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My sense, though, is that today’s exclusions stems from fear and from the need to generate enemies so that we can justify our own need for violence. Clearly, concern about “creeping sharia” in the United States is absurd; chances that sharia will be implemented in the United States are only slightly better than that Martians will invade. And yet people are really exercised by the perceived threat of Muslims “taking over America.” A few exceptions notwithstanding, there is no real enemy to speak of, but people create the enemy. Why? Because they harbor enmity and are plagued by fear and resentment. This is a deeply unchristian stance. We are supposed to love enemies and, if possible, make friends of them; we are not supposed to manufacture enemies so we can have targets for our fears and resentments.

– Theologian Miroslav Volf, interviewed by Patheos’ Patton Dodd

Can we just repeat that one bit where Volf echoes one of my obsessive hobby-horses?

A few exceptions notwithstanding, there is no real enemy to speak of, but people create the enemy. Why? Because they harbor enmity and are plagued by fear and resentment. This is a deeply unchristian stance.

For some of the fearful and resentful, it’s Muslims. For others it’s the Satanic baby-killers. Those Satanic baby-killers are everywhere.

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Kudos to Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley for standing up for the victims of alleged extortion and intimidation by the landlords of a Cape Cod manufactured housing community or “trailer park.”

According to a press release from Coakley, the company’s sales team “aggressively solicited homeowners at Peters Pond to pay up to $16,000 as a membership fee to remain in the community.” The fee was on top of the $6,000 annual fee owners paid to lease their properties at the Sandwich, Mass., housing community.

Coakley’s lawsuit seeks to end the collection and also return fees already paid by residents. She alleges the practices are a violation of the Consumer Protection Act and Manufactured Housing Act.

According to the lawsuit, nearly 100 homeowners have paid to join the club out of fear that they would lose their home.

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She is on her way

February 24, 2010 By Fred Clark 66 Comments

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. — Arundhati Roy

From Minnesota, “Residents work to purchase their own mobile home park“:

Owner Bill Halverstadt decided to give the residents who live in the
14-acre Meadowview Manor park the opportunity to buy it and pointed
them in the direction of help to make it happen. It started the
residents on a path of forming a cooperative to manage a resident-owned
park.

Halverstadt said his decision followed a family tradition to share with others the benefits he’s received in life.

“I’m glad to turn it over to the tenants,” Halverstadt said. “It’s good
for the tenants because they will have the confidence and a brighter
future. It gives them some certainty they otherwise would not have.”

Sharon Magnan, Meadowview Cooperative president, has lived in the park
for eight years. Magnan said as a community, residents decided owning
the park themselves provided them with the greatest security.

“Because our fear was that should the current owner sell it to a
developer or for any other reason we were all out of a home or at least
out of a place to put our home,” Magnan said.

They found help with the Northcountry Cooperative Foundation, a
Minneapolis-based nonprofit established in 2000 by a development fund
with a 30-year history. Northcountry Cooperative Foundation was
designed to help cooperatives and has a focus on affordable housing. …

… Supporters of this project are not reinventing the wheel, but are
drawing from a lengthy history of resident-owned manufactured home
communities in New Hampshire where 20 percent of the parks, more than
100, are now owned by resident cooperatives. Studies of the 30-year
history in New Hampshire have found resident-owned parks have lower lot
rents, sell more quickly for a higher value and are in parks that are
more well-maintained, Walker said. The residents have a vested interest
in being economically efficient.

We’ve been over this before. Manufactured homes based on somebody else’s land depreciate, like cars. Manufactured homes based on land owned by the homeowner appreciate, like homes are supposed to. When landlord-owned communities convert into resident-owned communities, the residents gain security and certainty about their future, their monthly payments often go down, and those payments go to building equity — creating wealth.

Resident-owned communities, in other words, are good for the economy.

There’s a politically winning cause here for whichever party has the brains and the will to seize it first. Championing the conversion of “trailer parks” into resident-owned communities would involve legal protections for residents — such as right-of-first-refusal laws with reasonable timelines — as well as various low-cost incentives or loan guarantees, but it wouldn’t have to be an expensive, budget-busting enterprise.

I’m assuming this effort would also prove to be politically popular because I have this theory that actually helping to improve voters lives is something those voters might appreciate.

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From Oregon, “Founder of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods transfers business to employees“:

Scores of employees gathered to help Bob Moore celebrate his 81st
birthday this week at the company that bears his name, Bob’s Red Mill
Natural Foods.

Moore, whose mutual loves of healthy eating and
old-world technologies spawned an internationally distributed line of
products, responded with a gift of his own — the whole company. The
Employee Stock Ownership Plan Moore unveiled means that his 209
employees now own the place and its 400 offerings of stone-ground
flours, cereals and bread mixes.

“This is Bob taking care of
us,” said Lori Sobelson, who helps run the business’ retail operation.
“He expects a lot out of us, but really gives us the world in return.”

Moore declined to say how much he thinks the company is worth. In 2004,
however, one business publication estimated that year’s revenues at
more than $24 million. A company news release issued this week stated
that Bob’s Red Mill has chalked up an annual growth rate of between 20
percent to 30 percent every year since.

“In some ways I had a
choice,” Moore said of what he could have done with the company he
founded with his wife, Charlee, in 1978. “But in my heart, I didn’t.
These people are far too good at their jobs for me to just sell it.”

Bob could have made a lot of money if he’d just sold the company to somebody else. Bob was smarter than that. And, yes, better than that.

Read the whole story.

This is something that can happen. This is another way the world might actually be.

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