Cathy McKitrick of The Salt Lake Tribune reports on a legislative battle in Utah that sounds a lot like the one in Delaware: “More mobile-home owners agree: Displaced need time“:
Many mobile-home residents are elderly, disabled and live on shoestring budgets. Under those conditions, any kind of move is difficult.
As land grows more scarce and more valuable, park owners find it in their best self-interest to sell to developers who want to build high-end homes. State law requires only that they give residents 90 days to get out. Often, landowners will start boosting rents to put pressure on residents.
Some mobile homes are too old to move. For these folks, some who still owe on the structures, it can be a total loss.
For the homes that can be moved, it can cost $10,000 to $15,000 to get the job done. …
[The Utah Mobile Home Owners Action Group] isn’t asking for a handout.
“We’ve got a proposal to get at least a one-year lease,” [chairman Donald] Saulnier said. “That would give people a chance to prepare for a move, where the rents would remain steady during that time.”
He also hopes lawmakers will consider legislation to give residents the right of first refusal when a park goes up for sale.
In many cases, mobile-home owners can band together and buy their parks at fair market value, said Mark Lundgren, project manager for Utah Resident Owned Communities.
They have to come up with a 5 percent down payment, Lundgren said, which becomes affordable when split among the residents.
Lundgren works closely with Utah Community Reinvestment Corporation, a nonprofit consortium of banks, which can help finance the rest.
To Lundgren, it makes good sense for several reasons.
“Manufactured homes actually start to appreciate when the residents own and control the land,” Lundgren said. Otherwise, like vehicles, the structures depreciate.
And manufactured homes expand the pool of affordable housing without requiring government subsidies.
“There are more mobile homes providing housing for the low-income segment of the population than there are Section 8 [Rental] Vouchers in the state,” Lundgren said.
That’s in Utah — the fastest-growing state in the country. In comments to the last post on this subject we learned from activist Glenn Bell of the California nonprofit group Neighborhood Friends that a similar battle is being fought in the Golden State. A bit of googling turns up articles on the same thing happening in Florida back in 2005 (I’m not sure what became of those proposals — anybody from Fla. know?).
So this seems to be a common struggle all over the country, with low-income families and retirees in Sussex County, Del., and Salt Lake County, Utah, facing the same dilemmas. This seems to be true for most of the more than 22 million Americans living in manufactured homes.
McKitrick provides a good overview of the political dynamics in Utah, which I would guess are similar elsewhere:
This vulnerable group — which owns the homes but not the land beneath them — hopes to convince state lawmakers that they need and deserve more protection.
“We’ve been going up to the Capitol for almost nine years now,” said Donald Saulnier, chairman of the Utah Mobile Home Owners Action Group. “And park owners go and beat us down. They have high-priced lobbyists and lawyers.” …
The issue likely will evoke vigorous debate.
“It’s a real bad idea for anyone to sink their money into [manufactured homes] without a guarantee of a long-term lease,” said Sen. Dan Eastman, a Republican from Bountiful.
Eastman said he would support giving residents the right of first refusal “if it was fair market value.”
But he draws the line at anything that “limits private-property owners to what they can do with their properties.”
Sen. Wayne Niederhauser, a Sandy Republican and real-estate developer, said he has not been following the issue. But he voiced concerns about the 180-day notice and the right of first refusal, saying both fly in the face of private-property rights.
“Are these people in trailer parks doing any due diligence when they enter into a contract with a property owner?” Niederhauser asked, adding that those types of negotiations can be done by contract rather than state mandates.
Niederhauser, the real-estate developer, offers a recipe for nonstop litigation. His suggestion that these “negotiations can be done by contract rather than state mandates” makes about as much sense in this context as it would for, say, speed limits. (The tyranny of state-imposed speed limits, after all, restricts individual freedom, so let’s just have individual drivers fight it out in court on a case-by-case basis.) This preference for litigation over the level playing field of regulation is a common tactic among those who are confident they have deeper pockets and better lawyers than anyone else. Niederhauser wants to frame the issue as a matter of disinterested ideology, but he is far from disinterested.
The alternative to Niederhauser’s law of the jungle, with lawyers red in tooth and claw, is a fair set of rules for tenants and landowners alike. Here is New York State’s Manufactured Homes Park Tenant and Owners Information.
Those are the options: Civilization or endless civil suits.
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P.S. Regarding the non-issue of the terminology here, i.e. the terms “manufactured” and “mobile” home, which I’m using interchangeably. This is the relevant excerpt from the Census Bureau’s glossary for HUD’s American Housing Survey:
Manufactured/mobile homes. A manufactured/mobile home is defined as a housing unit that was originally constructed to be towed on its own chassis. It also may have permanent rooms attached at its present site, or other structural modifications. The term does not include prefabricated buildings, modular homes, travel campers, boats, or self-propelled vehicles like motor homes. Some people use the terms trailer or manufactured housing in the same sense as mobile homes.
Manufactured/mobile home setup. Manufactured/mobile homes are placed on a permanent masonry foundation; resting on concrete pads; or up on blocks, but not on concrete pads.
Manufactured/mobile home tiedowns. Manufactured/mobile home or trailer tiedowns are ground anchor foundation systems that give stability to manufactured housing/mobile homes
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