Some Folks' World

Here's a sampling of recent headlines from around North America:

Let's start with that last one, from the Caledonia Argus of Caledonia, Minn.

An overflow crowd of at least 40 persons were on hand at the Jan. 26 Caledonia City Council meeting to express opposition to an eight-unit mobile home park to be located in the 1000 and 1100 blocks of East Grant Street. Increased traffic, loss of parking along the south side of East Grant Street, and anticipated drop in property values were the major reasons cited by the large group opposed to the mobile home court. …

The group … asked the council if they knew how much their property values would go down if a mobile home park was situated in their neighborhood. [Mayor Bob] Burns replied that question could only be answered by a licensed appraiser.

That question can only be answered by a licensed appraiser. It can only be asked by a licensed NIMBY asshat.

The classic "property values" dodge is a hegemonic two-fer: It taps into the economic insecurity and sense of powerlessness that lurks not far from the surface for working-class folks like those in Caledonia (per capita income: $16k) and it redirects it toward those with even less power and less economic security. Tidy. This is part of why it's difficult to get even basic legal protections put in place for the residents of such homes or parks — those who ought to be their closest political allies view them as both a threat and as the living symbols of that which they fear.

That's the theory. What it means in practice is summed up in this, the entirety of a report from Pittsburgh's KDKA:

Residents of a Butler County mobile home park are wondering where they're going to live after the owners told them they will have to move out. Some 40 families are facing possible eviction at the Cromwell Estates Mobile Home Park in Saxonburg. The owners of the park say the eviction is due to the high cost of constructing a new sewage treatment plant. Many people have lived at Cromwell Estate for 10 or 20 years or more.

The raw material for 40 variations of the next Great American Novel reduced to a four-sentence news report. And not an unusual report. Here's the news from Fremont, Calif.:

The owners of a mobile home park for people 55 and older are
threatening to close the park if they are not allowed to raise rents by
as much as 49 percent for some tenants.

Besaro Mobile Home
Park is "actively considering other uses for" the 30-acre, 236-space
community on Deep Creek Road in north Fremont, "including construction
of single-family homes, condos or apartment buildings," according to
legal papers the ownership group filed this month with the city of
Fremont.

Same story, just six months or so behind what's happening in Saxonburg, Pa. The Nanaimo Bulletin in British Columbia tells a similar story, but puts a human face on it:

“I’ve lived here for 31 years in this trailer park,” [Len Joa, 85] said. “I
live here for a reason. My doctor, my friends, the location. If I had
to move now I don’t know what I’d do. I’d have nowhere to go.”

Joa
is concerned B.C.’s Manufactured Home Park Tenancy Act doesn’t go far
enough in protecting him from losing his home. He’s worried the current
owners of his park, who he has a strong relationship with, are getting
older and may wish to sell the property to a developer some day. That
situation has hit close enough to home – residents at the Ivy Green
Marine trailer park in Ladysmith were recently evicted as the owner –
Oak Bay Marine Group – plans to redevelop the land.

“I’ve got friends in that park. They’ve been there 10 years,” said Joa. “It’s a shame.”

The good news is that some local and regional governments are trying to prevent the endless replaying of this story. The city of Perris, Calif., imposed a moratorium on rent increases after mobile-home owners there saw their rents hiked from $275 to $435 in less than two years. Without such a moratorium or some other kind of legal protection, there is nothing to stop these residents from predatory or arbitrary rent increases of that kind.

Again, these residents own their homes, but not the land beneath them. Despite the name, most mobile homes cannot be relocated, or if they can be, it can only be done at prohibitive expense. Faced with rent increases, then, these residents have no recourse. They either pay the higher rent, or they abandon their home and lose everything they invested in it. There is no market mechanism to limit or prevent extreme or predatory rent increases. No market mechanism protecting these home-owners.

Yet even moratoriums and limits on rent hikes don't keep landowners from trying to exploit their advantage here. Park owners in Perris raised rents last month by $35, despite the moratorium. (The city is suing and demanding an explanation.)

In Glenwood Springs, Colo., the RB Development Group is looking beyond moratoriums or rent limits to a more fundamental solution — helping manufactured-home owners purchase the land beneath their homes. The developer hopes to subdivide a 96-home mobile home park into individual parcels, so that the home-owners will pay equity-building mortgages at stable rates instead of the instability and insecurity of their current rental payments.

The devil is in the details, but this is the arrangement advocated by ROC-USA, the New Hampshire-based nonprofit promoting resident-owned communities nationwide. Converting manufactured-home parks to resident-owned communities creates stability and equity for the families who live there (which may mean a boost for the "property values" of the surrounding community).

It also corrects for the built-in market failure of the situation in which people are irrevocably invested in their houses but have no say in what happens to the land beneath them. If you don't like the idea of excessive intervention and entanglement from governments imposing moratoriums or rent controls, then here is your solution.

And it just might help to pull banks out of their current nosedive. Government has been scrambling to recapitalize lenders, but those lenders haven't restarted lending yet because they're still not sure where they might lend that money safely. Here is one place. Here is a vast pool of potential borrowers. They have a longstanding track record of making payments and their loans would be fully collateralized. It seems to me to be just the sort of long-term, reliable, secure and cumulatively large-scale lending that banks ought to be looking for right about now.

Some folks' world