Here’s yet another manufactured housing community getting royally screwed, “East Allen Township (Pa.) mobile home owners seeking protection from raising rents.”
Residents of the Greenbriar Village development say owner Equity LifeStyle Properties has been unjustly increasing their land rents, and there’s nothing they can do about it.
Equity is the largest manufactured home community company in the United States and in some cases has increased land rents more than 100 percent in a year, said Randy Schaffer, the president of the Greenbriar homeowners association.
Manufactured home owners have no repercussions to take to combat rent increases, especially if the complex owner steeply hikes rents to drive out residents to sell the land for another purpose, Schaffer said.
“Landowners now have the legal right to price us out of our homes,” he said. “They now have the license and incentive to take our homes and are doing so.”
Greenbriar resident Tom Blackton has seen his monthly rent increase from $374 to $539 a month in the 10 years he’s lived there. Mobile home owners typically own their homes and rent the land they sit on.
“I can’t even sell it now because people would walk away if they found out,” he said.
… “Many people in this community are living on Social Security,” Blackton said. “People are hurting here.”
This is another reason we should be increasing Social Security benefits, instead of debating how much to cut them because if we don’t cut them now then there’s a chance that something bad could happen in the next 30 years and we’d have to cut them then.
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