Canada too

It seems that manufactured-home owners in Canada may be just as ill-served by their laws and governments as their U.S. counterparts. Here’s an article from British Columbia’s Ladysmith Chronicle, “Seaside residents lose arbitration“:

Residents of Saltair’s Seaside Trailer Park will have to uproot by next May.

Following a June 4 arbitration hearing in Victoria, Seaside residents received notice that the arbitrator ruled in favor of the new landowners. …

In April, the landowners gave Seaside their one-year eviction notice and a cashier’s check for approximately $3,000, following section 42(1) in the Mobile Home Park Tenancy Act.

… [Landless homeowner Alice] Walter, along with resident Norm Street, have homes in Seaside that they pay mortgages on. … If they can’t sell their homes or find places to move them, then they will both end up paying a mortgage on places they cannot live in, places that may be demolished by the new landowners after the eviction next May.

A local government official, Brian Duncan, acknowledged that “On a human level, it’s tragic,” but said that the new landowners were within their rights.

Those rights were, I suppose, purchased along with the land. If you have the means, you can buy all kinds of rights that other people can’t afford. If you don’t have the means, you probably won’t be able to secure quite as many rights. It all seems terribly feudal.

This precarious situation, again, is something facing tens of millions of manufactured-home owners throughout North America. They own their homes, but not the land under them. When landlords decide to sell or redevelop the land, these folks face eviction with no legal protections other than the sort of things provided by “section 42(1) in the Mobile Home Park Tenancy Act” — a grace period before they have to be off the land and an inadequate stipend for moving expenses.

That Canadian statute is poorly named, because there’s really little that’s “mobile” about these homes. That’s the problem here — families have all their equity tied up in homes that cannot be moved and that cannot stay where they are.

That’s an impossible situation for those families, arising from the prior impossible situation — that of people owning their homes but not the land beneath them. That situation is bound to create irreconcilable conflicts between the rights and needs of homeowners and landowners. The only way to solve such conflicts is to prevent them from occurring in the first place — about which, more tomorrow.