This story by Ariana Figueroa appeared on Colorado Newsline on April 10, 2022.
Jon Zang walks his dog several times a day in his mobile home community in West Goshen Township, Pennsylvania. It’s quiet, as most of his neighbors are at work. But he often wonders how many more walks he and his bulldog mix, Ladybug, will have down the streets of the place he’s called home for 21 years.
“We’re literally sitting on a time bomb that we’re sure is going to go off at some point, but we don’t know when,” Zang said.
His park was purchased by an investment company, Walkart Inc., that residents say is trying to change the county zoning laws to close down a community that’s been home to 60 manufactured homes since 1957. Walkart, which could not be reached for comment, wants to build luxury apartments in its stead, according to Zang and a report in the Daily Local News.
“They just want this property to expand their stranglehold on the rental communities of West Chester,” said Zang, who pays $550 a month for his lot compared to an average rent in the area of $1,700 monthly for a one-bedroom apartment.
Mobile home parks provide affordable housing for millions of low-income residents — including seniors on fixed incomes — to own homes while renting the land underneath. The average cost of a manufactured home in 2019 was about $82,000, according to a report by Manufactured Housing Institute, a trade organization representing the industry.
By the numbers:
- Estimated number of mobile homes in 49 states: 2.7 million
- Estimated number of mobile home parks: 45,600
- Average 2019 cost of manufactured home: $82,000
But in an exploding housing market, that land is increasingly in demand for other projects, or park owners propose major rent hikes or changes in leases. Residents have few protections under a patchwork of state laws.
Congress might be expected to step in, since some mobile home parks are bought by private equity firms that use federally subsidized loans that carry low interest rates. But there’s been little movement in Washington, D.C.
“The invisibility of mobile home parks is a huge problem,” Andrew Rumbach, an associate professor with the Department of Urban Planning at Texas A&M University, said.
It’s difficult to understand the scope of people living in these communities, as there is no federal database. But it is estimated that there are 2.7 million mobile homes across 45,600 mobile home parks in 49 states, said Paul Bradley, the president of ROC USA — a nonprofit based in New Hampshire that helps residents purchase their mobile home communities.
What’s more, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, some of the most frequent filers of evictions on a county-by-county basis were owners of mobile home parks, according to data collected by Eviction Lab.
For example, the owner of a mobile home community was the top filer of eviction cases in Cincinnati, in Hamilton County, Ohio, with almost 200 eviction files through November 2021, said Jacob Haas, a research specialist at Eviction Lab, a project by Princeton University that collects and publishes the first-ever dataset of evictions in the U.S.
Mobile home park owners were the top 10 filers of evictions in Florida’s Alachua, Duval and Pinellas counties, according to data collected by Eviction Lab.
“It’s not uncommon at all for manufactured home communities to show up among the locations that have the most (eviction) filings during the pandemic,” Haas said.
50 states, 50 policies
During the pandemic, amid sickness and job losses, mobile home park residents also have grappled with rent hikes or revisions of their leases, often with little help from state laws.
“There’s basically 50 different policies for how to protect residents in these parks,” said Esther Sullivan, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver.
“In many cases, they are disadvantaged by omission, meaning a state usually doesn’t have laws on the books that directly address the rights of park residents and the responsibilities of park owners,” she said.
In the worst case scenarios, some residents must abandon their properties because they can no longer afford to rent the land below their homes.
Cesiah Guadarrama Trejo, a housing advocate who also lives in a manufactured housing community in Colorado, said that when people own their homes but cannot afford the rent hikes, “that will eventually displace people.”
If a resident can no longer afford the plot of land they rent, it’s not like they can move their homes, said Dave Anderson, the executive director for All Parks Alliance for Change, a tenants’ union for residents of Minnesota’s manufactured home parks. The cost of moving a mobile home — assuming it doesn’t damage the structure — can range from $5,000 to $8,000.
Anderson said the trend he’s noticed in the Twin Cities is out-of-state companies buying parks and trying to rewrite leases.
“There’s a much more aggressive plan for generating profits out of these purchases,” he said.
Some states, like Pennsylvania, have 60-day notice requirements for any rent increases, said Daniel Vitek, a staff attorney at Community Justice Project in Pennsylvania. But there’s no state law to prevent aggressive rent hikes, he added.
Vitek said one protection that Pennsylvania gives mobile home park residents is a requirement for six months notice of a park’s closure, and the owner of the park must pay for the appraisal of the mobile home. Depending on the appraisal, that homeowner might be compensated for the worth of the manufactured home.
“I don’t want to make it sound like Pennsylvania is a great place to live in a mobile home park because even though it has its own statute and provides for a lot more protections than, say, a tenant in just a normal landlord-tenant relationship, they’re still pretty weak protections,” he said. “And the tenants are at the mercy of a bad owner quite a bit.”
Where’s Congress?
The invisibility of mobile home parks extends to the federal level, despite deep government involvement in the housing and mortgage industry that is supposed to prop up the availability of low-income housing — especially manufactured housing.
“We need people to be able to see these places and see what they are and what value they have and then make good, intelligent policy decisions to protect people who live there,” Rumbach said.
U.S. Rep. Cindy Axne, D-Iowa, introduced legislation last year that would extend tenants’ rights to help residents get at least a 60-day notice of rent increases. In a statement to States Newsroom, Axne said movement on legislation for manufactured housing has stalled since the president’s social spending plan, known as Build Back Better, died in the Senate.
The House passed its version of the bill that included a $500 million Manufactured Housing Community Infrastructure Improvement Grant program that would have helped resident-owned groups and nonprofits in buying and preserving manufactured housing communities.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat, introduced a stand-alone Manufactured Housing Community Infrastructure Improvement Grant program in November.
The chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, sent a letter in January 2020 to the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation — the government-sponsored enterprises known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Brown questioned how many manufactured housing communities are being bought by private equity firms that obtained billions in low-cost loans through those entities.
Brown noted there is little data available on private equity’s involvement, and that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are just two outlets for financing, but said Congress needs a better understanding of the situation.
“I have seen first-hand how residents in these communities, many of whom are elderly and have fixed incomes, have experienced rent and other housing cost increases with few consumer protections,” the Ohio Democrat said in a statement.
Brown, along with Axne, traveled to Waukee, Iowa, to visit residents of Midwest Country Estates, a mobile home community that had been recently bought by a private equity firm in Utah, Havenpark Capitol. Axne said many of the residents experienced a 70% increase in rent hikes from the firm.
Brown in his letter raised numerous questions about Fannie Mac and Freddie Mac and the effect of private equity firm ownership on manufactured housing. The Senate Banking Committee declined to share the responses received from the two agencies.
At a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, criticized private equity firms for creating a housing crisis, especially for seniors in mobile home parks.
“So Wall Street investors buying up manufactured home communities threatens the remaining affordable housing stock that seniors rely on,” she said.
“It means that seniors have fewer opportunities to age in their own homes and that they risk being squeezed by rising rents, leaving them even with less money to buy medicine and to put food on the table. Congress needs to act to weaken the investors’ grip on the housing market.”
Read Part Two…