In California, mobile homes make up to 6% of the state’s housing stock. With as many as 300,000 homes in 5,000 mobile home parks in the state, they play a critical role in providing affordable housing. But state laws and efforts by for-profit developers to buy up mobile home communities are putting this kind of housing at risk. We talk to experts about the challenges mobile home owners face.
Guests:
Bruce Stanton, general counsel, Golden State Manufactured Home Owners League
Mary Currie, resident, Marin Valley Mobile Country Club
Randy Keller, advocacy manager, manufactured home parks acquisition, California Center for Cooperative Development
Mariah Thompson, senior litigator, California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc.
This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. In California, mobile homes make up, say, six percent of the state’s housing stock, with as many as three hundred thousand homes and five thousand mobile home parks in the state. These places are a crucial part of the state’s affordable housing picture. Though few have been built in recent decades, the mobile home parks that do exist are facing pressure from private equity firms that have found ways to squeeze a few more dollars out of people on the lower end of the income scale. But residents who’ve often been in a community for years are fighting back too to preserve their places in the Bay Area.
Joining us to help us understand the issues that mobile home park residents face, we’ve got Mariah Thompson, senior litigator with the California Rural Law Center. Welcome.
Mariah Thompson: Hi. Good morning. Yeah.
Alexis Madrigal: Thanks for joining us. We’ve got Bruce Stanton, general counsel for the Golden State Manufactured Homeowners League. Welcome.
Bruce Stanton: Yes. Good morning. Thanks. Good to be with you.
Alexis Madrigal: Good to have you. And we’ve got Randy Keller, who’s the manufactured home parks acquisition and advocacy manager with the California Center for Cooperation Development. Welcome, Randy.
Randy Keller: Good morning. Thank you for having me on your show.
Alexis Madrigal: So, Mariah, let’s go with you first. As a senior litigator there at the Rural Law Center, you’ve been working with mobile home communities for quite some time, over a decade. What are the kinds of communities that you end up representing?
Mariah Thompson: Yeah. Thank you. So California Rural Legal Assistance is a statewide nonprofit legal aid. We’ve been around for about sixty years assisting rural Californians with all sorts of issues, including housing. My clients tend to be on the, on the margins of, when it comes to homeownerships in terms of, economics. So we typically represent farm workers, residents with a fixed income, seniors, folks that are at or below the two hundred percent of the poverty line.
Alexis Madrigal: And what are the kinds of economics of the communities that these folks are living in?
Mariah Thompson: Yeah. So, traditionally, mobile home parks have been one of the last, you know, kind of bastions of affordable housing throughout the country and across California. You know, there’s currently over three hundred and seventy-five thousand mobile home park spaces in California representing about five thousand parks. And, typically, the folks in these communities are, you know, families, folks living on fixed incomes, a lot of veterans and seniors, and folks that have been able to have access to homeownership because mobile homes have typically been fairly affordable. You know, I’ve had many clients that have acquired their homes directly from the prior owner for under ten thousand dollars or around ten thousand dollars. And the clients that I represent, they’re typically living in mobile homes that are from the nineteen sixties, nineteen seventies, and are more of an aging housing stock.
Alexis Madrigal: And in this case, okay, they own the home. But by that, you mean they literally own the building — like, the four walls. Wherever that home is, they don’t own the land, right?
Mariah Thompson: In most circumstances, yes. When we’re talking about parks, they are typically renting the property that is beneath the home, but they do own the home. The thing that makes mobile home parks different is that the home, despite the name, is not usually movable. So they own an asset that is fixed in place, but they don’t own the land that it’s affixed to.
Alexis Madrigal: You know, Bruce Stanton, you know, there are all kinds of different mobile home communities, each with their own particularities. What are mobile home communities in the Bay Area like?
Bruce Stanton: Well, thanks. And I would just say Mariah really, I think, explained well what sort of an industry we have here. Parks can range from as small as ten to twenty spaces to as large as over eight hundred spaces. You know, typically, a park has common area facilities such as clubhouse, swimming pool, sauna, laundry rooms. There’s gonna be overflow or guest parking in most parks. Sometimes there’s special amenities provided like a dog run or something, and there’s a few parks that even have very unique features such as a house and an older building that’s part of the park property. But what we are finding is there are less and less mom-and-pop park owners and an increasing number of larger corporations, some of them even out of state, that are acquiring parks because they’re seen as a real cash flow bonus for them — you know, that the homeowners are basically renting dirt on which they place their personal property structure that they have, you know, complete obligation to repair and keep up. They pay mortgage and, you know, loan fees, whereas the park’s responsibility is the infrastructure.
Alexis Madrigal: Are those companies — I’ve been wondering — so are those companies starting to vertically integrate? Like, do they offer loans now too in addition to renting the thing? Or are they pretty much sticking with that traditional business model of just renting the dirt, as you put it?
Bruce Stanton: They are pretty much sticking to the traditional model, but in the process of that, they’re looking for ways to increase cash flow. And if they’re purchasing a park in a rent-stabilized jurisdiction — which there are currently just over one hundred cities and counties throughout California that have some form of mobile home rent stabilization — they’re looking for ways to decontrol the spaces. You know, that could be, in the most extreme case, an eviction or otherwise challenging the ordinance. Or something that Mariah and I are all too familiar with is filing petitions or applications for fair return under the ordinances, seeking to increase beyond what the annual rent adjustments the ordinance allows are, by saying, you know, we’re not getting a fair return, we’re not keeping up. And sometimes these petitions get filed literally within months of the new park owner taking ownership, which is pretty interesting.
Alexis Madrigal: So do all these mobile home parks — are they all subject to some kind of rent stabilization or rent control, or just some subset of them? And what is the subset of them?
Bruce Stanton: Yeah. There is no state rent regulation for mobile home parks. It’s a creature of local regulation by city or county. And as I mentioned, there’s literally about, at this point, maybe a hundred six or a hundred and seven such ordinances. I don’t have a breakdown at my fingertips for the number of spaces that covers, but most of the ordinances are located in the coastal, higher-density jurisdictions where there are more parks. For example, I think San Jose has the most parks within its city limits — it has sixty-five parks. The Central Valley area, the more conservative, property-rights-centric area, is where there is no rent stabilization, and those residents basically are subject to paying whatever the park owner says they want.
And the problem is mobility. These are — the key is these are captive folks. You know, if the rent goes up, it’s not like you’re renting an apartment or a condominium and you can just pack up and move down the road. Mobile homes are really immobile homes in immobile home parks, and the courts have recognized the captivity of mobile home residents. There’s one famous quote from a Ninth Circuit court opinion that says the park owners have the residents “over a barrel.”
Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about mobile homes, a critical component of the affordable housing picture in California, including here in the Bay Area. Joined by Bruce Stanton, general counsel with Golden State Manufactured Homeowners League; Mariah Thompson, a senior litigator with California Rural Law Center; Randy Keller, whose manufactured home parks acquisition and advocacy manager with the California Center for Cooperative Development. We want to hear from you too. Maybe you live in one of the Bay Area’s many mobile home communities. What are the sort of joys and challenges of living there?
Let’s bring in Mary Currie, who’s a resident of the Marin Valley Mobile Country Club in Novato. Welcome.
Mary Currie: Thank you for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: Well, just tell us a little bit about your community.
Mary Currie: Well, it’s a sixty-three-acre property here in Novato, and it started as a mobile home park back in the sixties. And in nineteen ninety-seven, the city of Novato took ownership — took title to the property — which is a little different than most mobile home parks. I think we’re the only one owned by a city here in California. But we have three hundred and thirteen units and about four hundred and twenty-five people. And it’s a community — capital bold “community.”
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. Capital C. Yeah.
Mary Currie: Yeah. And it’s really, it’s an amazing place to live. I was attracted to moving here. I lived in San Anselmo for a long time, and I needed to downsize and generate some funds to help take care of my mother. And it was just a perfect fit for me. I’ve been here for about four and a half years. And we have a lot of people that have been here for thirty or more years. I mean, it’s really an amazing place. It’s filled with a lot of different backgrounds. We’ve got, you know, teachers, nurses, architects — a range of professionals. And one thing that’s very interesting here is that ninety-one percent of our residents, in a survey that was done two years ago, are low income. Marin County low income is about a hundred and nine thousand dollars a year for one person. So we have a lot of people living right on the edge, check to check.
Our community is over fifty-five. And this place is so amazing because of the commitment that people have to bringing interesting programs. One of the recent ones is we have a park market. We connected with a nonprofit called ExtraFood, and we provide food four days a week through a volunteer program here in the park where people can come get food that is donated by various markets in the area. And that’s bringing people about a hundred and fifty or more dollars a week to their food budget.
And those are the kind of services we need here. We’ve got lectures, exercise classes, and a swimming pool. I mean, this place is amazing. I mean, I’m always pinching myself. I’m out walking in the morning, and it’s just such a great place to live.
Alexis Madrigal: We are talking about mobile homes, this critical component of the affordable housing picture in California. Joined by Mary Curry, who is a resident of the Marin Valley Mobile Country Club in Novato. We’ve got Randy Keller, manufactured home parks acquisitions and advocacy manager with the California Center for Cooperative Development; Bruce Stanton, general counsel with the Golden State Manufactured Homeowners League; and Mariah Thompson, senior litigator with California Rural Law Center. Of course, we want to invite you in as well. Would you move into a mobile home? Maybe you’re in a mobile home community now. Let us know how life is.