Here's what the resident said:

"They raised the rent by $75 last year, and the latest increase will come this May. Rent is going up by $100 for a total of $550 per month.  They figure they got you over a barrel because there's no way to go anywhere, I mean, you're stuck," said Eyneart. 

Here's what the park owner said:

His Burien-based company has invested more than $130,000 into the park, he said. That includes hauling away abandoned cars and trailers, installing new mailboxes and putting in new plumbing. 

Here's what the journalist said:

Residents acknowledge improvements have been made. But that doesn't change the circumstances for people who can't afford the rent hikes.

Clearly, there are many points of view here, but let's explore what's true from what's false.

1. A $550 per month lot rent in Orofino, Idaho is insanely cheap. The median single-family home price is $348,000 and the average apartment rent is over $1,675 per month. Let's stop pretending that a mobile home park lot rent that is 70% less than all other forms of housing is somehow too high.
2. No resident is "stuck" in a mobile home park any more than they are "stuck" in a house or condo. If you have a better living option then sell your home and move to it. Nobody ever bought or sold a mobile home with the expectation of moving it at a cost of $10,000+. And most of the cost of moving mobile homes is the result of HUD requirements!
3. New owners always seem to put significant capital into fixing aging infrastructure and bringing the property "back to life". Living conditions – without exception – are superior under professional management.
4. What is NOT a part of owning any property in the U.S. – regardless of single-family or multi-family – is inheriting some type of governmental responsibility for marginal tenants. That's the job of the U.S. government. Can you imagine an article on McDonald's where they are criticized for eliminating the "Value Meal" because they are not worrying enough about customers who can't afford to eat in a modern America. The reason this topic always comes up is simple: the government cannot afford the massive size of Section 8 programs. So everyone's trying to pin this responsibility on private owners because the government has defaulted on their obligation.

I wish that everyone – owners, tenants and the media – could agree on the basic truths of life in America. You can plead your point, but don't insult our intelligence.

“I’m here to speak in opposition to this mobile home development we’ve got going on Needmore Road but I’m not here alone. I’m here with a group from my community, I’m here with some 400 names on a petition. These people are made up from anything from elderly people, young families with small children that lives in our area, who are all very concerned about our community. Your taxpayers and your voters are here to voice our concerns on this matter,” Carnes said to the commission.

Anyone who has ever appeared at a city council or zoning hearing on a proposed mobile home park development or expansion can completely commiserate with how this went. You literally go up to the podium, give your presentation, take your seat and 500 people then speak in opposition. You get greater turnout to a zoning meeting on a proposed mobile home park then you would at a high-school football game. That’s what keeps the “moat” around mobile home parks and protects them from overbuilding (the nemesis of retail, office, industrial, apartment and self-storage niches). Because of the aggressive hatred that the average American has for mobile home parks, this is exactly why so few new ones are ever built.

And another park bites the dust.

The property with hundreds of home lots and amenities in the northern metro area last sold 14 years ago for less than a third as much money.

Making $100 million with a single mobile home park in 14 years is a challenge but fully attainable apparently.

And multiple parks potentially bite the dust.

And another park bites the dust.

Roughly one-fifth of mobile home parks across the nation have been purchased by large-scale investors in recent years, according to a 2022 study by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a nonprofit foundation based in Massachusetts.

I’m not sure if the author of this story bothered to do any fact-checking, but there are around 44,000 mobile home parks in the U.S. and if 20% were purchased by large corporate investors in the last few years that would equate to around 10,000 parks. The actual number is probably more like 500 parks tops (ELS – the nation’s largest MH REIT – only owns around 400 in 30 years). And that’s around 1% NOT 10%. But the facts don’t much matter in this case because corporate ownership has nothing to do with higher lot rents.

The real reason rents are increasing across the nation is not because of large corporate owners, but simply because mobile home park lot rents are insanely, ridiculously low compared to $400,000 houses and $2,000 per month apartments. It’s called the free-market system, and it’s the backbone of America capitalism. Price controls are a part of socialism and “can lead to shortages, black markets, and reduced quality, ultimately hindering economic efficiency”. And that’s why the legislature in New Jersey hopefully won’t fall for this nonsense.

The Cedar Falls Resident Cooperative bought the park for $8 million to prevent a corporate sale that could have led to steep rent increases.

With the sale finalized, residents will see a $100 monthly rent increase, but they believe ownership will help keep costs stable in the long run.

"It's such a relief," she said. "I don’t have to worry about losing my home."

So let me get this straight: the residents deliberately bought the park and increased their rent immediately by $100 per month to fend off a professional investor from buying it and maybe raising the rent $50 or so. This is literally a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. If the park had sold to a professional buyer, the residents would have received a smaller rent increase, capital poured into fixing aging infrastructure, and professional management with proper collections and rules enforcement. But instead the residents now have no money to make repairs, rent that is higher than what a professional owner would have charged, and a management that will never collect or enforce rules correctly.

And the residents are celebrating what exactly? That they blew it?

And another park bites the dust.

And another park bites the dust.

And another park bites the dust.

The floors are caving in. The roofs are leaking. The walls that lack insulation invite mold. For residents of Rudd’s Mobile Home Park in Richmond’s Southside, these aren’t just minor inconveniences — they’re daily battles in a place they call home. Unlike traditional renters, most mobile home residents own their homes. (What they rent is the land or lot under where they live.) That means when things start falling apart, the responsibility to fix them falls on their shoulders. But many say they are barely making ends meet, making expensive repairs out of reach.

I’m sure the author of this article was really mad that they could not find a way to blame the park owner for the residents not maintaining their own homes. Believe me, if they could have, they would have.

And another park bites the dust.

A new mobile home park in Maine moves forward despite the anger of surrounding property owners. Affordable housing has become so severe that people are getting desperate – even city bureaucrats.

A resident of the mobile home park told MTFP that their $510 monthly lot rent will increase by $65 and that they will be charged $45 for utilities, totaling an annual $1,320 raise. The increase is due to rising maintenance costs and property taxes, the notice stated. Another resident told MTFP the $1,320 would cover the costs of planned projects for the park, including an office remodel, dumpster and mailbox replacements, road maintenance and community events. Park residents wrote a letter to the company, which was provided to MTFP, stating that they would not comply with the rent and utility-free increases and that the proposal for new mailboxes, dumpsters and community events is “blatantly insulting.”

What’s “blatantly insulting” is that the writer of the article never bothered to spend even 60 seconds of research on the housing market in Helena, Montana. So here are the numbers they ignored:

Single-family home cost: $439,800

3-Bedroom apartment rent: $1,330 per month

So tell me again how $575 per month is highway robbery? Now you know why they avoided the stats.

And another park bites the dust.

So the residents spent $18 million for 92 lots – that’s around $200,000 per space (and probably the most ever paid for a mobile home park in that area). And the deal was cobbled together out of short-term loans. Who wants to place a bet that this deal will be back on the market in five years – or whenever the loans come due?

Mountain View City Council wants to help mobile home residents by further limiting how much landlords can raise rents each year, but park owners are warning the new rules will make their operations unsustainable.

You’ve got to be kidding me. This is Palo Alto, California – one of the priciest residential markets in the U.S. Do these bureaucrats not realize that these park owners can sell the land for more than the parks are worth all day long? If this passes, there won’t be a single mobile home park still standing in Palo Alto.

However, Paul Beard, Weisfield’s attorney, said, "Petaluma is attempting to compel Youngstown to illegally discriminate against families with children. The city's complaint has no merit, because the city's ordinance is patently unlawful ... It purports to force the park to engage in federally prohibited discrimination. The park will continue to serve all members of the community seeking quality affordable housing, including families with children."

I know nothing about this case, but it won’t be the first time that a city tried any and everything to try not to have to pay school tuition on “trailer park” kids. We’ll see how this works out.

Another park bites the dust. The rents were too low to allow needed capital repairs and make a profit greater than alternative uses. It’s not rocket science.

Residents, including Dudleys Herrera, say feel ignored after they’ve repeatedly contacted the city and county about the growing issues, including trash and contamination. City officials said no citations have been issued at Li’l Abner, as they hope to work with developers to address the issues rather than impose penalties.

This park is being torn down. People are still living there who should have already vacated. Why would anyone think that the city would be interested in wasting more time on this? They simply need to leave.

Another park bites the dust.

It’s a great idea to repair old mobile homes at no cost to the owners. I hope more states can replicate this initiative.

Once they matched the 18 million dollar offer, the board had to find the money. Meadowood knew they would have to carry a big mortgage. The question was, could they get enough grants and low interest loans from local, county and state government overseeing federal dollars to finance what they needed? The final piece turned out to be a $3.475 million low-interest loan from Colorado's Department of Local Affairs."DOLA was our last piece. When we got our DOLA award, had it not been for our DOLA award we would not have made it," Cook explained.

Let me first say that I am not in any way opposed to residents buying their mobile home park. What makes me mad is that the media tries to make it a "David vs. Goliath" story under which the residents slay the corporate landlord. Clearly, the seller in this story was more than happy to take the $18 million regardless of who gave it to them. But there's no biblical moral here. The lot rent that residents will be paying, however, is THE EXACT SAME AMOUNT as they would under a corporate buyer – perhaps even more. Here's the simple math behind that statement:

1. All of the operating costs of the mobile home park are the same regardless of ownership (water, sewer, electricity, gas, insurance, repair, etc.). You don't get a "resident-owned discount" on any of these.
2. The monthly mortgage payment on the roughly $15 million mortgage will be identical no matter who the borrower is.
3. You add these two together and you come to the same monthly number no matter if the residents own it or a professional investor owns it.

The only difference between the two options is the bizarre concern that somehow the corporate owner is buying it for land development. While that's true in some cases (like last week's $1 million per lot park sale) that's very much a rarity. So what's the benefit to the residents with these transactions?

I would suggest that the lot rent will be HIGHER under resident ownership, as the tenants are lousy managers of these properties and will allow the delinquency to go up and the needed cap-x repairs to go down. It would be like letting the guy in row E fly the American Airlines jet and expect the same outcome as the highly-trained pilot. But when the media pretends that the residents are just as good pilots as the professionals, it demeans those who actually know what they're doing: the corporate investors. And that's simply not true. Go drive a "tenant owned" community and tell me how it compares to one owned by a corporate owner. You won't be impressed.

On the subject of longevity of the park not becoming redeveloped, the worst part of these stories is that they fail to tell the truth about an essential fact: these "tenant-owned" deals are not built for long-term financial survivability. When a corporate owner buys a mobile home park they typically do so with 10-year notes structured at 70% LTV. When the tenants buy the park, the financing is typically cobbled together from short-term notes (typically 3 to 5 years in duration) and other flimsy hand-outs. As a result, the deals will probably go back on the market again since they can't get them refinanced under a traditional structure and the non-profits lose interest and refuse to keep going with personal guarantees and grants.

I wish that, just once, somebody would have the guts to tell the truth about resident ownership! Again, I have no problem with it as a seller, but the lies have had a negative effect on the industry with many state governments and that part of the story has to end. Many blue-state bureaucrats have bought into the false "landlords are evil" manipulation over time, which is just plain wrong.

Thursday night’s Planning Board meeting in Warren generated strong opposition to a proposed 22-lot mobile home park off of Route 1. “How are the people that live around this and own property that pay taxes, how are we benefiting from this? Because I pay taxes on waterfront property. And I want to know, like, how am I benefiting from this? What am I benefiting from this?

It’s interesting that Maine – which holds itself out as some type of liberal oasis of original thought – goes berserk with the mere mention of a new 22-space mobile home park.

This exemplifies why virtually no mobile home parks have been built in the U.S. in over 50 years.

“The rent will be based on the expenses of the park, not somebody making somebody’s wallet grow bigger and bigger.”

The tenants are buying the park for $1.9 million. There are 42 total lots and $300 lot rent currently. So each lot will be burdened with around $45,000 of debt. Interest rates are currently around 7%. So let’s calculate the real numbers for a minute:

• The 30-year mortgage payment for each lot will be around $300 per month all by itself. Add on water, sewer, taxes, insurance, management, trash, repair and maintenance, etc. and that’s about another $200 per month. And that leaves no money for cap-x repairs to roads, trees, water and sewer lines, etc.

The article refuses to say what the new lot rent will be under the tenants’ ownership, but it looks to me like around $500+ per month just to break even. And I have no clue how they will be able to pay for any major repairs at all.

Does anyone at the Maine non-profits educate the residents on what the lot rent will rise to after closing? You know the answer is “no”. Because if they did the tenants wouldn’t be buying these parks.