Mobile Home Park News Briefing

This must be a friend of the woke journalist from last week’s “we need rent control in Montana” story. Here are the facts. Montana is a trifecta Republican state. In all of America history, rent control has only been adopted in trifecta Democrat states. As a result, there is ZERO chance of rent control in Montana. 

Yes, this is the same story as last week, in which the residents are trying to convince non-profits to buy them a park for over $1 million more than it is appraised for. This transaction has zero percent chance of ever closing and the tenants need to give up and move on and stop wasting everyone’s time.

Back in the 1990s, James Carville (who worked for Bill Clnton) famously said "drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, no telling what you're going to find” as his reaction to Paula Jones accusing Bill Clinton of sexual assault. This entire debacle at Lil’ Abner mobile home park just keeps getting weirder and weirder. Every week there seems to be a new lawsuit by tenants who were told to move out for redevelopment months ago. You could probably just mount cameras in this park and produce a #1 rated reality television show.

An official from the Boa Vida Communities made a statement saying, "We have been in touch with Attorney General Heather Hamel on this matter over the past week. On Friday August 8th we inspected each space within the community with a licensed electrician. At that time, it was determined that there were numerous unpermitted alterations made by residents, which cause the power draw to greatly exceed the capacity of the system. These alterations are causing the main fuses to trip, interrupting service for them and their neighbors. Each resident is provided with 50-amp service, by bypassing or altering this without our knowledge or approval they are drawing more energy than the system can provide. This can and has caused outages either localized to their space or street, or even effecting the entire community," said Josh Court of Boa Vida Communities."We will continue to work with licensed electricians to make any repairs or changes needed to ensure the system is being used as designed, and ensure that our residents do not experience interruptions caused by other residents tampering with system," Court said. 

So what you basically have here is a master-metered electrical system with tenants deliberately exceeding the allowable amps by putting in window air-conditioners in excess of what’s allowed, which results in lines melting and fuses blowing. The guilty parties here are clearly the tenants who are cheating and not the park owner.

And another park bites the dust.

Both council members asked questions others didn’t, such as whether owners were consulted and what could happen if parks closed. They also underscored the threat of legal retaliation. That threat was all but assured. In an email to the Argus-Courier on Wednesday, Davies said that Harmony “should have multiple suits on file” in the coming weeks, with more expected after.

I hope Petaluma has a big line item in their city budget for legal fees, or otherwise they have really screwed themselves. Common sense tells you they are going to lose this case and, if they do, the parks will also be able to get judgements against the city for their legal fees and damages.

Is this really the best way for Petaluma to spend their tax dollars – to squander millions to appease maybe fifty vocal mobile home park residents? Looks pretty stupid to me.

I also like the obvious fact that this whole bit of idiocy is being orchestrated by some “Soros-inspired” political action group – just look at how professional those protest signs are! I couldn’t get stuff that nice printed at Fastsigns. Are the folks holding these up even actual residents or just being paid to be there? Doesn’t look very authentic to me.

I’m not sure what they mean by “unaffordable” but it’s an absolute fact that lot rent, insurance, property tax, utilities – pretty much everything related to owning a single-family home, condo, or mobile home – is going up at a rapid pace. Who’s to blame? Not park owners. We’re the folks that have delivered the least expensive form of detached housing America has ever seen. The actual culprit is inflation, which has been the direct result of government over-spending (we’ve got $36 trillion in debt) and other failed policies. If you want to hate someone, hate the government. But blaming mobile home park owners for all the ills of America is ridiculous.

While the bill focuses on rent-related protections, it does not address land use concerns or prevent the redevelopment of manufactured home parks.  But the underlying issue is that property owners can redevelop their land according to zoning allowances, potentially replacing manufactured home communities with apartments, townhouses or commercial developments.  

Well, they finally figured it out. When you enact rent control, mobile home park owners simply tear their parks down and build back better uses. Maybe they should have thought of that first?

And another park bites the dust.

And another park bites the dust.

This is a regurgitation of the same article as last week, only with even more factual blunders. Let’s start with the obvious. The article is only talking about parks with water wells. That’s maybe 10% of all parks (probably more like 5%). Roughly 8% of Americans live in “trailers”, but less than half of that number live in mobile home parks, with the other half residing on their own private land. So here’s the actual math: 300 million Americans times 3% = 9 million Americans. Then multiply that number by 10% and you get 900,000. Then take away all the water wells that are properly permitted and maintained (about 50% according to the article, which I will bet $100 is completely wrong and more like 90%) and you have 450,000 people. So the title should be “hundreds of thousands” and not “millions”, even based on the writer’s faulty figures and logic.

But then there are other difficulties with the stats here. This entire article series is not based on any actual data but extrapolating some bureaucrat’s opinion regarding only the mobile home parks of Utah. Utah, and that region of the U.S., has some of the worst contaminants of water – including arsenic – that require methods of active extraction. In most of the other states, all you have to contend with is adding chlorine for water purification. So that’s hardly a fair data set to base assumptions on.

There are definitely “trailer parks” out there that have unlicensed water wells with zero supervision. We’ve all driven through their muddy roads where the homes lack skirting and the tenants lack shoes. Nobody buys those, and they remain in the hands of the original mom and pop builders for an eternity. But to claim that those properties are a fair representation of all the properties with licensed water wells that are regularly inspected based on state, county and city laws is ludicrous.  

We’ve sold a few mobile home parks to the residents over the years. There’s nothing wrong with that. When the non-profits offer you $42 million for two “trailer parks” any smart person would say “yes., yes, yes”. It’s not rocket science. But will they actually close on the deal? That’s the big question.

EVERYTHING squeezes Florida mobile home park residents. Gasoline, food, medicine, insurance, property tax, cable TV, cell phone, water, sewer, trash – you name it. How can you single out lot rent as the only culprit? Look, we live in a country which has the highest inflation and interest rates in 40 years. That’s not the fault of mobile home park owners. I seriously doubt that anyone – including the residents quoted in the story – really believe that. They’re just hoping they’ll get lucky and some bureaucrat will propose rent control. Here’s a news bulletin: there’s 0% probability of rent control in Florida. But if you want to propose it in Vermont, you might have a shot.

I could have told these idiots that selling old mobile homes in an auction format like that would be a total failure. I’ve been to these type of tax sales and nobody ever shows up to bid. Bureaucrats should stick with things that they’re good at … which is basically nothing.

But, one week ago, they learned the state cannot buy the property. The appraisal for the 52-acre property came back $1.1 million below the $6.5 million offer from Crown, Preston said. By law, the state cannot pay more than the appraised value.

Yeah, that’s kind of a deal killer. Clearly, the only way to buy the park is to factor in raising the lot rent to market levels and filling vacant lots.  And that pretty much sums up why these “tenant-owned” deals never happen, because they’re not professional deal makers and have zero common sense on the requirements of how to put big mortgages on properties and actually pay the bills.

As real estate investors increasingly buy up mobile home parks, evictions are rising. In Florida, eviction filings jump by 40% in the months after a park is sold, according to research from Princeton’s Eviction Lab.

It should come as no surprise that evictions jump 40% in many parks immediately following purchase by professional investors. That’s because the new owners require that residents actually pay their rent every month – something that the former mom and pop owners never made them do. We’ve bought parks in which tenants have not paid lot rent in 4 years yet mom and pop never kicked them out. Those days are coming to an end as new owners have huge mortgages to pay every month and dead beats can no longer be afforded.

Bureaucrats may be able to force owners to deny residency to non-seniors, but they won’t be able to stop them from tearing their parks down and putting up more profitable uses.

I used to be on the Landmarks Commission in my small town. Occasionally we would have some nutty group come down to city hall and rant and rave about something and we’d say things like “you are heard” to get them to shut up and leave. That’s all the Fortuna council did here. There’s absolutely nothing of value in their declaration. It’s like when Teddy Roosevelt would tell the Indians “we shall endeavor to persevere”. Just verbal garbage, nothing more.

Read this:

Recently, IFF closed a $430,000 loan that provided DPC with financing for the purchase of a 40-foot recreational vehicle (RV).

OK, now read that again.

If you are thinking WTF then you have common sense. If you are thinking “I don’t get it” then you must have worked in the Biden administration.

The media regurgitates this story every week. Look, if you think that private equity groups are evil then you better go on Google and look up all the holdings by Carlysle, Apollo – and hundreds of others – and you’ll realize that pretty much everything you do or use on a daily basis is owned by private equity groups. As a result, you’ll have to move to an island in South America and live in a tent to escape the reach of what you believe to be Satan. Smart people realize that private equity groups inject millions of dollars into their mobile home park holdings to bring them back to life and nobody else has the money to do so in a big way. Thank God they exist.

I have three main takeaways from this article:

1. If anyone thinks that a $207 per month lot rent is sustainable in a town with $293,000 single-family home prices and $1,510 per month apartment rents, then you’re too dumb to argue with. Clearly, this owner needs to tear the park down immediately and redevelop into apartments or any other use. I’m sure they’re calling the land brokers right now.
2. The protestors’ signs in the photo are all professionally made and NOT by the residents. This is clearly the work of a well-funded “Free Rent Movement” group. The residents are simply pawns in this game.
3. Massachusetts is a state filled with political and judicial nut cases.

So let me now tell the judge and tenants what will happen next:

1. The park owner will find a better use for the property and give the tenants termination notices.
2. The residents will have to leave and will find all other housing options cost literally ten times more than the park did.
3. The political action group that is funding and promoting this nonsense won’t even take the tenants’ phone calls when they realize they’ve been played for fools.
4. The residents end up 100% screwed and the park owner ends up with a more successful use that makes ten times more money than the park ever did.

How do I know? That’s how these situations always turn out.

Great headline for sensationalism, but then you read in the article that it’s NOT 68% of mobile home parks that supposedly have water issues but only 68% of those with their own well water. But then the argument gets even weaker when it’s revealed that the “68%” number is not rooted in science but merely an estimate based on a micro-sampling of a few small trailer parks in western states, which sometimes have a very high degree of carcinogens in their water supply that can’t be cured with simply chlorine. The reality is that maybe 10% of U.S. mobile home parks are on well water and, of those, all of the institutional-quality ones are tested monthly and in 100% compliance. So when you take the supposed 68% and apply it to roughly 10% of mobile home parks on well water, that’s just 7%. But then you take off all those professionally-managed parks and leave just those nasty 1-star slum trailer parks down by the river and you are probably at 2% or less of all parks. So shouldn’t the headline actually read “New Study Shows Drinking Water in 98% of Mobile Home Parks is Safe”? Absolutely!

More of the “Private Equity Derangement Syndrome” in action. Perhaps the reason that Michigan has so many private equity groups owning parks in that state is simply because there are a ton of parks in poor condition that need private equity money to rebuild them and bring them up to modern standards. There’s certainly nothing sinister going on. 

There is not a single mobile home or mobile home park in the National Register — a glaring omission that, if addressed, challenges the preservation field to join the fight for affordable housing.

I’m shocked that not a single mobile home park is in the National Register. I would have thought that some of the earlier landmark properties, like Point Dume, would have made the cut.

It will be interesting to see if they can force HUD to remove the “chassis rule” and stop making mobile homes sit 3’ off the ground with the embarrassing skirting that screams “trailer park”. The single-family home lobby will fight this concept to the death, but maybe the industry will get lucky.