This quote reflects everything that’s wrong with the perception of mobile home park landlords:

[when a home burns down] residents are still required to pay rent for their mobile home spot, regardless if their house is still standing….But that’s not all.“They’re now telling us that we’re responsible for cleanup,” Castillo continued. “These families, many of whom didn’t have insurance, are now left to scramble and find apartments, find other places where they already don’t meet the income requirements. Aside from doing that, they also have to now find a way to save money, to pay the over $5,000 in cleanup fees plus the monthly rent until they are able to put in their 30 day notice to vacate.” Leaving many not knowing what’s next.“I feel like they’re just seeing us as dollar signs,” Perez said.

According to this rationale, mobile home park owners are not landlords, they are apparently government agencies – non-profits – that are responsible for much more than just providing parking spaces for mobile homes. Can you imagine applying this same logic to a parking lot at the airport in which your car burned down while you were on your trip. Do you think that would make you not responsible for your parking fee? For removal of your car? To any damage to the parking lot that the fire caused?

This is just plain stupid.

This is an issue for each resident to decide. If you live in a flood zone, you get flooding. It’s called accountability. How can people suddenly wake up and say “oh my gosh, I didn’t know I could be flooded?” when they’ve known that from the onset. If the State of Vermont now steps in and says “you can’t live in flood zones” then many people who have planned for periodic flooding will lose the use of their property. Is that fair?

More nonsense about back-seat driving residents and media reporters trying to second guess complicated land development issues – kind of like me trying to critique brain surgery.

Another article about a county government shutting down a park. Between owners wanting to redevelop for more profitable uses – and city/county/state governments wanting to shut them down to remove affordable housing units from their neighborhoods – mobile home parks may soon be listed as an endangered species.

The buyers are paying $16,250,000 ($200,000 per lot) for a rundown park. Exactly how would this not be a redevelopment deal? The reason the residents have probably not received notice is that the owner is not going to do so until after the deal has closed. How could anyone think that there will be any other outcome? 

Same recurring theme:

Soon, the mobile home park located on Forrest Avenue in McKenzie could cease to exist. During the monthly meeting of the McKenzie City Council, the board approved (on the first reading) Ordinance 554 to amend the mobile home park property from R-4 (residential mobile home) to R-3 (high-density residential). This allows the owners to develop the property for the construction of “townhouses.”

Redevelopment of mobile home parks is accelerating for more profitable housing options. Residents and bureaucrats better take note because they will soon find out that the only way to stem this tide is to drop the strategy of public shaming park owners who engage in reasonable rent increases and instead say to owners “how much would the rent have to be to keep this park in operation and away from the wrecking ball?” and then happily pay it.

Am I the only one or doesn’t this program sound like the old “company store” from the 19th century where miners and manufacturing workers were not paid in U.S. currency but in credits they could only use at the “company store” and had no actual monetary value? In this case, you buy a stick-built home with real cash and yet all you get is a 99-year land lease under which you can only sell your home back to this “land trust” and after 99-years – if you don’t sell – they can just take it back for free. Since the whole point of home ownership is to gain equity as home prices increase, they are effectively neutering the ability to profit from home ownership. Bad deal for the buyers, in my opinion.

Great letter to the media from this owner when they were accused of raising rent and ruining the park:
When contacted, Brett Garner, the park manager until recently, responded in writing, citing some of the options.

“1. We can leave the community as it is, not pursue improvements, and leave lots rents close to where they were.”  “2. Increase the quality of the community by adding the lots on the east end, connect the existing community to the newly installed water and sewer pipe (planned for next summer), repave the roads (planned for July 2023), add a recreation area on the north side of the park, and clean up the look of the community so that it’s more desirable for you and all residents to live in. We chose to go with option two because, in our eyes, it’s what’s best for our immediate community (Estates at The Bluff) and the community at large (Kremmling).“

There’s no question that in any 100-space park there are probably 2 people who can’t afford to pay more rent and want to live in squalor if that’s the cheapest option. But the majority don’t agree and the key to running a business is to please the majority of your customers, not some tiny fringe faction.

This is getting absolutely ridiculous. The power in a mobile home park was cut-off for a brief while for necessary repairs to a transformer and the residents are going beserk because they didn’t get enough notice. I have lost my power for days at a time in a stick-built house in the middle of the summer – due to a major storm – and the entire town survived just fine. Here’s what both sides say:

“{the manager] said the power outages were a result of a private electric company hired by the management to work on a transformer within the park. She said paper notices were distributed to residents' mailboxes, but the warning given was far from sufficient. "We're supposed to have 72 hours notice, they didn't even come close to doing that," she said. One of the notices had the wrong date listed on it, leading to additional confusion”.

Not that many decades ago there was no air-conditioning. And 100 years before that, there was no electricity. And people survived just fine. Is America so pathetic now that it can’t get along even for a couple hours without power? 

The buyer is spending $16,250,000 for 87 mobile home lots. That’s around $200,000 per lot. Look at the photos of the property. Look at the location. Who in the world would not realize this is going to be torn down and redeveloped in the extremely near future?

Here’s one of the classic quotes of all time regarding this city-owned park:

“We’re making over $170,000 a year, so if any private developer would come in, I imagine they would maintain their asset the same way we would,” he said.

For those who have little math skills – which this bureaucrat hopes applies to residents of the park -- $170,000 per year in net income at a 6% cap rate works out to only $2,800,000. Do you think that a big piece of land near the waterfront in Ontario, Canada might be worth a little more than $2,800,000?

Here’s how this is really going to work out. The city is going to sell the property to a developer and they will swiftly tear it down to build apartments. The city removes all of the cost the park inflicts on the city (school tuition, uninsured hospital visits, etc.), improves the drive-up appeal of the neighborhood, and gets out from under the tough job of managing a mobile home park. And everyone knows it, regardless of what they may say at city council meetings.

The moral to this story is simple: stay far, far away from California if you want to be a landlord. Who in the world wants to mess with nonsense like this?

I have no problem with the concept of residents buying parks – we’ve sold several to the residents – but let’s all agree that 32 lots is not exactly changing the direction of the earth as many of these “resident-owned” articles like to suggest.

It’s not hard to find an attorney to file almost anything if you’ll pay their hourly rate, but I sense the residents will have some challenges with their class-action dream namely because 1) Ohio has no rent control 2) Ohio has no rent control and 3) did I mention that Ohio has no rent control? Kind of hard to overcome that one issue when your lawsuit is about the owner raising rent.

But I can bet you that the owners of this park are probably meeting this weekend with some land developers to get the current value per square foot – wouldn’t you? If the residents are the catalyst for that redevelopment then they have nobody to blame but themselves.

This time it’s a city itself that is tearing down the mobile home park to make way for a better use of the land. And the residents are mad because the city is going to displace 30 tenants to make way for 300 more housing units.

"Residents of the park have described the morale as “depressing” since the approval.“There is a community based here. They showed that they are going to make places so that people can have more places to live, but what about here? There are over 70 residents here. We are all getting kicked out on the street and that is not right,” said Amanda Mitchell, a resident who has lived at the park for 20 years."

It looks like the 800-pound gorilla in the room nationwide is that park owners simply tear down and redevelop when the mobile home park is no longer the highest and best use of the land. That means residents need to embrace rent increases and follow the rules because the alternative is homelessness. It’s that simple. Even cities – in this case -- are following this mantra.

Let’s see … $750,000 for a 1,700 doublewide works out to $441 per square foot. For a mobile home. In a world in which you can buy a really nice stick-built in many markets for half that amount. The only thing that knocks my socks off in this article is how stupid anyone would be to pay that much for an old doublewide. Come out to Missouri and we can get you an identical dwelling for about $50,000 on a lakeside lot, and you can put the rest in the bank at 5% and live off the interest.

Same old story. Residents won’t behave and pay rent and the end result is redevelopment.

“Sarbaum Mobile Home Park owner Mike Baker notified residents in April of an Aug. 10 closure. Baker wrote to residents that he was "no longer able to meet the park's operating expenses" due to late payments and expensive repairs to its 60-plus-year-old sewer system.”

Some mobile home park residents take for granted that they are guaranteed an on-going place to live no matter what they do. This should serve as a lesson to these folks that they are fully accountable for their actions and you can’t push park owners around and not expect to get a park closure notice. Land is too valuable and park owners all have limits to their patience.

We all know that mobile home park residents are all angels and can do no wrong. Certainly, they would never lie to the media, right? Well, I’ve not been to this property, but I know Acentia and they are one of the best operators in the U.S. with exemplary property condition and professional management. I’m pretty sure that the owners are correct when they say:

"Much of the information shared in your story is inaccurate and untrue," wrote Marko Vukovich, Vice President of Operations for Acentia, in an email to CBS News Colorado. "We have owned and operated Foxridge Farm for over 43 years and take great pride in serving our residents and fulfilling our mission, vision, and values. We aim to offer a clean, safe, healthy community for many years. We are not in business for the quick profit and resent any such accusation."

So why would the residents lie to the press? Well, let me think what their motive might be? Maybe they think that they can press the bureaucrats into freezing their rent or getting them some free stuff. I’m willing to bet $100 that if we all went out to Foxridge Farms right now we’d look at each other with a puzzled look and say “what are these tenants talking about?”

Here’s a great quote from the property owner:

“There often comes a time in the life of a park that a decision must be made as to whether it is feasible to continue operating a park when the physical improvements and infrastructure become older and costly to repair and replace, and/or the park owners conclude they can no longer economically operate the park based on measures taken by state and local government,” read a July 6 letter from Little Woods Mobile Villa managers to residents. Due to such factors, the letter stated, the owners were “considering whether it is viable to continue operating the park as a mobile home park, and are exploring the option of converting the park.”

Rent control equals redevelopment – it’s just that simple. It’s unbelievable that these bureaucrats can’t see that they have absolutely no power over the property owner’s right to simply tear the park down and build something else on the property that is not subject to rent control. Total idiots. They are personally responsible for hundreds of households being homeless as a part of their actions in this case.

Yet again the residents think they have won by harassing the owner into selling the land to a developer – then shocked and agitated when they can’t find anywhere even remotely as inexpensive to live:

“The Jimenez family is supposed to pay $440 in lot fees each month. Like the other tenants, they’ve stopped those payments. However, they can’t afford to move anywhere else. The day they have to pack up is fast approaching. County records show the residents were supposed to vacate the premises by the end of June as the property owner prepared to sell the park to a developer.”

I don’t know anything about this property or any of its troubles, but it seems to me that the residents massively overplayed their hand and now they’re homeless as a result. You are going to see much more of this until America stops being a nation of litigation and instead strives to focus on win/win strategies.

Well, if you thought she had any investing acumen, now you know better. Anyone who would spend $1 million on a mobile home that you don’t own the land underneath – whether it’s in Malibu or Timbuktu – is a certified idiot. My bet is that she released this video because somebody found out she lived in a “trailer park” and was about to sell the story to the National Enquirer so she decided to get a jump on that article. I watched this video and thought “wow, that’s embarrassing”. Not sure who would think otherwise.

Here’s what one neighbor of the mobile home park had to say: "let me tell you something. I see another fire happening. It's going to cost somebody their life. Whose head's that gonna be on? You guys. Take a look. Think about that." Based on that argument I could say to that neighbor “let me tell you something. I see you drive your car out of the driveway and it might cost someone their life if you crash into them. Whose head’s that gonna be on?”

The park owner is trying to tear down 10 old trailers and install 10 new ones. He’s not promising that he can end the risk of fire, famine, or locusts nor bring about world peace. He’s just following the law. That’s why the city agreed with the park owner.

Yes, we have a winner. “The Wokest Article OF 2023”. It not only takes the regular nonsense and expands on it, but it actually has a new woke angle not seen before: the reason mobile homes look bad is that evil manufacturers classify mobile homes as cars and therefore banks won’t fund home improvements that the residents are desperate to do which is clearly ridiculous. There is no battle between 99% of mobile home residents and out-of-state investors. There IS a battle between the 1% that want the parks to remain dumps at low rents and with the infrastructure failing. If these type of woke journalists want to really help those few mobile home park residents that don’t like living in a civilized society, then they should let them move in and sleep on their sofas.

This is a tough situation for the City of Blaine. They thought they had all mobile home parks effectively banned from being built in the city and suddenly it turns out the zoning department screwed up. A developer found the loophole and now the city is freaking out and trying to stop the developer with a moratorium. “City council approved the moratorium May 22 to allow time for city staff to clean up code inconsistencies. The underlying zoning code allows for manufactured home parks but the planned unit development (PUD) code does not. Manufactured home parks that are five acres or larger are required to be developed as PUDs.”

How will this turn out? The developer has pledged to sue the city if it denies his permit. The city is basically doomed as you can’t legally do what they’re doing. It’s like a plane with a broken landing gear and no matter how long you delay it, it’s still going to crash.

No offense but given the current values of mobile home parks in Colorado – typically around $100,000 per lot – means the $28 million the state has allocated to this program will only cover about 280 lots (there are single parks bigger than that).