A non-profit buys a 50-space mobile home park for a total package price of around $6 million (original price plus improvements) and saves the residents from the evil park owner and they live forever in a land of unicorns and pixie dust. Sheer genius, right? Well, they could just have given each resident $120,000 cash to go buy a nicer stick-built dwelling with zero lot rent (the lot rent is $483 per month). I can’t believe that I’m apparently the only one that sees these type of virtue signaling events make no economic sense. Either the folks who fund these non-profits have poor math skills or have never looked at Realtor.com.

So the non-profit spent $7 million cash for two mobile home parks with the intention of using the cash flow to buy more parks. Knowing how the world works, I’m assuming the non-profit bought these for a 5% cap rate and the two properties have an EBITDA of maybe $350,000 per year. That’s if they collected the rent and knew how to run a park, which they don’t. So the EBITDA may be more like $175,000 per year. And that means they will be able to buy a new park about every 20 years or so. Not exactly the potent force in housing they are claiming. Seen it all before.

Ronald Reagan was wrong. The nine scariest words in the English language actually are “you now own a mobile home park in California”.

I’m not sure what to think about this new concept in which the non-profit owns the housing unit and the “homeowner” can’t sell it except at the price the non-profit demands to someone the non-profit chooses. Isn’t that really just a rental agreement disguised as a mortgage? If you take the ability to create wealth out of home ownership then you’re really ruining that person’s future well-being, right? One more case of groups that think they need to control lives because they believe that humans are naturally stupid.

This is one of those strange cases where the word “park” has two meanings. The land in question is a city park that mostly serves the neighboring trailer park.

This group paid $16 million for less than three acres. Do you seriously think this is going to stay a mobile home park? I will bet $100 that there is something entirely different on top of this land by the end of the decade (which is about how long it may take to get the necessary permits and approvals to build something else on this land). If you assume a density of 12 units per acre, that would be like spending $450,000 per lot. Not sure how that computes except as a development site.

Is spending $800,000 to build a storm shelter for 50 lots really a good use of state funds? That’s nearly $20,000 per household – more than their mobile homes are probably worth. I am endlessly amazed at the level of financial waste at the state and national level. Don’t tell anyone but there is a product at most mobile home shows in which you put a solid steel storm shelter under the deck of your mobile home at a fraction of this cost.

Here’s the key quote from this article:

Given that prohibitive cost of moving a mobile home – often upward of $7,000 – homeowners find themselves stuck, forced to pay lot rent or abandon their home and asset.

Do you see something missing in that list of options? First of all, you can get another park owner to pay to relocate your home as long as it has a HUD seal (post-1976) and you have the basic verbal skills to ask them to do so, but leaving that aside, why would the only other option be to “abandon your home”? Whatever happened to the concept of selling your home? The article says that the median home price is gigantic and affordable housing is sparse so why would these folks who can’t afford to live there simply put their mobile homes on the market and sell them and then move? In most mobile home parks, homes sell for $5,000 to $50,000 based on age and location, but this bizarre concept that “mobile homes can only be abandoned” is just plain stupid.

Pretty crazy when solar panels are deemed to be uglier than a mobile home park. 

Oh come on, seriously? “Interior air-conditioning units are not as efficient as window units since they release warm air back into the room”. That’s not the case at all. Interior air-conditioning units work just fine – I’ve been in places that used them and they can cool you to meat-locker levels. The real problem is that they are more expensive than window units. The park owner is trying to keep the park good-looking and window units look lousy. The interior units are fine and so is simply getting the central AC unit back to working, and they look fine from the outside. The real battle here is that the residents don’t want to spend the money and don’t give a darn about aesthetics. You can also put a blue tarp over the hole in your roof, which is cheaper than getting your roof fixed. And you can tape a black trash bag over your broken car window. This writer is a real idiot.

I think this article pretty much sums up the new American concept that “people are too dumb to make their own decisions so the government must do it for them”. The park costs $600 per month in rent and the local 2-bedroom apartments are $2,000 per month. The average tenant makes $20,000 per year. So they obviously can’t afford anything but the mobile home park. And the danger in living there is arsenic in the water, which they clearly navigate around with bottled water. Meanwhile, the government wants them to relocate to $2,000 per month apartments (which is more than their gross income) but have safe drinking water. It’s kind of like the Covid-19 shot that, when Americans decided they were healthy and didn’t need it, were then forced to get it by a government mandate.

Another reminder of Ronald Reagan’s famous quote “the nine scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.

When FEMA gave this person $31,000 they should have immediately moved to a more affordable city and not kept beating their head against a wall of impossibly expensive housing (median home price of $800,000). I am forever bewildered by these cases of people who earn next to nothing trying to live in markets that are insanely expensive. “Move to the Midwest and have a good quality of life” is my opinion on this article.

The more I read about this lawsuit, the more I’m confused. Apparently tha plaintiffs are claiming that the park owners“ used “competitively sensitive market data” provided by Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Datacomp Appraisal Systems Inc. to exchange pricing information and conspire to raise rents”. Every industry group in the U.S. does continual market comp studies to see where they fit into the spectrum of rents and prices including every office, retail, lodging, self-storage and apartment group, right? “Price fixing” is defined as ”competitors that agree to set their prices at the same level”. Simply gathering market information does not seem to fit that profile. Not sure that any judge or jury would disagree.

Their other contention is that “Manufactured home lot rental prices were blatantly inflated at a staggering rate of 9.1% per year between 2019 and 2021.” If you simply go to Google and enter the words “apartment annual percentage of rent increases since 2019” the computer says the following:“Apartment rent growth averaged 11% per year during the rapid inflationary period of 2021 – 2022”. And that does not even count the same response if you enter in ”gasoline prices” which went up a cumulative 45% during that period and “single-family home prices” which went up a cumulative 32%. Once again, makes no sense.

As a result, I must be too stupid to understand this case. Does anyone?

After the flooding disaster in Vermont recently the government admitted that FEMA has only mapped out roughly 30% of the U.S. for flood exposure and that most of the maps are 15 years out of date. So who can possibly make this claim: “Mobile home parks are disproportionately located in parts of landscapes that are vulnerable to climate risks. So they’re disproportionately located in floodplains. They’re disproportionately located in places that are exposed to extreme heat. …They’re also disproportionately located in places that are close to other environmental harms.” 

The answer is apparently only this woke writer who apparently knows more than FEMA does. I hope he shares his voluminous research with all of us.

There doesn’t seem to be that much left to wonder about:

On July 27, trailer park residents got notice to vacate by May 3, 2024. The notice says the closure is related to “planned changes in the future use of the land.”

It’s a simple formula that mobile home parks + low lot rents = redevelopment. Do you see that as a recurring theme in most of these articles? I sure do.

If you didn’t see this sequence of events coming, then you’re an idiot:

In Petaluma, an update by the city capping the annual rent increases allowed by mobile home parks was intended to strengthen protections for renters. But it resulted in upheaval after management at two of the parks – Little Woods and Youngstown – responded with threats of closure last July.

Here’s a refresher on the real world. Every land parcel has a litany of possible uses. It will ultimately become the one that’s most profitable. If you cap mobile home park lot rents then you have set in motion many other more profitable uses that do not have caps on rent increases (apartments being the #1 choice).

I wrote a few weeks ago that the rent control proposed by Petaluma would result in the parks being torn down and redeveloped. Looks like I was 100% correct.

Now hold on a minute – doesn’t the article admit that nearly the whole city has this same problem – including the school district?

Since state mandatory testing of public water systems for PFAS began last year, several County schools tested with unsafe levels of PFAS and lead in their water, including Hodgdon Middle High School and Mill Pond Elementary School, where students have been drinking bottled water since last November. An extensive carbon treatment system is being installed at the two schools, with completion slated for late fall.

Then why is the mobile home park owner being singled out here? Gee, I can’t possibly guess why.

This author is about as woke as you can get, and tries to argue that if the residents owned their mobile home parks then they would fare much better in storms:

The best laws also require sellers to negotiate in good faith with community members and may grant them a right of first refusal. All in all, those steps should help increase the resilience of manufactured housing in the face of the daunting climate change challenge.

The only way this article could get more woke would be if he advocated residents growing sustainable gardens on their roofs.

OK, let’s first cut out the theatrics. The residents were at no time at risk of not “staying in their homes”. This is just a story about a non-profit trying to buy the park from the seller after ROC pulled out of the deal. There is still no agreement to the price or the deal even happening so I’m not sure what everyone’s so excited about. I’m also not sure how the non-profit coughing up nearly $12 million does anything other than probably make the rent increases accelerate since the tenants will not be able to manage the property as well as a professional owner could. But, of course, the truth is that people are using this story as nothing more than a virtue-signaling orgy. To that end they forgot to add to the title the words “sustainable, green and zero-carbon emissions’.

So the State of Washington has passed a first-option rule for the tenants:

The legislation, known by some as the Notice of Opportunity to Compete to Purchase bill, was signed into law on April 6 and now requires owners to share their intentions to sell with residents, giving residents a fair opportunity to compete to buy their manufactured housing community’s land, she says.

I don’t know of any owner that would not prefer to sell to the tenants as they do not do nearly as thorough due diligence and their projections don’t include making any profit. The reason that 99% of tenants never buy the parks is that they can’t obtain financing. When you consider the fact that of the hundreds of transactions each year only around 24 deals are sold to the tenants exemplifies that this is not worthy of that much focus. But to the bureaucrats of Washington it was one more P.R. opportunity of virtue signaling.

“Price fixing” is defined by Webster’s as “the maintaining of prices at a certain level by agreement between competing sellers”. I haven’t read the case, but it appears that all the defendants did was to get market comps from the same source -- as well as other input from other sources probably -- to determine what the “fair market value” of rents are in that market. If researching what market prices are is wrong then, using this same argument, every gas station that looks at what their competitors are charging, every grocery store that surveys what the store down the street is charging, and every apartment, office, hotel and commercial building owner in the U.S. are also guilty of “price fixing” but I doubt that anyone will support that argument. When you add the fact that you have many of the largest REITs in the U.S. funding the defense, I doubt it will survive the first round (if it even goes that far).

I really try to understand this whole “living small” thing but frankly it just seems awful to me. If I had to live in the home shown in these photos, I would be extremely depressed.  When I was at Stanford there was this professor that lived in a closet in the engineering department and lived on nothing but ramen. Students thought that was the coolest idea ever but it seemed to me like a really low quality of life. At some point being a miser becomes a sickness and not a virtue.

This is a hard article to understand. Why does Marin County own this mobile home park? How can they possibly be smart in not accepting a $30 million offer for it? Why would the offer constitute a doomsday scenario for the tenants?

Of course the answer is that people think that the county will charge less rent than the market supports, and in this way the county is effectively subsidizing the 400 residents, no different than doling out monthly checks to all of them.

But that then begs the question if Marin County is supposed to be benevolently giving away the tax money of all the other residents in the county without their knowledge or permission?

Obviously, the city should take the $30 million offer, let the new owner raise the rents to market levels, and stop trying to be Robin Hood. If it was their personal money they would be free to gift it, but I don’t think the taxpayers of Marin County have a clue what the bureaucrats are actually doing to them.

What an obvious attempt by the city to try and shut down the trailer park:

Quail noted she understands that the city is wanting to improve the community but feels there is also a secondary motive in this case that involves officials wanting to do what they can to do away with the trailer park saying it is being treated differently than any other inspection, a claim the city denies.

And then when it looks like maybe the park owner may sue the city, they’re afraid to even vote:

An initial motion by Councilman Ron Hanson to take the information received under advisement with a decision as to whether or not to uphold the decision made by the Electrical Board at a later date ultimately died for lack of a second. Hanson later abstained from a second motion to stick with the original verdict that passed with four yes votes from the rest of the council.

If the facts of this case are as I suppose they are, I hope the park owner sues each and every one of these council members personally and individually and then we’ll see how much fun they’re having with their bullying.

If the city refuses to let any mobile home park to be redeveloped into any other use – yet has no rent control – wouldn’t all of the park owners simply double or triple their rent to match any other development options? Every time bureaucrats think they’re making a virtue signaling initiative, it always backfires.