I hate to throw cold water on this stuff, but tiny homes are never going to be a permanent solution to housing issues. They are too small and depressing to live in on a full-time basis. At 400 sq. ft. or smaller they are about the size of a hotel room. I know few people who could live their lives in a hotel room happily. On top of that, they are way too expensive for their size. If you hate mobile homes due to the stigma, at least consider a 5th wheel with pop-outs which are still far cheaper than a tiny home to buy but have the same sq. ft. You can get a used 5th wheel for as little as $3,500 (look at RV Trader’s website) and then when you can’t stand “living small” anymore you can sell it for $1,000 and walk away from it. With a tiny home you are stuck with tens of thousands of debt and a tiny market of interested buyers.

Yes, the same tired narrative as the above article. And, yes, the goal here is for the media to brainwash you that all rent increases are “evil” and all park owners are “evil” if they regurgitate the same article 100 times in a row.

So here’s the deal. A park owner is raising the rents in a park in Olympia, Washington – just down the street from the Walmart Supercenter – from around $500 per month to around $750 per month. Olympia has an average single-family home price of $472,500 and an average apartment rent of over $2,000 per month. That new lot rent seems ridiculously low, right? Well, not apparently to the residents of Tumwater Mobile Home Park.

“I never thought it would happen here – with the history,” said John Stockman, a resident of 10 years. “We’re talking 50-60 years of [local] ownership.” Translation: “We like the old owner because he never raised the rent – even though he obviously should have”

With a record of monthly rent increases averaging just $10 to $15 a year, Western Plaza had presented itself as a forever home. Translation: “We thought we were going to get away with robbing the old mom and pop blind forever”.

Thurston County Assessor’s Office records show Legacy Communities paid $9 million for the park — more than double the amount it was priced at in 2008. Translation: “rents are going to have to go up a lot to justify the value of the land and the cost of running a business in a modern world”.

“It feels to me like society is just kicking Grandma to the curb,” Lucas said. “That’s how it feels – kicking Grandma out on the street. And I think that we’ve reached the point now where all of these elders are threatened with homelessness. This is elder abuse, and we as a society need to address it as we need to make some changes.” Translation: “We can’t really justify how this new rent is not still ridiculously low so instead we’re going to try and distract you with veiled threats of litigation and this false narrative that a $250 per month escalation in rents is going to make all seniors homeless so that maybe a politician will try to pass rent control really fast”.

The bottom line is that nobody likes higher rents but, in this case, they are more than justified.

And I urge you to look at where this park is located in Olympia vs. where the Walmart Supercenter is located at. I would imagine that the rent will have to be $1,000 per month shortly to have any hope of staving off the wrecking ball for a new retail center or $2,000 per month apartments. Translation: “you better hope for more increases because the alternative is redevelopment”.

It’s a good thing that non-profits don’t rule the world as it would be a pretty sorry place to live. Take note of just two key factors in this article:

1. The mobile homes that this non-profit is providing cost $100,000 to $130,000. Any idiot with a dealer’s license can buy essentially these same mobile homes for $80,000 or so turn-key. Not exactly a good value.
2. Look at the photo of the park and then zoom in on each home and lot. It looks totally junky like the “before” photo of many turn-around parks. Not exactly a sign of good management.

Every week these type of articles beg the question “is this the best way to spend money?” and every week the answer is clearly “no”. Most all private-sector park owners can provide a better product than this at a lower price point. But, of course, that never gets mentioned because all park owners are “evil”, right?

You guessed it – another article about “evil” park owners destroying lives with $50 rent increases. Except this one is different: the “evil” park owner is the country itself.

And when they were questioned about the increase at a county meeting, they didn’t mince words:

Commissioner Kent Becker said “commissioners look only at what the dollars are”.

That pretty much sums it up without a lot of B.S. 

If a park owner had said that they would have been tarred and feathered by the media.

The bottom line is that mobile home parks are income properties, and they only survive when they are the most profitable use for the land. Even the bureaucrats have figured that out in Hillsboro, Kansas.

Have you heard this narrative before? 

Owners Joy and Eddie Hanks purchased the park in 2020 for $600,000 along with several adjacent properties, according to property records. They revealed in July this year plans to construct “Digs on the River,” a 23-acre project to include apartment buildings, commercial and restaurant spaces, a boutique hotel and potentially a boardwalk down on the bank – but no trailer park. Those within the park, encompassing over 30 trailers, will be forced to move sometime after July 31, 2024, with 90 days' notice. 

Yes, it’s the fourth such article this week regarding parks being torn down for a higher use of land. If you want to stem this tide the simple solution is to make mobile home parks a higher use of land. And you only get there with much, much higher lot rents. As I’ve said a thousand times, low rents = redevelopment.

But here’s also a narrative you’re seeing a whole lot of this week:

Many claim their requests to meet face-to-face with the Hankses have been met with resistance. Morse, a resident of five years with her fiance and two young children, said discussions with the couple were “making progress” until about a month ago when Joy Hanks requested any further questions be sent in writing and declined to meet in person.“I just want to have a conversation,” Morse said. “I just want to have a real, human conversation, and I’m a businesswoman too. I plan to be perfectly professional, and I don’t want any conflict that she thinks will happen.”

Mobile home park residents and bureaucrats think they can talk owners out of making smart financial decisions. The problem is that only money talks in the investment arena. The owner is not going to meet with the residents because it’s pointless and only opens the door to litigation in a screwed-up America. If the rents had been higher there would not have to be a meeting and the park would continue on as part of that mixed use development. With apartment rents at $2,000 per month on average – and you can stack them two of three high – mobile home park lot rents would have to be triple the U.S. average in many cases to even dent the rate of speed you are seeing parks close down.

Another park being torn down for a new and better use of the land. And, in this case, the residents are suing claiming that they want more relocation money and freebies. Maybe they should have been as aggressive about pushing the owner to charge higher rents so they would not be cut loose?

More government and non-profit stupidity in action. Cotati, California is going to stop a park from changing from senior designation to all-age because they are afraid that having freedom of competition will force rents higher:

Concerned that an all-ages conversion could drive up rents if dual-income families were to move into the retirement-aged community, Countryside residents called on the city council to act before a state mandated six month grace period on the all-ages conversion expired in February, 2024.

Smart move. So now it’s pretty much guaranteed that the park will be torn down to make way for more profitable uses.

This is a 31-space park in poor condition. At $5.5 million that works out to around $200,000 per space. So, yes, this park is going to be torn down as far as I can tell. Everyone has to remember that there are many different options for every tract of land and mobile home parks are only one of those. It’s perfectly natural for a piece of land to go through a progression of uses over time – just as many mobile home parks started off as producing farms and then RV parks with gas stations and then on to mobile home parks. When a mobile home park gets turned into a nice apartment complex or retail center it’s simply called “progress”. There’s no deeper meaning.

I know nothing about the facts of this case, but let’s face it, if you live in California or Florida and your rent is too low the odds are 99% your property will be redeveloped. If I was a resident in a CA or FL mobile home park my question to the owners would be “how high does the rent need to be so the park won’t be torn down?” Isn’t that just basic common sense?

First of all, I love the lack of bias from the woke reporter:

Fresno mobile home park under the threat of closure by an unscrupulous owner with a cash register heart.

Second of all, this is an article that is the perfect illustration of why Ronald Reagan once said “the nine scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. This owner offered to keep the park free from redevelopment at a $650 per month lot rent, which was more than reasonable. The city blocked him and told him it could not be more than $350. He warned them, the park would be demolished if they refused to listen to reason but they wouldn’t budge. And now it will be demolished and everyone in the park will be homeless.

Here's a quick look at Fresno housing prices looks like: $359,700 on the single-family home average and $1,330 per month apartment rent on the two-bedroom unit and $1,800 per month on the three-bedroom.

So, $650 looked like too much, huh? Interesting logic.

But don’t worry, residents of the park, those same bureaucrats are ensuring you’re going to get at least 12 months’ notice to move out.

Think the residents would have voted to raise the rent to $650 per month as opposed to their new position as being homeless in a market with $1,300 2-bedroom and $1,800 3-bedroom rents?

The article fails to mention how many people live in this park (no doubt so you could not easily whip out your calculator and see what a monumental waste of money this non-profit inspired project was) so I did the research for you. Here’s the information on Mountain View Mobile Home Park. As you can see, it houses 34 trailers. When you see how many non-profits contributed to this deal you begin to realize why nobody wanted to identify the number of beneficiaries. Assuming they procured 80% LTV – and only counting the county’s contribution of $1 million as the total down payment -- then the park must have been purchased for around $5 million. At 34 total sites, that works out to $147,000 per household, and you know the actual number is probably closer to $200,000 when you add in all the extras from all the other non-profits. This then begs the question “is this really the best way to spend that money”? For example, they could have simply passed on buying the park and given each family $200,000 in cash and told them to go buy a nice brick house with no mortgage, a newer car free-and-clear, and have a happy life. But instead, they are going to force these folks to live in a highly dense 1960’s trailer park for the rest of their lives.

I promise you that not one single resident would have elected to stay if given the option of the money or their trailer. Shouldn’t they be given that choice in these transactions?

The same tired story of how resident-owned communities saved a 13-space trailer park from demolition and can do the same for all the other 44,000 parks in the U.S. There’s only one problem with this story: resident-owned cooperatives have only done around 300 parks total in decades of existence. That works out to a .0068% success ratio. At the current speed it will take them roughly 3,666 years to tackle the rest of the parks! That seems like a reasonable use of this much attention and discussion, right?

Ditto. Same story as all the earlier ones. Fighting higher rents = certain closure of the park.

Looks like construction companies will have plenty of work redeveloping former mobile home parks in 2024.

Wow, same story as above and will probably have the same ending unless these city leaders have more common sense.

I love the way that – only on mobile home parks – raising rents becomes a part of a social agenda. Here’s what the quote in the article said from one resident:

"I don’t understand why they think they need so much money to live on when we have so little to live on”.

I had the same question once from a woke reporter at PBS who said “why do you have to raise rents – why can’t you lower them instead?”. My answer was simply that I was a business person and not a non-profit but if she or PBS would like to cover the difference in rent – as a charitable act – then I could work out a deal. I’ve still never heard from the reporter or PBS to take me up on that offer. Charity sounds great as long as you don’t have to pay for it, right?

Looks like the same flight path as the earlier articles. When you fight lot rents going up even with CPI increases you are just asking for closure. Either these bureaucrats are completely incompetent or maybe their plan all along is just to get the parks torn down.

Ok, this is a first. Who ever heard of a bunch of mobile home park residents trying to criticize a fancy, new townhome project going in next door? But here’s what they had to say at the council meeting:

Residents said the project is too dense for the site.“For you to imply that it fits the area is ludicrous,” said Steve Harvey. “I believe we, the 155 residents in the park, deserve more consideration than just going forward with this project. On paper, it looks beautiful; in reality, it’s going to be a nightmare.”

Now take a look at the rendering for the project, then look at a normal mobile home park’s density and appearance, and you can easily see why the board immediately voted to approve the project.

This is one of the dumbest articles of 2023.

Do you notice a new trend in this week’s news stories? It’s back to the media brainwash plan of having every article tie back to the same dubious conclusion and – with repetition – turn you into a zombie that surrenders and starts believing their nonsense. This story has the same conclusion as many this week:

“Asking someone that, due to circumstances, to move out of an apartment with their possessions is totally different than asking someone to move their home to a new location,” Richardson said.

There’s one big piece missing that the writers are hoping you’re too dumb to ask: what about selling the home before you abandon it?

When I was on the Freakonomics podcast recently (one of the largest in the U.S.) and this topic came up, the folks that produce the podcast cut that discussion out. So let me try to use the brainwash technique myself to hammer it home:

Mobile home tenants have the freedom to sell their mobile home. And the freedom to sell their mobile home. And have I mentioned they have the freedom to sell their mobile home?

Additionally, they have the freedom to move their home to another mobile home park and have that owner foot the bill (called an “organic” move).

So why do many mobile home owners simply abandon the home? Because they have bad planning and foresight and don’t even try to sell it or move it. And why don’t they care? Because they value the home at next to nothing, which is normally what they paid for it.

Only when the media comes by – or a pandering bureaucrat – does the home suddenly become highly valuable.

Shocking, huh?

You’ve got to love California. If you own a mobile home park there and simply want to sell it as land for redevelopment, here’s what the state says you have to do:

Many require park owners to conduct studies on how closing would affect residents. The owners then have to report how they would compensate residents for their lost homes. And, a closure impact report has to be approved by local officials before a park closes.

Wait – you might say – do they require this of any other landlord? And the answer, of course, is “no” and here’s why:

Officials look at mobile home parks differently than other forms of housing because people living there often own the homes but not the land. But because moving a mobile home can be expensive, residents often leave the trailers behind if the park closes.

Now here’s where I see this argument falling apart. When someone buys a mobile home it comes with the condition that it is on rented land and there’s no assurance that the land will always be a mobile home park. That’s the basics of the agreement. It’s a ground lease. Just like parking your car at the airport. And mobile homes are very cheap as a result (think $1,000 to $5,000 for used homes in many markets).

If park owners are forced to go through all of these insane requirements, then they will need to adjust their rents accordingly, right? If you have to basically act as the guardian of every tenant in perpetuity then that’s a service that’s pretty expensive. Kind of like if the parking lot has to offer 24/7 roadside assistance and free auto repair as part of the parking fee.

But even though park owners have this additional burden in California now, they can’t raise their rent to accommodate this insane request due to rent control.

Which is just one more reason that you may have to be insane to buy a park (or anything) in that state.

Before the residents pop the cork on the champagne bottle over their “big win” they might want to read the decision. Having to give cause for a lease termination is not really that big a deal. Most park owners don’t like to do so because their attorneys tell them not to since it’s not required. But it’s not going to be that hard for those same park attorneys to come with standard reasons that allow the park owner to proceed without undue risk.

The key item that people are missing is that there is no financial incentive for park owners to terminate the lease of a paying customer who follows the rules. Never has been. The only type of tenant that would be terminated would be one that is a detriment to the general community. So effectively they are trying to ruin the lives of the 99.9% of residents who follow rules and pay rent and don’t want their neighbor having three pit bulls in the yard, two non-running vehicles and playing Van Halen at full volume at 3 AM. That’s why the Governor of Montana vetoed this idiocy to begin with, but now the court has once again overruled common sense.

The real moral of this article is not that the water bills were not paid by the “evil” park owner but simply that, once again, low rents = park closure. I’m sure the reason that mom and pop did not pay the water bill was that there was not enough money in the account to do so. And the only solution – as usual – is for a new buyer to come along and inject a huge amount of capital into the property to bring it back to life. Here’s what the attorney for the mom and pop owners had to say:

A deal is in the works for another company to buy Forest View, Gigante said. "They're prepared to invest over a million dollars into this park and upgrade it.”

Of course, you know the rest of the story. With the capital infusion and good financial prudence to make sure the property does not get into this situation again the rents should go up significantly. And then these same journalists will write scathing articles about how the new owner has ruined the lives of the residents because the rent is now still ridiculously cheap and not just insanely, unsustainably, ridiculously cheap.

You know that’s coming up soon.

Get out the pocket watch as it’s hypnosis time again:

Nationwide, ROC-USA works with over 300 resident-owned communities. Now, federal legislation, sponsored by U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, has been introduced to help preserve these communities. The bill, which was introduced by Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, would establish a permanent grant program to help revitalize manufactured housing communities with a specific emphasis on those that are resident-owned. With it would come funding for infrastructure improvements like water and sanitation.

Apparently some bureaucrats have been successfully turned into zombies and now believe that you should only fund infrastructure repair on resident-owned communities. Since there’s only 300 or so of them, that’s not a very big commitment. And maybe that’s why they put that restriction on there?

OK, it’s pocket watch time again. Start swinging it side to side while you read this pile of nonsense:

“Diamond Field LLC (also referenced as defendant) purchased Maple Acres Estates in August 2022. In March Diamond Field issued notice to Maple Acres tenants of its intent to increase their lot rent from $170 to $299 … Diamond Field’s tactics coincide with a nationwide trend, in whcih predatory corporations hiding behind layers of shell companies purchase manufactured housing communities, then raise the lot rent and force mass evictions”

So let me get this straight. Park owners raise rents because they want to do mass evictions? That’s their business model? Where’s the money in that? And, of course, there isn’t. A good rent increase is one in which you lose not a single tenant. And you get there by offering a good value, which at $299 I’m sure it is.

OK, so now let’s get to the down-and-dirty truth. Diamond Field LLC appears to have taken a crazy, stupid ridiculously low rent of $170 per month and raised it to $299 which is still crazy, stupid and ridiculously low but a little less so. And I’m sure they did major improvements and started to enforce the park rules as part of the increase. And if we went to the park right now and knocked on any random door we would find that the residents are absolutely ecstatic with the improvements and have no problem paying the ridiculously low rent of $299 now that the park is nicer. But, as usual, one or two people who were living marginally in the park and having trouble paying $170 per month ran out and found a cheap attorney who filed a frivolous case since there is no rent control in West Virginia. In fact, if you read the preamble to the article, you’ll see that all the attorney accomplished was to file an appeal wanting to get the eviction case moved to a different court in order to buy the marginal folks a little more time before they pack up their pickup trucks and drive off. Big deal.

Was anyone hypnotized by this article and its repetitive mantra? If you have an IQ higher than a lima bean then probably not.

I’ve been in this movie myself, back on a park in Texas in about 1999. The city tried to add an “administrative fee” to the park owners of about $2,000 per year just to get their annual permit renewal. So we all banded together, hired a municipal lawyer, and sued the city. The city lost big time. It turned out that the law in Texas clearly states that the amount of such fees cannot be greater than the actual cost to inspect the property, which was more like $100 and not $2,000. And what this city is proposing is even worse than that Texas city tried:

As of now, what is proposed to take effect on Jan. 1, 2024, “and for each year forward,” is that the “township shall charge and collect for the license an annual fee of $200 and the sum of $7 per calendar week for each mobile home occupying any space in the mobile home park during the calendar week or part thereof.”

These park owners probably need to get together, pool their legal fees, hire the nastiest municipal lawyer they can find, sue the city and stop this nonsense. I hope at least one of them is reading this and can look into these facts.

This is the rule the tenant was evicted under and appears to have admitted they are guilty of:

That included Section E of the lot rental agreement that states, “no bottles, cans, equipment, tires, lumber or debris of any matter shall be stored outside or under the mobile home.”

That’s a pretty bad problem: having junk in your lot, right? Pretty big eyesore for the neighbors and hurts the quality of life for 99.9% of the residents. And they refused to clean it up after they were given every possible opportunity to do so.

But that doesn’t matter because all the author was looking for was some lame intro in order to do the zombie repetition trick with this quote that reads like the article above it:

“Most people that own the mobile home will be facing loss of the mobile home itself,” he said. DeCoil estimates her home was worth about $10,000. She said she tried selling her home, too, but a pending eviction was a black mark for buyers. Experts estimate the cost of relocating a mobile home can cost between $5,000 and $15,000. And that’s assuming it can be moved, Eviction Lab research specialist Jacob Haas said. “They're called mobile homes, but they're often very immobile," he said. "It can be really costly, or often an impossible, process to relocate a mobile home to another site.”

So if some woke writer can engage in the hypnotism scam, then I will respond in kind:

What about selling the home or having another park pay to move it? What about selling the home or having another park pay to move it? Have I mentioned selling it or having another park pay to move it?

What a bunch of idiots these media groups think you are.