A 41-space mobile home park is shutting down. And it’s the narrative the media fears most. Here’s the key line from the article: “in the eviction letter, sent out this week, it says ongoing infrastructure issues have forced the park to shut down”. That translates to low rents make it economically unfeasible to rebuild the infrastructure. So the media won with their public shaming odyssey with this owner. They talked the owner into redeveloping the land into a more profitable use rather than face the wrath of tenants complaining about higher rents and the media trumpeting that. The media cannot handle the fact that the park owner – if you complain enough – can elect just to raze the property and end the harassment.

Let me get this straight – you’re going to buy a 20-space mobile home park for $2.4 million to make it a resident-owned community. That’s $120,000 per resident. The people in the mobile home park have limited funds. Why wouldn’t it be smarter to move them to a much lower-cost state and buy them a nice brick house for $120,000 in cash, and tell them “OK, you’re set for life and all you have to do is earn enough to cover utilities, taxes, insurance and food. They could then get a job anywhere at minimum wage and have a great life. When I read these articles it always makes me wonder if the writers and non-profits have ever ventured to states like Louisiana where you can buy a nice brick house all day long for $100,000 or so. You can see them on Realtor.com. Why would you be spending huge money to keep people living in a state they can no longer apparently afford?

Does the name “factory-built” housing sound attractive to anyone? In a country in which we always equate hand-built assets as superior, branding anything as “factory-built” seems to me to be a negative. I wish the industry could come up with better names.

I love woke articles like this that portray residents not buying their park as some type of a crisis. The residents tried  to buy it during their “first option” and failed. No reason was given for the failure, but it was probably the fact that the property needed substantial infrastructure repair. The new owner is replacing the roads and utilities, and raising the rents as a result. But all the writer wants to talk about is the higher rent, not all the improvements that went with it. The writer states: “three residents confirmed that their rent increased by $125 following the road completion in Nov. 2022. For resident Sheri Payne, that hike represented a nearly 40% increase over her previously stabilized rent. The writer fails to tell you that the park’s rent is probably $300 per month under market even at that new rent level. Could the residents have completed all this infrastructure work and kept the rents low? Absolutely not. This is nonsense.

Shame on this city council for even considering building a 47-lot mobile home park in a neighborhood where the median home price is over $300,000. Of course the neighbors don’t want this, and who would blame them? If you have a $300,000 house and they put up a mobile home park next to you, that home will drop to $200,000 or less overnight. If the council is going to screw over the folks that live near this proposed site, they could at least not insult their intelligence and pretend it’s a good thing for them. I’m sure that not one person on th council voting on this lives in that neighborhood.

For decades, the government has propped up coastal areas by offering flood insurance at huge losses to the U.S. taxpayer, rather than forcing people to move inland who can’t afford the insurance. In this case, the goal seems to be how to maintain people who don’t earn enough money to live in an area to remain in place. Is that really helping anybody? Surely not when the subsidies would give them a higher quality of life somewhere else.

You have to love an article that starts with “how can the owners sleep at night?” That’s probably true – they can’t sleep because they can’t decide whether to redevelop this property into an apartment complex or a big box retail center. When will the media realize that if you publicly shame owners for raising rents and enacting rules then they will take the easy road and simply tear these old things down and build higher uses for the land? Do they still teach economics at colleges that offer journalism?

This is going to be a real problem for California park owners as insurance rates are going to skyrocket. No wonder so many catastrophe movies (like San Andreas) are based in California. It’s not just because the studios are there. Between earthquakes, fires – and now flooding – this is becoming the place to buy property with a short shelf life.

It’s always been a lot easier to build RV parks than mobile home parks. That’s because the RV industry has done a great job of promoting itself (the “Go RVing” campaign) and people in RVs don’t go to school at a cost of $8,000 per kid to the city and county. The failure of the mobile home industry to put any money or effort into PR has created a scenario where the average American has a terrible opinion of the product.

Lot rent of $518 per month is not in any way unreasonable. Apartments average around $2,000 per month nationwide. Yes, it’s going to keep going up. Yes, corporate owners are going to raise rents as part of bringing old parks back to life. Yes, after all the hikes they make there’s no place even remotely as cheap to live. Yes, it’s called the free market because you’re free to move out if you want to. Yes, even with higher rents the park is full. Yes, there are 10 people willing to pay the higher rent for every 1 that won’t.

When the park has vacancy it will lower rent. It has none and the phone is ringing off the wall. Why are park owners held to a higher level than milk and eggs, which have doubled in the past few years?

The best quote in this article came from a resident that said “he’s looking to sell his mobile unit and move to housing that’s more stable. But he has yet to find anything near the rent he pays for his lot, which is $850 a month.” Absolute genius. Harass the park owner in the middle of a blizzard demanding that frozen water lines be fixed, get the State of Colorado and media involved to advance your false narrative, and then whine when the solution is to maybe have to move out. Here’s a message to everyone in the U.S.: mobile home parks are not non-profits and if you harass owners enough, they will simply put up the “Land For Sale” sign and you will be cut loose. If you want a world in which there is no economics then sign up for Section 8 apartments and let the government determine your future.

These reports are great for large, institutional owners, but you have to determine your rents the old fashioned way by calling the competition yourself. There’s just no easy way to figure out where you fit in regards to rent levels.

OK, I’m trying to be patient. Maybe some of these writers wrapped up college during Covid and on-line learning didn’t work for them. But this has to be one of the dumbest quotes of all time: “some manufactured home park residents in and around Sequim said they’ve received increased rents on land leaving them with less money to live.” Is there a way that rent could go up and they could have more money to live? This is, yet again, woke journalism in the state of Washington. You simply cannot mandate price levels in a capitalist society. That’s called socialism or communism. When the state government aspires to be less capitalist, it’s time to start moving to another state.

This quote says it all: “measures being mulled by senior Biden administration officials include sealing eviction records, standardizing rental leases and promoting a right to counsel for tenants facing off with landlords in housing court. Another possibility could be a federal campaign to curb discrimination against affordable housing voucher holders based on their source of income, a practice challenged as a fair housing violation.” That has to be the dumbest list of all time, and none of those things would improve the position of renters in any way. So here’s my list by comparison: “relax the UBC so that modular homes can be built on vacant city lots, offer tax incentives for residential property owners not to redevelop into a non-residential use, and expand the Section 8 program so that it is available to more people”. Of course, I win. But when you take on the Biden administration, that’s not a very high bar.

A family owned a mobile home park. They got an offer from a land developer that’s three times its assessed value as a park. The developer told the paper “It’s an optimal location for alternative use, but that use is yet to be determined”. Everyone is mad. The tenants are mad that the park is being torn down and they are being displaced. This is what happens when residents fight higher rents and the media delights in publicly shaming owners. If the owner had raised the rents more, maybe the park would exist. But he would have had to fight the media’s public shaming, so why bother? Maybe someone should send this article to all of the above journalists?

Boy, they sure showed the world who’s boss. A non-profit recently “went under contract to buy a 20-unit mobile-home park outside of Glenwood Springs for $2.4 million in an attempt to buck the trend of displacement and affordable-housing destruction at the hands of private-equity groups buying Colorado parks.” I guess the park owner is laughing all the way to the bank, while the non-profit puts this grand tale all over its website. Here are some real-life news bulletins for this same Vail newspaper: 1) you could have given those tenants $120,000 in cash each and they would have been much better off 2) institutional investors would never look at a 20 space park (it’s about 20% of the target size of 100 lots) and 3) $2.4 million is a rounding error in today’s America if you want to be a big shot in philanthropy. That might make you sound big at the cocktail party at the Red Roof Inn lobby, but that’s about it.

America has been under a cloud of endless insurance losses for years now – from fires to hurricanes. Given society’s obsession with litigation and the simple fact that insurance companies are businesses and are focused on profits and not losing money annually, there is no doubt that insurance in California and Florida will be endlessly harder to obtain and retain except at huge cost increases. And that will naturally translate into much higher lot rents in those markets. The woke media might as well start writing the articles now to criticize those given rent boosts, as the insurance picture in California and Florida is becoming desperate.

It’s pretty sad when the best part of the article is in the comments section, such as this truthful obersvation "it should be illegal for the government to tell property owners how much rent they can charge tenants. They won't charge more than the market will support because they don't want to have vacancies, so there is always a balance between supply and demand. Anytime the government artificially tips the scale we go into the land of unintended consequences.” So let’s get this story right. This idiotic town in California has decided that the park owner can only raise rents by 70% of CPI with a cap of 4%. Just wait for the “Land For Sale” sign to go up and the park to be become an apartment complex or Home Depot store. Where do you find idiots like this?

It’s the classic tale the media hates most: lot rents are too low and the park gets razed to make way for apartments. If the lot rents had been higher, the park would still be a park, in all likelihood. But the residents would have fought tooth and nail against that, and the media would have jumped on the bandwagon to publicly shame the owner. So the correct solution was to simply demolish the park and make it into a more profitable use. I have tried to explain this to the media for years now, but they refuse to accept the reality of economics. Mobile home park residents nationwide need to accept the fact that mobile home parks can be other types of uses, too, and if rents are not higher then parks will be bulldozed. You can’t have it both ways. I wish that MHAction would stop inspiring people to make themselves homeless.

OK, I understand that this park is in California. But let’s do the math here. There are roughly 300 mobile homes. They are going to spend around $80 million to relocate these people who are currently living in mostly pre-HUD trailers. That’s $266,000 per household. Has anyone in California travelled beyond the state lines and visited, for example, Arizona, where you can get a nice stick-built home with a garage – and throw in a new car – for less than $266,000? Just buy each household one of those houses for cash, give it to them, and tell them to move to Arizona. What are these bureaucrats thinking?

Only a state bureaucrat would think that they are helping mobile home park residents by making a new law that stops park owners from “requiring a tenant to make unnecessary upgrades” to their homes. Essentially they’re dooming the 98% of park residents who take care of their property so that the 2% with five non-running cars piled in the yard, their home painted three colors and aluminum foil for curtains won’t have to bother cleaning up their act. Then you add on the new law that requires tenants to have first option to buy the park – something that they virtually never exercise and that slows down the sales process by months – and you have the kind of genius thinking that has made America the mess that it has become. Let me make it more clear for these legislators of Montana. If you pass these two bills you are going to simply have park owners tear more parks down and put in things that have less ridiculous restrictions – and nobody would blame them.

Apparently you have a 15% better chance of being killed in a mobile home than a stick-built home if a tornado hits. You also have a 15% higher chance of dying from boredom if you read this article.

Angleton, Texas has a median home price of nearly $200,000. The developer is going to be sticking mobile homes that value at around $70,000 each on to those new lots. Can you possibly understand why the city residents are up in arms about this zoning catastrophe? I imagine the litigation will be flying soon, as every home owner near this planned development is about to see a 50% decrease in their home value. Again, bureaucrats at work who would never allow this to happen in their neighborhood but could care less as long as it’s not next to their property.

The same boring story of how great the resident-owned community concept is without including the fact that the park in which the residents bought the park they paid $80,000 per space and are putting no capital back into it vs. the park where the corporate owner paid about $80,000 per space (after the residents refused to buy it) and then poured a ton of money back into the property to fix it up and raised the rents accordingly. At the end of the movie, the residents will be paying the same lot rent in both parks (because park #1 will still need all this work done eventually and the rent will have to go up to pay for it) only the quality of life in park #1 will probably be lower as they will have poor management and zero fiscal governance.

Another story of how larger owners buy up failing properties, inject capital into them to bring them back to life, save them from the wrecking ball, and are now guilty of ruining the world by giving people a better place to live at a still highly affordable price. Maybe this writer should contact the folks at Lee’s Trailer Park and get their take on that.