Mobile Home Park News Briefing

Over the past decade, rents in these parks have risen 45%, according to census data.

OK, housing is the fourth largest cost for the average American household, behind healthcare, childcare and transportation. Let’s see how much those have gone up over the past decade:

1. Healthcare has gone up 80.5%.
2. Transportation has gone up 41.5%.
3. Childcare has gone up 43%.

So it looks like mobile home park lot rents have gone up half as fast as healthcare and about in-line with all other household costs.

It would be nice if the author happened to point this out to the reader. But, of course, they can’t because it would not support their whole socialist agenda. Landlords and private equity groups are inherently evil, right? No matter what the facts are!

Alas the fate of the socialist park ownership program: the tenants never really own the park and the non-profits sell them and move on after the virtual signaling opportunities are less than the financial reality.

And, as usual, another park bites the dust times two.

No wonder Trump is de-funding PBS – how many people do you think want to see a documentary on a mobile home park tenant being evicted over an unpaid water bill? The answer: about as many who want to see Joe Biden modelling beach ware.

If private owners decide to sell the seven parks near public transportation hubs, developers could demolish the parks in favor of townhomes or high-rises.

What is the obsession with mobile home parks? If you can build 400 affordable housing units on the same tract where there are 80 mobile home lots, why would anyone not do that? Mobile home parks are only one level and apartments can be five stories high or more. This is beginning to look like the environmentalists who would block all development to save an endangered snail. Totally ridiculous when you are supposed to be focused on the greater good.

Dunford is adamant that the city doesn’t want “another mobile home park nor will we support another mobile home park” in that location.

Wait, I thought California loves affordable housing? They do, just as long as it’s not anywhere near where they live.

And, as usual, another park bites the dust.

Residents like Sarah Giles-Gardner, who has a disability and is on a fixed income, said that hike is not sustainable. “I just don't have enough money to be able to stay if it's just gonna be $145. It's too much. It's too much, I can't do it,” she said. “We need to fight back because this is not right.”

I bet I could find 100 people that would say that they can’t afford to eat anymore because McDonald’s tripled the cost of the McChicken sandwich – and that’s just in my small town of 4,500. Price controls are not how the free market works. That’s how socialism works. Thank heavens I don’t live or do business in Maine.

Look, there’s no such thing as “unionizing” a mobile home park. It has no legal standing or power. This is not Starbucks. This concept is good for five minutes of fame but people will then move on to more important items like the failure of the new Kardashian cable show.

During the meeting, Vista Del Rio residents urged Perez to redefine manufactured homes as real property …

In Washington state they apparently want to take the concept that you can be a boy, girl or animal based on your personal whim to the trailer park arena and allow personal property to identify as real property. This might go over with some idiot bureaucrats, but there’s no way the lending or titling community is going to go along with this.

It’s a very unfair rock and a hard place that resident homeowners are put in. In today’s market where you have buyers like Crown Communities, the interested third party here — it’s a private equity company. The price escalation for these communities is incredible in the last five, certainly 10 years. Folks tell me like, “I like the idea of resident ownership. I literally just cannot build that into my budget. It should not be this momentous, expensive, insane process for me to become a landowner in addition to the homeowner here.”

Sure, raising $13 million shouldn’t be that big a deal, right? I’m shocked the park can’t just pass the hat and raise that amount over a weekend. How did people get this stupid?

The Saco City Council on Monday unanimously approved a moratorium on rent increases in mobile home parks, which was awarded by hearty applause from residents of a local mobile home park.

Saco, Maine apparently wants all park owners to redevelop their properties into a different use. Please accommodate them and call your local land broker to figure out what the best use for the land might be – because clearly a mobile home park isn’t it.

And another park bites the dust.

In August, residents of the Ohana Estates at 8211 E. McKinley Ave. learned that 59 giant sequoias might be cut down. The incident prompted them to mobilize. By January, the neighbors plan to start a co-op to buy the community from their landlord, thus ensuring their housing stays affordable and the trees remain cared for.

There’s a pretty big difference between protesting trees from being cut down and lining up millions of dollars in financing to buy a park.

At manufactured home parks – sometimes called trailer parks or mobile home parks – rents are rapidly rising due to large-scale buyouts by private equity firms.

No, rents are rising due to the simple fact that mobile home park lot rents are ridiculously low. The evidence? The average single-family home in the U.S. is over $400,000, the average apartment rent is over $2,000 per month and the average mobile home park lot rent is around $400 per month. This crap about how “private equity groups are conspiring to destroy the earth” is the ridiculous ramblings of total idiots or Elizabeth Warren – same difference.

Now a four-part documentary collaboration between Arizona Public Media and Arizona Luminaria, building on over a year of Luminaria’s coverage of heat and displacement in manufactured homes, investigates the hidden crises inside Southern Arizona’s mobile home parks. 

It’s refreshing to see there’s a new documentary on “evil mobile home park owners” since it’s such a fresh and original concept. But does anyone seriously think that even ten people want to see a four-part documentary about trailer parks in Arizona? Who funds these projects – the National Association of Boredom? In a world of Netflix, HBO, and YouTube, the only way you’d want to watch this woke nonsense is if you’re too poor to own a computer or too self-loathing to respect your time.

Minnesota manufactured home park residents and lawmakers are speaking out against what they say are skyrocketing rents and unsafe living conditions. At the Minnesota State Capitol Thursday, they placed the blame on out-of-state private equity firms that have been purchasing these communities in recent years.

Isn’t it a little odd that these weekly articles are always simply regurgitations of the same basic talking points, with this week’s special being “evil private equity groups”? Looks like all the little woke writers had a pizza party and shared ideas.

Of all this week’s articles, this is the dumbest. Anyone who would pay $3.49 million for a mobile home – regardless of location – should be immediately confined to a mental health facility.

The Michigan Manufactured Housing Association (MMHA) filed a complaint last week in Macomb County Circuit Court against the City of Warren, building director Kirk Rehn, and building inspector John Impellizzeri.

You’ll see a lot more of this going forward as city and state governments have often gone too far and park owners are having to fight back. It’s great that the state association, in this case, had the gumption to lead the charge.

Energy Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit, runs a manufactured home replacement program that provides funding to replace homes built prior to 1995 with new builds. The program provides eligible applicants up to $16,000 to help pay for a new single or double-wide mobile home, and connects them with other agencies that can provide funding to pay for the replacement. Energy Trust also provides a program navigator to help applicants throughout the process. 

Here's the math. You can’t possibly make sense of trading in a paid-for home to get a new $80,000 one, get a rebate check of $16,000, and have a $64,000 mortgage to service. The payment on that new mortgage is more than ten times a month what the energy savings are. This is just plain stupid and this non-profit is literally ruining peoples’ lives by even suggesting this idiocy.

The union shared its demands for negotiations with Elevate Commercial:

• Rent reduction
• Cancellation of back rent
• Transparent rent and fee calculations
• A collectively bargained lease

That’s not asking much, right? I might understand if this was in New York City right now – where a socialist is poised to become mayor – but this is Idaho, which is one of the reddest states in the U.S. But then, after the shock wore off, I looked up what a “tenant union” even means and here’s what AI says:

“A tenant union does not have statutory or governmental authority; its power comes from the collective action and solidarity of its members, similar to a labor union”. 

So basically a “tenant union” has about as much functional meaning as my old “Big Boy Hamburger Club” did in the 1960s. But for those few wokesters of Idaho, apparently the term “union” – however ridiculous – makes them smile.

Meetings of the board of supervisors are subject to Iowa’s open meeting laws, which limit the reasons a meeting can be held in closed session.

Havenpark is a great company and every operator knows that they keep their properties up to meticulous standards. Claiming that they have been neglecting basic services is laughable. So it kind of makes sense that – when offered to meet face-to-face with the county to discuss these false allegations – the county isn’t sure they can make the meeting.

The manufactured housing sector performed well during the second quarter, with occupancy holding at peak levels and asking rents continuing to rise. Demand for manufactured housing remains strong alongside elevated new supply shipments. Nearly 54,000 units were shipped across the country during the first six months of the year, marking the second highest first-half total of the past decade, surpassed only by levels recorded in 2022. Despite continued supply growth, occupancy conditions have remained stable since approaching 95.0% in early 2024. The current rate of 94.9% is up 10 basis points annually. This tight occupancy has allowed operators to raise rents in recent periods. Asking rents trended higher by 7.0% during the past year to $752 per month. Rent growth has been steepest in the Southwest and West regions. Year over year, manufactured housing rents in the Southwest advanced by 7.9% while rents in the West rose 7.5%.

All great news but who comes up with these “average rent” numbers? How many parks do you know that have a $752 per month rent? That’s right, virtually none. The real number is more like $400 – about half of what this article says. Here’s what AI reports when asked the question: “As of late 2024 and early 2025, the average mobile home park lot rent in the U.S. typically ranges from $300 to $1,000 per month. However, the median figure is likely closer to the lower end of this range, with some experts citing around $300 to $400”. While I can see rents easily hitting $752 in the years ahead, that is absolutely not the norm today and that type of figure currently remains mostly the bastion of the REITs – who probably gave the data for this story.

The Quincy City Council approved an ordinance to add new regulations and standards for mobile home parks.

Now we jump to Illinois, where the city of Quincy has decided to emulate California and drive park owners to consider if there aren’t better uses for their land than a simple “trailer park”.

Washington state bureaucrats love their new rent control laws so much and can’t resist a good photo opportunity – even if it means going to a “trailer park” for a few minutes of pandering. Afterwards I’m sure they were off to the steakhouse to laugh about the event.

Another case of park owners suing cities and counties for regulatory overreach, this time in California. Perhaps these bureaucrats missed the news bulletin that Biden is gone now and the law is back in vogue.

Mobile home park rents will be capped in the city of Camarillo — at least for the next six months. The Camarillo City Council voted unanimously on Oct. 22 to temporarily block mobile home park owners from increasing parcel rents by more than 4.2% while the city works out the details for a potential permanent rent ordinance.

More of what California does best: over-regulate and force landlords to tear their parks down and put up uses that are less regulated. Perhaps that’s why there’s zero affordable housing there – they chased it all off.