🏡💚 Mobile home residents show path to social housing

Written By Zach Lou

April 12, 2024

Despite the fact that they are home to over 1.6 million Californians, mobile homes are often overlooked in the discussions about housing. There are probably a multitude of reasons for this: mobile home residents tend to be disproportionately older and poorer; they are typically not in urban centers; and there’s a general stigma around trailers, trailer parks, and their residents.

In the context of California’s housing crisis, mobile homes offer affordable options where rent can often be half the monthly housing cost of a single-family home. This can make a huge difference for people that are low-income or at risk of homelessness.

But their affordability has started to change in recent years as corporations have begun buying up mobile home parks, pushing up rents, and driving residents out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, corporate real estate is very explicit about the profit potential of investing in mobile home parks — according to the materials from a Mobile Home Park Investor’s Boot Camp, “the fact that tenants can’t afford the $5,000 it costs to move a mobile home keeps revenues stable and makes it easy to raise rents without losing any occupancy.”

On top of that, even if residents own their mobile homes, they often still have to rent the land underneath. This leads to situations where private landlords will delay vital upgrades but continue to collect lot rents.

But amidst all this, mobile home parks can also foster strong and tightly-knit communities. And sometimes those communities fight back.

That’s what happened earlier this year when a group of mostly Oaxacan farmworkers in Fresno County purchased their mobile home park from its corporate landlord. It’s an incredible story of organizing, advocacy, and persistence — and it demonstrates a model for cooperatively-owned social housing.

In 2019, a real estate investment corporation, Harmony Communities California, bought up this mobile home park and quickly set to implementing the for-profit investment management model: raising rents by 32%, neglecting park maintenance, retaliating against residents who voiced concerns, and failing to provide residents information in their languages. Over the course of the following five years, residents began to organize and seek legal aid to sue Harmony.

Eventually they were connected to the California Center for Cooperative Development (CCCD), which offered a different solution: assistance in buying the land and forming a limited equity housing co-op. CCCD is part of ROC USA, a national nonprofit that supports residents who are interested in forming housing cooperatives with the goal of taking mobile home parks off the private investment market.

The journey was long, and the funding streams complex, but eventually they were able to put together the money needed to buy the park. Not to be underestimated was the funding provided by the state (*gasp* state funding for social housing??) through the Manufactured Housing Opportunity & Revitalization Program and the Farmworker Housing Grant Program.

The limited-equity housing co-op model is a great example of the diversity of forms that social housing can take, as it allows for ownership but maintains permanent affordability. As explained by CCCD Executive Director E. Kim Coontz, “If you belong to a limited equity housing cooperative in California, you are agreeing when you come into the deal, you get a good price for the [park] and then you pass that on to the next person by limiting the appreciation on the [park] when you sell it. We’ve got this model that’s very, very successful and it preserves affordability. Why aren’t we doing more of this in California?”

The mobile home park, renamed Nuevo Lago Mobile Home Park, is now controlled, owned, and run by the residents. They have a board of directors made up of residents, who make decisions about how much rent to charge, park finances, and operating rules.

This also gives a glimpse into how resident-control can promote climate resilience. Commentators note how these communities create the right conditions for building green infrastructure and renewable energy. “There’s nothing more perfect than these resident-owned communities because they already have a cooperative structure and, generally, commonly own the piece of land,” according to Kevin Jones, director at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. “[They] are just kind of natural communities to be able to bring the benefits of solar to more low- to moderate-income people.”

When we talk about green social housing, it’s easy to jump ahead to a future vision of brand-new climate-resilient social housing. While we certainly should demand and promote that vision, we shouldn’t neglect the huge opportunities we have to preserve and upgrade the housing we have — and convert existing buildings to social housing. To echo Kim Coontz: why aren’t we doing more of this in California??

Residents (and members of the board of directors) of the Shady Lakes Mobile Home Park that purchased the park from their corporate landlord, and will rename it the Nuevo Lago Mobile Home Park. Source: KQED

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Zach Lou
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