California MHP News

Mon, Mar 27, 2023 – Mobile home residents in California face an outsize risk of failing utility systems, flooding and fires as a result of infrastructure that frequently hasn’t been updated or repaired in decades.

In 1984, California passed a law to help remedy this: a loan program, paid into by the residents themselves, to buy and in later iterations, fix their parks.

But that solution, for the last 10 years, has helped only one of California’s 4,500 mobile home parks.

State administrators approved a single loan application, in 2021, from a fund now worth $33.5 million, the state’s Housing and Community Development Department confirmed to CalMatters. The loan went to a non-profit organization to rehabilitate a run-down park in the Eastern Coachella Valley, a region notorious for its dilapidated mobile home parks. The last two applications it approved before that were in 2012, according to Alicia Murillo, speaking for the department.

Thu, Mar 23, 2023 – In the new episode of “Gimme Shelter: The California Housing Crisis Podcast,” CalMatters Housing Reporter Manuela Tobias shares her findings from a five-month investigation on California’s mobile home parks, the last stop in housing affordability for the state’s most vulnerable residents.

In a five-month investigation, CalMatters housing reporter Manuela Tobias uncovered questionable state oversight of mobile home parks across California. She found parks could go up to 20 years without a full inspection under state law, and even when state workers discovered problems, limited enforcement could allow serious health and safety problems to fester.

Her story takes readers behind the scenes of Stockton Park Village, a park abandoned by its owners in 2020 and left its residents to endure years of squalor, including multiple septic system failures.

In the latest episode of Gimme Shelter, Manuela shares what she learned in her reporting with co-host Liam Dillon, housing reporter for The Los Angeles Times. Listeners this week will hear not only Manuela and Liam unpack substandard housing issues across the state – but the voices of the people most affected by the problem and officials seeking solutions.

The guiding question for this installment of the podcast: How is the state doing as it tries to strike the balance between keeping this crucial source of affordable housing open, while also making sure the conditions at the park are livable?

Mon, Mar 20, 2023 – While the state has wielded most of its enforcement powers at Stockton Park Village, its residents have endured varying degrees of filth and hazardous conditions for more than four years.

The state of California has given the housing agency limited powers to intervene when conditions at mobile home parks get this bad. It can strip owners of their ability to collect rent until they fix the problems – which records show it did three times at Stockton Park Village. But it can’t step in and help those residents itself. Instead, it can eventually refer the problem to the local city or county district attorney’s office, which can bring a civil action to abate the nuisance and ultimately appoint a receiver, or temporary caretaker – which it did in the summer of 2021.

CalMatters reviewed hundreds of pages of records in a five-month investigation of California’s mobile home parks. Stockton Park Village is not representative of all or even most mobile home parks in the state. State housing department records show it’s one of about 40 parks with suspended licenses in a state with about 4,500 state-licensed mobile home parks. But county officials, the park’s receiver, attorneys for the park’s residents and advocates who work with residents elsewhere say they believe the number of mobile home parks in disrepair could actually be much higher because of their old age and shoddy construction.

Under state law, a park could go up to 20 years without a full inspection; inspectors rely mainly on residents to file complaints. While inspectors visited 91% of state mobile home parks in the last decade, according to a recent state audit, only half were full inspections, and 330 parks got no visit at all.

In choosing which parks to inspect, the state housing department told the auditor it prioritized parks based on the number and severity of complaints the parks receive and the time since the last park inspection. Parks without any recorded complaints, then, had a risk of serious undetected health or safety violations, the audit concluded.

I get calls almost every day from people who have varying stages of information about what their rights are, said Hilary Mosher, a volunteer regional manager in Northern California for the Golden State Manufactured-Home Owners League, the main lobbying group for park residents. When I suggest that they file a complaint with (the state housing department), about 90% of them back off because they’re afraid of retaliation.