Mobile Home Owner News – October 2024
Resident curated mobile home owners news and information for residents of Mobile Home Parks owned by Kort & Scott (KS) companies. The MHPHOA also provides news coverage for Mobile Home Parks not owned by KS companies.
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Fri, Oct 11, 2024 – Santa Rosa is taking initial steps to strengthen protections for seniors who live in many of the city’s mobile home parks. The City Council during a Tuesday study session directed planning staffers to move forward with a proposal to designate 12 of the city’s 16 parks as seniors-only.
The designation would require most residents in the park be 55 and older, ensuring that rental spaces remain available to older adults and making it tougher for park owners to convert existing senior parks to all-ages.
Senior residents have been championing the change since they secured some of the tightest local rent control protections in late 2022.
Any change is likely to land in court. Similar proposals in the region have been challenged by park owners, who say they’re also facing rising operations costs and the senior designation impinges on their business and discriminates against other would-be residents, particularly younger, lower-income tenants and people of color.
The 12 parks include 1,753 spaces, according to city data. Citywide, 2,154 spaces exist, accounting for about 3% of all homes in the city.
RE: Santa Barbara County, California / Del Cielo Mobile Estates / Harmony Communities
Tue, Oct 8, 2024 – Santa Barbara County Planning and Development staff were directed to develop a potential moratorium on converting senior mobile home parks to all-ages parks that would prevent owners from making that change while a mobile home overlay or overlays can be formulated.
The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously directed staff to develop a potential moratorium and then postpone work on the Coastal Zone short-term rentals ordinance to free up Long Range Planning Division staff to focus on creating potential overlays that would preserve senior parks.
Residents of mobile home parks where new owners are planning to make that conversion brought the issue to the board at several meetings this summer and asked for a moratorium.
A Planning and Development staff report said the county has 21 mobile home parks that provide permanent residency, and 11 of those are restricted to residents 55 and older, providing 1,862 spaces for seniors out of the total 2,401 spaces.
Del Cielo Mobile Estates on Santa Maria Way in Orcutt is planning to covert from a senior park to an all-ages park.
RE: Imperial Beach, California / National City, California
Sun, Oct 6, 2024 – Imperial Beach RV park residents will soon be protected from owners who try to skirt a state law that shields occupants from arbitrary evictions once they have lived in a park for nine months. And National City approved an agreement with mobile home park owners that limits rent increases.
Gov. Gavin Newsom last month signed Assembly Bill 1472, sponsored by Assemblymember David Alvarez, that prohibits RV park owners in Imperial Beach from requiring occupants to move out and reregister every six months, making it impossible for them to become eligible for the state protections.
Under state law, park owners must have reasonable grounds to deny renewing leases. Violating park rules or missing rent payments are some examples. The new bill, effective in January, specifies that a resident is someone who has occupied a park for at least nine months in a yearlong period. Imperial Beach RV park owners could be fined $500 for violating the law.
The law comes after repeated pleas from long-term residents of the Miramar Imperial Beach Mobile Home and RV Park to protect them from being shuffled in and out. Located on Palm Avenue, the 100-space park is one of the few remaining sources of affordable housing, not only in the small, coastal community, but across San Diego County.
In National City, officials approved a 10-year memorandum of understanding between the city and all four mobile home park owners overseeing more than 300 spaces limiting rent increases at their properties.
The agreement, effective in January 2025 and expiring in January 2035, allows rents to be increased up to 5 percent a year. A 90-day written notice must be provided to tenants ahead of rent hikes. Owners can pass through various costs, such as property tax increases or disaster-related expenses, evenly spread out over the years to all tenants. Those costs are usually added to rent increases, but are not amortized.
RE: California
Tue, Oct 1, 2024 – This table of Mobile Home Parks, RV Parks, and Manufactured Home Communities for Sale in California is a work in progress as of Tuesday, October 1, 2024. Data is being updated regularly.
This is a partial listing and covers the period 2021-01-01 to 2024-10-01. This is NOT a complete list of mobile home parks for sale in California. Many sales of mobile home parks are usually done via Pocket Listings (aka Off-Market Listings, Exclusive Listings), they are not marketed via public channels.
RE: California / Mobilehome Residency Law (MRL)
Sun, Sep 29, 2024 – There are five (5) Assembly Bills and two (2) Senate Bills relating to mobilehomes that have been signed into law by the Governor to become effective January 1, 2025. The MHPHOA have updated our online California MRL in HTML to reflect these updates.