Mobile homes: the price of security
[Useful previous posts on mobile homes include:
· Paradise Park, New Jersey: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
· Briny Breezes,
· Modesto, California: Part 1, Part 2
·
The more I look around for mobile-home policy challenges, the more they pop up like mushrooms:
And the more the issues; here, from the Seattle
Rising land values may squeeze them out
At the end of a string of new houses, and backed up against a stretch of forest, a small community has sat quiet for years. Former salesmen and mill workers and nurses, living out their retirement in rows of mobile homes.
You might say it was only a matter of time. But it still hit the residents of Wonderland Estates hard last summer, when they heard the land they rented just outside
But the damage was already done.
The psychological damage, perhaps; not the financial. Not yet,anyhow.
“This place just went into a panic,” said Don Charnley, 65, a retired mechanic.
A main street (from the Wonderland Estates web site)
As the ground beneath them grows more valuable, and park owners sell out to developers, mobile-home owners are losing their lots by the thousands. The pace is so quick, the state’s relocation fund has run out.
It’s terrific that the State of Washington has established a relocation fund; that’s part of an overall solution. But appropriations run in annual cycles (slower than markets), so a sudden spike catches them unawares.
Hundreds of homeowners are waiting for nearly $2 million in assistance. And 20 more parks are scheduled to close statewide this year.
It’s not an isolated incident, it’s a trend — one might even say, epidemic.
Honey, we’ll find another mobile home park soon, I promise
Determined to remain homeowners, some residents have delayed retirement, or taken a second job, to pay the higher price of condominiums. Others have moved from park to park in search of a permanent home. Still others have gone straight into subsidized housing.
Even as people value only what they pay for, so too do governments notice only what they fund. Mobile homes are a tremendous form of affordable housing that for decades has gone unnoticed — and only intermittently attended. Having been quiescent for so long, the mobile home owners must now rapidly raise their voices, so they are the anti-incumbents.
“It’s pretty much a hardship, any way you look at it,” said Teri Ramsauer, manager of the state’s office of manufactured housing.
This year, politicians are paying attention. Gov. Christine Gregoire has included $4 million for the relocation fund in her biennial budget.
A start.
Funding relocation at glacial speed
And two bills in the state Legislature focus on preserving manufactured housing.
1. The homeowners’ bill (x) offers a small tax break to landlords who voluntarily sell to residents and (y) gives public-housing authorities a chance to match an outside offer.
2. The landlords’ bill tweaks the Growth Management Act to allow for construction of mobile-home parks in rural areas, where zoning rules keep developers at bay.
An interesting if eclectic mix of subsidy (the real estate tax abatement), procedural remedy in the right to match (but why housing authorities?), and new production (although unless the new mobile parks also provide some form of cooperative ownership or other land-use protection).
More than 1,450 mobile-home parks remain, more than a quarter of them in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.
Assuming 40 spaces per park, which is about the national average, and 1.5 people per home (in view of the high proportion of elderly), that’s about 87,000 Washingtonians — roughly 1.5% of the state’s population.
1 out of every 80 seats is a mobile home owner
Together they represent that rare opportunity at home ownership for the elderly person on a fixed income, or the young family just starting out.
An impaired form of ownership lacking many of the six economic characteristics of true ownership.
In
Estela Cervantes bought her first one for $6,000, back when she was a young wife raising three children, and caring for an elderly mother. It was a good investment, she said, and a sound, stable home.
Cervantes’ Quixote thought windmills a good investment, too
Meaning not to disagree with Ms. Cervantes, I disagree, at least as to the investment part. It was a stable rental arrangement with an unusually high security deposit and no right of recovery, nothing more.
Until that first notice arrived.
Over the years, park closures have pushed the Cervantes family from
Progress only if you’re looking backwards
Moving steadily away from the city, steadily down-market.
Cervantes is on disability these days, with two ruptured discs. Her husband is a landscaper. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in King County last year was $868 — close to twice what they pay the park in monthly rent now.
That leaves her oldest daughter. “We’re going to squeeze in with her, and live in the living room,” Cervantes said.
Because housing demand is elastic, declining income means shrinking housing consumption. And likely, shrinking new household formation, for propinquity inhibits procreation.
In better times, the family would get $12,000 from the state’s relocation fund, a pool of money people pay into when they purchase a mobile home.
Remember that fund, the one the state established? It seems the state may have been the custodian but it was by no means the funder.
But the wait for that money is at least four years long.
Not a cheery prospect
By which time the households will be irretrievably damaged. Not so much an unfunded mandate as a cruel practical joke. It gets crueler:
And Cervantes can’t even find a park that’s accepting new tenants. Nearly half the people on the state’s relocation list have had their homes demolished, officials said, either because the homes are too old to move, or because they can’t find an open park. Cervantes likely will do the same.
As my Mystery Source observed, mobile homes are the only form of occupancy that depreciates rather than appreciating. Those who lose their space are instantly in need:
This year alone, closures will force 627 homeowners into the state’s affordable-housing crisis.
Few have a shot at owning homes outside the parks. Even renting will be tough. And for the poorest, there are few subsidies to rely on these days. King County Housing Authority has a one- to three-year wait for housing. Federal [Section 8 Housing Choice] vouchers are scant.
Now we can see a reason why the state legislature might have thought of giving housing authorities the purchase option; absent purchase, there is no safety net — except the public housing authorities, whose safety net, as I’ve documented before, is massively leaking.
Safe only with enough money
Over the years, housing authorities in Snohomish and King counties have purchased parks, trying to protect them for the future. Nonprofit groups have also stepped up, from the Low Income Housing Institute to the Manufactured Housing Community Preservationists, which runs parks in
Good for the housing authorities; and good for the preservationists.
Given the “dire” state of affordable housing, the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance has made the preservation of mobile-home parks one of its top priorities for this legislative session.
When seeking political change, recruit allies as fast as you can!
A grassroots movement is growing: residents rallying, raising awareness and, in some cases, saving their own parks. In
The best way to predict the future is to invent it; politicians help those who help themselves.
That’s French for, “every constituency for itself!”
Last summer, the movement came to Wonderland Estates.
One recent morning, several elderly women stood bent over stencils, swapping ideas for a sign. Something colorful and catchy enough to pull the public into their Saturday pancake breakfasts.
The Wonderland Estates Co-Op Association is busier than ever these days, cooking meals, organizing raffles, bothering businesses for donations. Every penny counts in the push to purchase their park, which
At least that
The owner is not currently listing the property, but he said through a representative that he is open to offers. So the co-op is pursuing a possible joint venture to purchase the park.
Money from their fundraisers will go toward business expenses, like the cost of an appraisal and the cost of closing. Once the deal is done, their monthly rents will pay off the mortgage.
Spaces currently lease for $475 a month. Assume $4,300,000, 5% rate (from a friendly lender, perhaps the state), 30 year loan (debt service constant of 6.4%), is $275,000 annual debt service, divided by 110 homes [Author’s count from the Google Earth picture — Ed.], works out to an increase of $210 per space per month — a 45% jump.
Can you find 45% more money every month?
That’s been the plan anyway, ever since last summer, when a tenant spotted that advertisement for Wonderland Estates on a real-estate Web site: 12.2 acres of prime land, just off the
$350,000 per acre. A figure inconceivable thirty years ago, but now all too plausible.
[By the way, if my home count is right, this represents fewer than 10 homes per acre, which would be considered low density for an apartment complex, because the apartment complex would go up three stories. Wouldn’t have guessed that low density from the aerial, would you?]
Residents formed a co-op soon after. They started a newsletter. They tried to keep each other calm.
The whole thing infuriated Charnley, president-elect of the co-op. He bought his single-wide for $12,000 last year, then spent $20,000 fixing it up — walls torn down, walls put up, new doors, new appliances. Now this.
With any luck, the co-op will secure a loan, make an offer, and get it accepted, before the developers come. The real fear right now is for those frail tenants on fixed incomes, with no place else to go.
We’re keeping our fingers crossed
Luck won’t enter into it. Action — or inaction — will.
