First you get their attention
The story is told of the farmer who sold a rube a mule, telling the rube that the mule would only respond to Tender Loving Care. A week later the rube returned, irate, because the mule refused all commands and did no work whatsoever.
“Really,” said the farmer thoughtfully. He went to his woodpile, selected a firm branch, and with all his might bashed the mule right across the eyes with it. The mule’s four legs shot straight out, it brayed in outrage, and collapsed in a heap.
I’m outraged
“Hey!” shouted the rube as the mule slowly staggered back to consciousness. “I thought you said the mule needed TLC!”
“He does – but first you’ve got to get his attention.”
I’m paying attention now, aren’t I?
If someone could sell out from under you the land on which sits your immovable home, would you want the legal right to compel the seller to offer you a chance to match the market? That’s the question posed by pending and hoped-for legislation proceeding in Howard County, Maryland, as reported in Explore Howard:
Amy Lamke was about to give up on living in Howard County when she learned about Deep Run Mobile Home Park in Elkridge.
http://gis.howardcountymd.gov/InteractiveMap/Myinteractive.aspx
P.G (Prince George’s County, south) is metro DC, Anne Arundel (east) is Annapolis, and Baltimore is to the north
Mobile homes are affordable housing’s poor relation, its dark matter – a vast bulk of property, filling an important ecosystemic niche, yet unobserved and all but unacknowledged. In particular, I find it astonishing that the major affordable housing advocacy organizations appear to give mobile homes short shrift.
After she divorced several years ago, she and her daughter looked at apartments and tried living in a shared home, but found that rents were too high and shared housing left them with no privacy or security.
Three years ago, she discovered Deep Run Mobile Home Park, a 620-unit park on Old Waterloo Road, and with it both an affordable place to live and a sense of community.
But there’s one problem: While she owns her home, she does not own the land it sits on.
6551 Old Waterloo Road:
In the path of development between Washington and Baltimore
This is a common configuration because of the history of mobile homes.
At any point, the owner could sell or redevelop, leaving Lamke and her neighbors searching for housing, she said.
Welcome to Paradise Park. Without the resident protections.
Deer Run: extensive and well laid-out …
“We’re really, really happy,” said Lamke, 43. “But there is the nagging fear … in the back of all of our minds.”
That fear is why Lamke supports a statewide bill, being considered this year in Annapolis, that would require mobile home park owners to come up with relocation plans for residents if owners decide to sell or redevelop.
… right in the development corridor between Baltimore and Washington
A relocation plan is a palliative; it doesn’t give residents security of tenure, although it may provide a mixture of notice and transitional assistance.
A similar bill affecting only St. Mary’s County was signed into law last year. That bill requires mobile home park owners to submit to the county a detailed relocation plan if they decide to change the way they use their land or sell it.
Whether the owner should be obligated to pay that transitional assistance is another matter, a dicey one.
Pick a choice, any choice
The plan must include a list of park residents, a relocation timeline and a budget showing how much money the owner would spend to help residents move.
A deft finesse. To mandate that the owner pays could be a taking or discriminatory tax. To require the owners to disclose is merely a public-opprobrium penalty, not compensable but potentially effective (embarrassment being among the most powerful human neuroses).
One of the main supporters of the statewide bill, state Sen. James Robey, an Elkridge Democrat, said the bill could help people uprooted by redevelopment. With mobile home parks around the state shutting down in recent years — and counties often chipping in with relocation expenses and other aid — park owners should be required to do more, he said.
Seeing a lot of mobile home activity: state Senator James Robey
Counties should be the ones that chip in.
“They have a right to (sell or redevelop) and I fully appreciate that,” Robey said. “But I’d like to see them provide some assistance to those people who’ve been there so long and have paid their rent.”
Again, Senator Robey stops carefully short of saying that they must provide such assistance. This is an excellent example of political vaporware shrewdly deployed, in that it invites the guilty to fleeth where none pursueth.
Robey should know about mobile home park closures: He was the Howard County executive from 1998 to 2006, during which at least six mobile home parks shut down in the county. He said the county helped negotiate payments to residents of Pfister’s in North Laurel when the park closed to make way for the expansion of an ice cream plant, one of the largest such closures in the county.
Senator Robey previously gave the Howard County seal of approval
Having been down that road before, Senator Robey appears eminently qualified to manage the legislative sausage-making machine on this issue.
Robey said the statewide version of the bill is still being drafted, but he has circulated it among people in the mobile home industry to get feedback. It is too early to tell if it faces any significant opposition, he said.
Officials with the Manufactured Housing Institute of Maryland, an industry trade association that lobbies lawmakers on mobile home-related bills, did not return a call for comment.
Scoring another public-relations coup!
Showing our usual knack for presenting a favorable image
Mobile home parks face a tenuous future in Howard County.
In the past five years, Ev-Mar Mobile Home Park and Pfister’s, both in North Laurel, and Aladdin Village, in Jessup, have closed to make way for redevelopment along Route 1.
Route 95 and Route 1: the growth corridor
Mobile homes are a low-value, low-cost use of land. As communities gentrify, they will be economically displaced unless protected, and in the long run, the only enduring protection is ownership by the occupants.
(Again, if a mobile home park is to be acquired and preserved as affordable housing, it often makes sense to redevelop into a higher density with more efficient use, either through hermit crab housing or subsidy portage.)
Nine mobile home parks, with a total of about 1,400 households, remain in the county, according to the county Department of Planning and Zoning and 2007 Census data estimates. All are in the eastern part of the county, and all, except for Deep Run, are in the Route 1 corridor.
Officials with the local community advocacy organization People Acting Together in Howard (PATH), which has taken the lead on helping local residents faced with park closures, said they are not aware of any parks that are in the process of closing now.
Unfortunately in the PATH of development along Route 1
Last year, PATH pushed for a bill that would have given Howard County residents the right of first refusal to buy their parks before the owner could sell.
As we’ve seen in New Hampshire and New Jersey, such rights of first refusal are a common response particularly for mobile homes, where the power relationships are so unbalanced against the home owners. In general, and if properly crafted, I support them in mobile-home-park contexts.
The bill had the unanimous support of the local legislative delegation and passed the House, but it stalled in the Senate Rules Committee, said Del. Guy Guzzone, a Columbia Democrat.
Knowing where bills go to die: Guy Guzzone
Rules Committees are where leadership-disfavored bills go to die quietly, without political fallout.
The Rules Committee is deliberating
PATH initially considered pursuing the right of first refusal bill again this year on a statewide level, lead organizer Cynthia Marshall said, and even met with Gov. Martin O’Malley about that possibility. But when O’Malley declined to put it in his legislative agenda for the year, PATH decided, for now, to focus on making the St. Mary’s relocation bill apply statewide, Marshall said.
Though, according to his official web site, “Martin O’Malley is a fearless, intelligent public servant who puts people before politics,” these people were not on his agenda
“There are several protections that mobile home owners need,” she said. “This, along with the right of first refusal, are two important ones.”
She’s right.
While Deep Run’s owners have not indicated they plan to sell, Lamke said it would be helpful to have laws on the books offering some protection to residents, in case the owners change their minds.
You can’t negotiate with someone who refuses you a seat at the negotiating table.
No place for you homeowners …
“I don’t know what I would do” if the park closed, she said. “It’s still so expensive to live in this area. I think we’d just have to move out of the county.
“These are our homes, our future and our lives that are at stake here,” she told the delegation.
As I’ve previously posted, I worry about rights of first refusal, which can be abused into becoming nothing more than procedural hurdles without a genuine commitment to transact – but they have one undeniable benefit.
They get the mule’s attention.
Now that we’ve got your attention …
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