Category: California

Condo-ing mobile home parks: Part 3, who decides?

13 August, 2009 (14:04) | California, Eminent domain, Local issues, Mobile homes, Tenure, US News | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's part 2 and the previous Part1.]
 
Two days ago, we looked at Santa Rosa’s Country Mobile Home Park, whose owner wants to condo the land (at least as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle; the owner wouldn’t talk to the newspaper), and yesterday we saw that in a forced condo conversion, land value [...]

Condo-ing mobile home parks: Part 2, at what price?

12 August, 2009 (10:29) | California, Eminent domain, Local issues, Mobile homes, Tenure, US News | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]

Yesterday we encountered Country Mobile Home Park, an estate in Santa Rosa whose park owner is adamant about converting the land to condominiums, and selling the individual plots to those whose homes rest atop those plots.

Plots? I love plots!

[Editorial note: park owners persist in calling the land 'spaces', [...]

Condo-ing mobile home parks: Part 1, unofficial affordable housing

11 August, 2009 (15:11) | California, Eminent domain, Local issues, Mobile homes, Tenure, US News | No comments

You own a mobile home. The land is owned by a third party landlord who likes nothing better than jacking up your rents.

Legally, mobile homes that lack land aren’t real estate, and you can’t finance one as real estate; instead you get a chattel loan. You can’t avail yourself of the legal protections of [...]

Plowing it under: Part 2, the how

5 June, 2009 (09:44) | California, Homeownership, Innovations, Subprime, Tenure, US News | No comments

Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
In yesterday’s depressing blog post, we visited beautiful distant Victorville, California:
 

Over the mountains on the road to Vegas: isolated Victorville
 
A new-construction development in Victorville is being dismantled, as reported in this Los Angeles Times story, because holding the property has become more expensive thanks to the perverse consequences of a recent [...]

Plowing it under: Part 1, the why

4 June, 2009 (10:33) | California, Homeownership, Innovations, Subprime, Tenure, US News | No comments

What to do with unproductive acreage?  Plow it under – turn the soil into fallow ground, put the nutrients back into the earth.
 

Better to mulch it before the scavengers take everything
 
Among the many ways land is unique as an asset class is that its physical holding costs are zero – it need not be maintained.  [...]