“At that time there were more applications than we could fund,” said Rioux, who is now consulting with the state housing department on behalf of the California Coalition for Rural Housing, a Sacramento-based nonprofit. ![]() After buying a park in Houston, Texas, for example, residents together bought a storm water management system that later protected them from Hurricane Harvey.Īt its inception, California’s program was designed to combat rent hikes, poor management and park closures, which were increasingly common as the infrastructure at parks, which were often built to poor standards, began to fail and the land around them grow in value, said Jerry Rioux, a former housing department employee who helped write the legislation for then-state Sen. Because they rent the land their trailers sit on, residents are often at the mercy of park owners, who have little incentive to make the capital improvements old parks need.īut if they were to own their park, residents could pool their money to make repairs. Housing experts say resident ownership is one of the best ways to remedy poor habitability and economic conditions at mobile home parks, which house some of the state’s most vulnerable residents. When we’re thinking of all the needs of parks and residents, it’s easy to assume it was meant to do it all,” said Sasha Hauswald, assistant deputy director at the housing department.ĭuring a conversion to resident ownership, residents can turn the lots into condominiums they buy individually, or create a non-profit cooperative that owns the land and issues shares to participating residents. “This program was intended for a very specific purpose. The original intent of the fund was narrow: Help residents buy their parks. “I’m going to wait and see what this does and monitor it very closely,” said Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia, a Democrat from Coachella who authored a bill to reform the program in 2018. Yet the need among poor residents is greater than ever, as living conditions at parks slump, chances of corporate ownership steepen and alternative affordable housing options vanish. Housing experts, including from the housing department, attribute the program’s failures to limited demand and an overly complex application process. The last two applications it approved before that were in 2012, according to Alicia Murillo, speaking for the department. 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. 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. ![]() 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.īut that solution, for the last 10 years, has helped only one of California’s 4,500 mobile home parks. 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.
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