CALABASAS : Rent Laws for Mobile Homes Being Studied

In response to an outcry over escalating costs, Calabasas officials may help control rent for the mostly senior citizen residents of the city’s only mobile home park.

At a meeting attended by dozens of residents of Calabasas Village Mobile Home Estates last week, the City Council directed its staff to study mobile home rent laws of other cities, and recommend a course of action.

Mobile home resident Reva Isaacman said many of her neighbors in the 210-trailer space park are hardly able to keep up with their lease and mortgage payments, and can’t sell their trailers because the rent for a new owner would increase, in some cases, by hundreds of dollars.

“We moved here thinking this would be an inexpensive place to live,” Isaacman said. “But now there’s nowhere else to go, and we’re locked in. You can’t just hook your trailer up to a tow hitch and move somewhere else. It’s very expensive to do that, so now the owners virtually have a monopoly on us.”

The East Coast-based owner of the mobile home park was not available for comment, and park Manager Joe Hicks declined to discuss the residents’ concerns.

Most residents of the park pay between $500 and $700 a month in rent, plus utilities, said Isaacman, who has helped organize the lobbying effort.

But the lease agreements, all signed after 1989, allow the park owner to raise rates in 1996 by 5% or more and, for some, by 10% in the year 2000, Isaacman said. Those hikes would come on top of the national Consumer Price Index increase, which was about 3.4% last year, she said.