SOUNDING OFF:Follow mobile home park owners’ money trail

Articles have appeared in all types of media of late, from extremely right-wing political newspapers to mobile home related online newsgroups, all seemingly written by the paid political hacks of the park owners’ groups — you know, the ones making the most money from all of us.

What’s my background in showing the truth, my credentials and my creditability, along with my true awareness as to what’s really going on here? You be the judge. I am a 48-year resident of a mobile home park, have initiated and/or been on numerous boards and committees representing the mobile/manufactured home owners, I am the founding director of the Manufactured Home Owners Network at www.mfghomeowners.net, and I am the senior sales consultant for Mesa Manufactured Homes.

For the most part, mobile home parks have become “cash cows” for the park owner(s), treated as and emphasized only as commercial real estate interest. To us mobile/manufactured home owners living within such surroundings and paying an ever-increasing space rent for this privilege, our perspective is naturally different. This is our home, our security and our personal property investment and ownership.

When there are issues such as the ones that are brought up in related articles and that prompted this particular rebuttal, we usually find very little personal support beyond our actual park boundaries. Convenient and made-up real estate terms such as “highest and best use” have become the creed of the money trail, which leads right back to the politicians from these very park owners that now control our destiny. And don’t forget — it’s our money from the monthly rent assessments that everyone is using to justify their means.

Park owners, their political organizations and their paid lobbyists will all quickly point out when there is any talk of helping to further protect the residents living in these parks that it is their land and they should be free to do as they wish with it. Problems really surface when some type of ordinance and/or law is initiated that tries to protect the residents even further and tries to put some of the responsibility back on the park/property owner of the land, especially for some of these relocation costs if the park is to be closed.

Naturally, the park owners try to conveniently claim that they are in essence being forced to pay for their own property twice. This is not true at all when the actual facts are known.

The bottom line is really very simple: Park owners simply want to kick everyone out without paying one red cent and/or taking any real responsibility. It is nothing more than pure greed. They can simply make more money this way, not only for changing the land use to something other than a mobile home park, but for not having any extra costs, expenses or responsibility at all to the residents in doing so. Likewise this scenario has become quite easy for the money trail from the park owners leading right back to the politicians, so in essence park owners now control their strings. It’s a vicious but highly protected circle — park owners use our money from the ever-increasing space rents to pay for the politicians they put in office, who now do what they’re told based on the rhetoric and influence of the paid-political lobbyists and related real estate groups who represent park owners, and all the time while leaving the park residents out in the cold and fending for themselves.

Now, based on the above information, why would anyone actually want to live in a mobile home park in the first place? If conditions such as these do, may and/or can exist, why bother? Why put yourself in the middle of basically a no-win situation? That answer is quite simple. For the most part, the life in the vast majority of most mobile home parks is just fine. Rents go up of course, but not because of greed, but based on the cost of living, and I might add, in reasonable increments. There’s no internal harassment and intimidation as may be found elsewhere. However, how do you know? Which park is good? Which one is bad? How do we even know if a good park can go bad if the ownership and/or management changes? What happened to the so-called mom-and-pop ownership and “feel” of the parks of long ago? That answer is also simple — too many are now corporate-owned. Corporations, for the most part, don’t really care about the residents in the park. The bottom line is simply profits. Yet, even some corporate-owned parks are better than others. What’s the difference? The problem is basically logistics; the bad park owners, managers and management companies are simply ruining it for the good ones. Unless they start policing themselves, this scenario will not only continue but will definitely get worse.