Goin’ mobile

Last updated on: November 28, 2007 at 10:04 pm by Fred Clark

Goin’ mobile 2007-11-28T22:04:15-05:00 Fred Clark

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So far I’ve posted stories from Delaware, Florida, California, Utah and Arizona about the powerlessness of manufactured-home owners who do not own the land under their not-really-mobile mobile homes.

Add Idaho to the list:

The president of Boise State University says the threat to mobile home living as an affordable low-cost housing alternative in the region is alarming.

The school and city researchers released earlier this week a study that found low-income residents being forced from manufactured homes due to a demand for vacant property to make way for new development.

The study found Boise had 50 mobile home parks with 2,076 manufactured homes being occupied by 5,412 people.

Of those residents, half are senior citizens living on $20,000 a year. Most of the residents are female and nearly half have chronic medical conditions.

The study found that about 1,300 mobile-home households have been forced to move since 2001.

You can read more about the Boise State Study, “Mobile Home Living in Boise: It’s Uncertain Future and Alarming Decline,” from BSU’s press release, or download the entire study here.

Again, the deal with manufactured housing/mobile homes/trailer parks is this: If you own the home and the land it sits on, it appreciates in value much like any other home. If you own the home but not the land it sits on, it depreciates, like an automobile, and you’ll be unlikely to be able to sell it or move it for a reasonable price should the land rent become prohibitively expensive.

The demographics of Boise’s trailer parks echo the general shape of the manufactured housing population we’ve seen in the other states: low-income, fixed-income, elderly, female. The BSU study found that about two-thirds of these manufactured-home owners were paying rent on the land beneath their homes. About half of them were living on around $20,000 a year, while the typical cost for moving a home to a new location would be about $10,000. The implications of the arithmetic there aren’t difficult to figure out.

The BSU study is pretty thin when it comes to recommendations. The report suggests, for example, that the city of Boise “publish a pamphlet that warns homebuyers about the danger of owning a house on leased land and another that informs mobile home residents of their legal rights.” That first pamphlet seems a bit belated, the second one would be depressingly short.

The most promising recommendation, in my view, is this one:

Encourage housing cooperatives by working with private lenders and homeowner associations or by assisting nonprofits.

“Working with private lenders” is a bit vague, but the full report expands on this to explore the variety of tax-exempt financing options for “leasehold” co-ops or limited equity co-ops like those New Hampshire promotes working with the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund’s ROC USA program.

“ROC” there stands for “resident owned community,” meaning communities where manufactured-home owners also own the land underneath them. Instead of paying rent — which could be increased at any time, forcing them off the land and probably out of their homes — the residents of these ROCs make payments on the loans that purchased the land they live on. ROC USA has helped 86 manufactured housing communities in New Hampshire become resident-owned, giving these homeowners the security and stability that the residents in Boise desperately lack.

It’s an excellent model. It works. And the ROC USA people are eager to help other states and cities find ways to duplicate this model so that they don’t end up, like Boise, with 1,300 retirees forced from their homes.

What’s happening in Idaho and in Utah, Delaware, California, Florida and Arizona is likely also happening in many other states. And it shouldn’t be happening. Poor old people with few options shouldn’t be forced out of their homes. The ROC USA approach to helping them purchase the land beneath their feet doesn’t involve government mandates or wealth-redistribution. And it doesn’t involve burdensome restrictions on anyone’s personal liberty beyond insisting that landowners must allow their tenants the first crack at buying the land for a fair market price. It is, after all, a model developed in the “live free or die” state.

In much of rural America, manufactured housing fills the same affordable housing niche that apartments do in urban areas. Helping the residents of manufactured housing communities achieve a bit more security and stability, it seems to me, would be a good way of winning votes in rural areas.

The Chicago Tribune reports on what attempts to woo rural voters typically means. “Ohio governor reaches out to rural voters,” the headline reads. Read the article, though, and you’ll see that the substance of this “reaching out” involves: A) Gov. Strickland speaking at county fairgrounds; B) Gov. Strickland telling stories about his youth on a farm; C) Gov. Strickland going hunting; and D) Gov. Strickland going hunting some more. Lots of sizzle, no actual steak.

Strickland’s story about when “a fire leveled his boyhood home” and his family lived “for a while in a converted chicken coop” may well earn him some sympathy points with rural voters. But those voters who are struggling with higher rents on the land beneath their homes — and who are therefore fearing that they may themselves soon be living in converted chicken coops — might find a more compelling reason to vote for the man if he helped them through something like ROC USA.

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