Re: Rents spike as deep-pocketed investors buy mobile home parks

[Governor Swill]

In article <srfe1f$4moj$1...@news.freedyn.de>
Democrat asshole <rudy...@gmx.nut> wrote:
>
> This is how you fucking fools get repaid for voting Democrat.
>

For as long as anyone can remember, rent increases rarely
happened at Ridgeview Homes, a family-owned mobile home park in
upstate New York.

That changed in 2018 when corporate owners took over the 65-year-
old park located amid farmland and down the road from a fast
food joint and grocery store about 30 miles northeast of Buffalo.

Residents, about half of whom are seniors or disabled people on
fixed incomes, put up with the first two increases. They hoped
the latest owner, Cook Properties, would address the bourbon-
colored drinking water, sewage bubbling into their bathtubs and
the pothole-filled roads.

When that didn’t happen and a new lease with a 6% increase was
imposed this year, they formed an association. About half the
residents launched a rent strike in May, prompting Cook
Properties to send out about 30 eviction notices.

“All they care about is raising the rent because they only care
about the money,” said Jeremy Ward, 49, who gets by on just over
$1,000 a month in disability payments after his legs suffered
nerve damage in a car accident.

He was recently fined $10 for using a leaf blower. “I’m
disabled,” he said. “You guys aren’t doing your job and I get a
violation?”

The plight of residents at Ridgeview is playing out nationwide
as institutional investors, led by private equity firms and real
estate investment trusts and sometimes funded by pension funds,
swoop in to buy mobile home parks. Critics contend mortgage
giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are fueling the problem by
backing a growing number of investor loans.

The purchases are putting residents in a bind, since most mobile
homes — despite the name — cannot be moved easily or cheaply.
Owners are forced to either accept unaffordable rent increases,
spend thousands of dollars to move their home, or abandon it and
lose tens of thousands of dollars they invested.

“These industries, including mobile home park manufacturing
industry, keep touting these parks, these mobile homes, as
affordable housing. But it’s not affordable,” said Benjamin
Bellus, an assistant attorney general in Iowa, who said
complaints have gone up “100-fold” since out-of-state investors
started buying up parks a few years ago.

“You’re putting people in a snare and a trap, where they have no
ability to defend themselves,” he added.

Driven by some of the strongest returns in real estate,
investors have shaken up a once-sleepy sector that’s home to
more than 22 million mostly low-income Americans in 43,000
communities. Many aggressively promote the parks as ensuring a
steady return — by repeatedly raising rent.

There’s also a growing industry, featuring how-to books,
webinars and even a mobile home university, that offers tips to
attract small investors.

“You went from an environment where you had a local owner or
manager who took care of things as they needed fixing, to where
you had people who were looking at a cost-benefit analysis for
how to get the penny squeezed lowest,” Bellus said. “You combine
it with an idea that we can just keep raising the rent, and
these people can’t leave.”

George McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of
Land Policy, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based think tank, said
parks containing about a fifth of mobile home lots nationwide
have been purchased by institutional investors over the past
eight years.

McCarthy singled out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for guaranteeing
the loans as part of a what the lending giants bill as expanding
affordable housing. Since 2014, the Lincoln Institute estimates
Freddie Mac alone provided $9.6 billion in financing for the
purchase of more than 950 communities across 44 states.

A spokesman for Freddie Mac countered that it had purchased
loans for less than 3% of the mobile home communities
nationwide, and about 60% of those were refinances.

Soon after investors started buying up parks in 2015, the
complaints of double-digit rent increases followed.

In Iowa, Matt Chapman, a mobile home resident at a park
purchased by Utah-based Havenpark Communities, said his rent and
fees had almost doubled since 2019. Iowa Legal Aid’s Alex Kornya
said another park purchased by Impact Communities saw rent and
fees increase 87% between 2017 and 2020.

“Many of the folks living in the park were on fixed incomes,
disability, Social Security, and simply were not going to be
able to keep pace,” said Kornya, who met with about 300 angry
mobile home owners at a mega-church. “It led almost to a
political awakening.”

In Minnesota, park purchases by out-of-state buyers grew from
46% in 2015 to 81% in 2021, with rent increases as much as 30%,
according to All Parks Alliance For Change, a state association.

US Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, speaking at a Senate hearing this
year, recalled tenants complaining of repeated rent increases at
a Havenpark development in Great Falls. One resident, Cindy
Newman, told The Associated Press her monthly rent and fees went
up $117 to nearly $400 over a year and eight months — equal to
the increase over the previous 20 years. The company says the
increase was $95 over a three-year period.

On top of rent increases, residents complained of being
inundated with fees for everything from pets to maintenance and
fines for clutter and speeding — all tucked into leases that can
run upwards of 50 pages.

Josh Weiss, a Havenpark spokesperson, said the company must
charge prevailing market rates when it purchases a park at fair
market price. That said, the company has moved since 2020 to
limit its rent increases to $50-a-month.

“We understand the anxiety that any rent increase has on
residents, especially those on fixed incomes,” Weiss said.
“While we try to minimize the impact, the financial realities do
not change.”

The mobile home industry argues the communities are the most
affordable housing option, noting that average rent increases
across parks nationwide were just over 4% in 2021. Spending on
improvements was around 11%. Significant investments are needed,
they said, to make improvements at older parks and avoid them
being sold off.

“You have some people coming into the space that give us all a
bad name but those are isolated examples and those practices are
not common,” said Lesli Gooch, chief executive officer of the
Manufactured Housing Institute, the industry’s trade association.

Both sides said the government could do more to help.

The industry wants Federal Housing Administration financing made
available to residents, many of whom rely on high-interest loans
to purchase homes that cost on average $81,900. They also want
the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to allow
housing vouchers to be used for mobile homes.

Advocates for residents, including MHAction, want lawmakers to
put a cap on rent or require a reason for an increase or
eviction — state legislation that succeeded in Delaware this
year but failed in Iowa, Colorado and Montana.

They also want Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to stipulate in loans
they back that rents remain affordable. And they support
residents purchasing their communities, which started in New
Hampshire and has reached almost 300 parks in 20 states.

A Freddie Mac spokesperson said it has created a new loan
offering that incentivizes tenant protections and last year made
those mandatory for all future mobile home community
transactions.

At Ridgeview, it’s unclear how the rent strike will be resolved.

Cook, which claims to be the largest operator of mobile home
parks in New York and has a slogan “Exceptional Opportunities.
Exceptional Returns,” declined to comment. The company closed a
$26 million private-equity fund in 2021 that purchased 12 parks
in New York, but it was unclear if one of them was Ridgeview.

Residents, meanwhile, soldier on. Joyce Bayles, an 85-year-old
resident has taken to mowing her own lawn because crews show up
only monthly. Gerald Korb, a 78-year-old retiree, said he’s
still waiting for the company to move an electric pole and
transformer he fears could topple onto his home during a storm.

“I bought a place and now they are forcing all this on us,” said
Korb, who stopped paying rent in protest. “They are absentee
landlords is what they are.”

https://nypost.com/2022/07/26/rents-spike-as-deep-pocketed-
investors-buy-mobile-home-parks/