Escondido Mobile Home Owners Lose Rent Control Bid

Mobile home owners in Escondido may resort to a ballot initiative to force rent control on mobile home park owners after running into strong philosophical opposition by the Escondido City Council.

The Escondido Mobile Home Park Action Committee, a tenant group with about 500 official members and hundreds more supporters, will also consider trying to unseat council members who are adamantly opposed to rent control for mobile home parks, Don Olmsted, a spokesman for the committee, said Thursday.

As things stand now, mobile home owners won’t get anywhere by dealing with the council, Olmsted said. “I think it’s very unlikely to expect anything with the ideological point of view of a majority of the council,” he said.

The council, in a 3-2 vote Wednesday night, rejected a proposed measure to limit rent increases in Escondido’s 27 mobile home parks to the annual rise in the consumer price index.

Councilman Doug Best, who voted against the proposal, said he would support subsidizing elderly mobile home residents who cannot keep up with rent increases, “but when you have people in these parks making $50,000-$60,000 a year, they don’t need rent control.” He added that a “broad-brushed” rent control ordinance “where everybody, including those making mega-bucks, gets subsidized by the park owners, is just not going to fly.”

Park owners agree that rent increases have become epidemic because new tax laws make it impractical to develop new rental parks.

Crusade for Controls

Mobile home owner advocacy groups have been crusading for years to get cities in San Diego County, where about 90,000 people live in mobile homes, to do something about the rapidly escalating rents. One partial solution has been the proliferation of resident-owned parks, where tenants, frequently with the aid of low-interest loans provided by local authorities, buy the park from the owner.

That way, residents own the land their mobile homes sit on, not just the mobile home itself, and avoid the rent increases that some say can “economically evict” people on fixed incomes.

Escondido Councilman Jerry Harmon said park owners should face the same price controls that monopolistic utilities do because the supply of mobile home parks is so much less than the demand for spaces. Since the market isn’t working fairly, he said, government should step in and fix it.

Harmon accused the park owners of acting irresponsibly and insensitively.

“I think in some instances (living in a mobile home park) has been as uncaring as a concentration camp. There are some park owners that have no regard for the people and their concerns,” he said, adding that park landlords have “jacked rents up arbitrarily and capriciously, because they knew they could get away with it.”

The ordinance that the City Council rejected Wednesday was proposed by a five-member committee that had been set up to devise a compromise between the park owners and the tenants. But Buzz DuPont, who owns Vista Verde Mobile Home Park in Escondido, said park owners oppose anything but the mildest form of rent control.

Instead of rent control, DuPont said, the council should subsidize those who cannot keep up with rent increases. He noted that the park owners in Escondido have offered to donate $30,000 to a fund to help mobile home owners on fixed incomes, and he challenged tenant advocacy groups to support that approach.

DuPont acknowledged that there is a shortage of mobile home parks in Escondido, but he said rent control would only make it even less likely that more parks will be developed. If any sort of rent control were imposed, he said: “Anybody with any brains who wants to build a park would say, ‘No way.’ ”