Mobile Home Tenants in Anaheim to Seek City Law on Rent Controls

A battle between mobile home residents and owners is expected to be fought before the Anaheim City Council Tuesday when a group of residents seeks a rent control law.

The group, called the Anaheim Political Action Committee, says rents at some parks have more than doubled in recent years.

“We finally got fed up with the gross inequities of the whole thing and the harassment some people have had to put up with,” said Phil Israel, committee president. The committee claims to represent 7,000 people in 14 of the city’s 28 mobile home parks.

Israel said the goal isn’t a rent freeze but rent stabilization, with rent increases tied to the Consumer Price Index. He declined to cite examples of exorbitant rent increases but said the group will do so at the City Council meeting.

Gerard Dougher, a park owner who has been the target of lawsuits by tenant activists, said the committee’s claims of excessive rent increases are “proven lies.” Dougher owns 12 parks in the county, including four in Anaheim.

“Every park owner has a policy to help people who are truly needy,” he said. “It’s a myth that people are having to eat cat food. Go around to Anaheim Shores Estates (mobile home park) and look at the Cadillacs and Mercedes and BMWs parked in the driveways and tell me these people can’t afford to pay the rent.”

Dougher argued that rents at most parks do not reflect the actual land values.

He was among those representing mobile home park owners who appeared before the Anaheim City Council last week with another proposal.

Under that plan, residents could negotiate five-year leases with fixed rent increases limited to once a year. In addition, charges for such things as capital improvements, insurance premium costs, property taxes, government-required services and adjustments in the master ground lease would be reflected in rent increases.

Paul Bostwick, a member of the Mobile Home Park Owners Assn., said park owners representing 2,796 of Anaheim’s 3,656 spaces, have agreed to the proposal.

But an attorney for a mobile home tenants’ rights organization said the proposal is “horrendous.” Patricea Dean of the Golden State Mobilehome Owners League based in Garden Grove said her office has received a number of calls from residents questioning the lease agreements.

“The negotiated leases that people are being offered are on a take-it-or-leave-it basis,” Dean said. “The ones I’ve seen call for a 4% to 8% increase per year, and then they call for these so-called ‘pass-throughs’ for improvements, utilities and repairs. If you are going to pay extra every time costs go up, why should the rent go up?”

Dean said mobile home owners who have invested upward of $40,000 in their homes are stuck between high rents and the shortage of spaces in the county. Studies also indicate that mobile home space rents in the county are the highest of any region in the state, averaging $330 in 1986.

“People have a lot of money invested and become locked into a park and are totally at the mercy of the man who owns the land,” Dean said.

Only one Orange County city, San Juan Capistrano, has adopted a mobile home rent control ordinance. At least two other cities, Westminster and Stanton, have repealed similar laws in recent years.

Faced with the unpopularity of rent control measures, the Anaheim Political Action Committee is already planning ballot initiative to bring the issue directly to voters, Israel said.