ELECTIONS ’88 : Stakes Are High in 2nd Bid for Westminster Mobile Home Rent Control

With 18 mobile home parks in Westminster, the campaign for Measure G, the second rent-stabilization initiative for mobile home park residents in two years, has been an emotional one.

But the stakes are high for mobile home park owners and renters.

To park owners, it is a matter of stopping a trend before it starts. If Measure G passes Tuesday, Westminster will become the second Orange County city to adopt a mobile home rent-control ordinance, after San Juan Capistrano.

“To us, that’s extremely significant,” said Vickie Talley, executive director of the Irvine-based Manufactured Housing Educational Trust, a political action arm for mobile home park owners.

To Gerald C. Grimm, a leader of the initiative effort, it is a matter of senior citizens surviving on fixed incomes in the face of rent increases. One of those senior citizens, Grimm said, was a 90-year-old man who lived alone in a mobile home and was having trouble making ends meet.

“We brought some surplus bread for him. He thanked us and told us: ‘I wouldn’t know what I’d do without you. Thank you for bringing these things for me. I wouldn’t be able to make it otherwise,’ ” Grimm related.

There are almost 2,900 mobile homes in the city, and increasing demand for a limited number of mobile home spaces has driven up the monthly rent to as much as $550, according to supporters of the measure. Most tenants own their mobile homes but rent space in a park.

Organizers said that, in one case, a tenant’s rent increased from $340 a month to $480. They also noted that many tenants have multi-year leases with a 6% annual increase, which is higher than the inflation rate.

Measure G would provide that park rents in any year could not be raised to a figure greater than two-thirds of the consumer price index. The CPI was 4.2% in 1987, supporters said. Also, in case of a rent disagreement or grievance, the issue would go to arbitration, with the loser paying arbitration costs.

A similar measure on the 1986 ballot was defeated. But Measure G supporters say they feel that their fortunes could change Tuesday because the initiative is officially called a rent-stabilization measure rather than a rent-control measure.

In 1986, the City Council sued the initiative’s supporters and won a court order to change the language from rent stabilization to rent control, which Grimm described as a “red flag to landlords.” A similar suit against Measure G supporters this year failed, and the term rent stabilization remains the official language.

Mobile home park residents, for the most part, are elderly and living on fixed incomes, although younger people unable to afford Orange County’s costly housing have been recently moving into the parks.

“When you allow the landlord to take away everything by high rents, that’s devastating to old people. It’s traumatic and there are enough pressures in life already,” said Grimm, who is 72.