Moratorium Extended to July : Santa Clarita Protects 24 Mobile Home Parks From Closings

The Santa Clarita City Council has extended until next July a moratorium blocking mobile home park closings in the city.

The moratorium, originally a 45-day emergency ordinance passed July 14, would have expired Sunday. But the council unanimously decided to extend the moratorium Thursday night to give the young city time to assess how to protect the parks.

The moratorium was prompted by the impending closure of the Desert Gardens Mobile Home Park, a 60-space park at 18617 Soledad Canyon Road in Canyon Country. The park’s owner, Towne Square, announced in July that it planned to replace the park with a commercial development, possibly a shopping center.

The moratorium does not apply to Desert Gardens, since the residents had been notified of its closure before the council approved the moratorium. The park’s 92 residents have until next August to find new homes. A few have already left.

Park owners have said there are no immediate plans to close any of the other 24 mobile home parks in the city. But park residents, many of them retirees on limited incomes, fear that park owners will want to replace the parks with more profitable housing or commercial development.

“Existing parks are becoming sitting ducks,” Don Wilder, a resident of the Greenbrier Mobilehome Park, told the council Thursday. Wilder is chairman of the Santa Clarita Valley Mobile Home Council, a newly organized group of residents from 14 parks fighting park closures.

At the council’s urging, Wilder’s group is working with park owners to draft guidelines for moving park residents when a closure occurs. State law already requires that park owners pay “reasonable costs” to help evicted park residents find new homes. But Wilder said the city should develop more stringent guidelines to force park owners to pay more of the costs of moving residents.

At Thursday’s meeting, Richard A. Patterson, an attorney representing park owners, urged the City Council not to extend the moratorium. Under state law, he said, emergency ordinances should be reserved for issues posing immediate threats to the public health, safety and welfare. The moratorium on park closures failed to meet such requirements, he said.

“This issue is an issue of mental health,” Councilman Carl Boyer III replied. He called the specter of park closures a “very serious threat to the mental health of the occupants of mobile home parks.”