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Mobile Home Residents, Landlord to Discuss Lease Limiting Increases in Rent

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Times Staff Writer

A card table at a Calabasas mobile home park today will be the center of Los Angeles County’s latest fight against potential rent gouging.

Residents of the 210-space Calabasas Village Mobile Home Park will be invited to sit down with their New York landlord to discuss a long-term lease that county officials are requiring him to offer to longtime renters.

The Calabasas residents are among about 10,000 mobile home dwellers in unincorporated county areas who are being offered the first leases that tie rents to levels to be set by future consumer price indexes.

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If park owners cannot come up with leases that residents will sign, they must offer alternative seven-year leases drawn up by county housing experts.

Began a Year Ago

The lease requirement went into effect Jan. 20, 1987. County supervisors reacted to complaints that some park operators were ignoring voluntary rent guidelines issued by the county after formal rent control restrictions expired in January, 1985.

Between 1979 and the end of 1984, a county rent control ordinance limited rent increases to about 9% a year. In 1985, some parks raised their rents by 15% amid signals that future increases would total 60% or 70% by 1990.

Because modern mobile homes cost an average of $65,000, are often 64 feet long and 24 feet wide and anything but mobile, their owners worried that they were at the mercy of landlords who were free to raise rents as high as they wanted. “You can’t move these things,” said Calabasas coach owner Jack Flamer.

A typical Calabasas Village rent that was $280 a month when rent control ended has increased to $430 per month, according to Flamer, a 14-year resident of the park.

A few residents--those who have moved in since January, 1986--have been charged more. They are also exempted from the county’s lease requirements.

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Increases Described

At Calabasas Village, 11 such newcomers have been told that their rents will increase from last year’s level of $480 per month to $655 this summer and then to $685 next January, according to residents.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Ruth Willer, who has lived in the park 1 1/2 years. “My husband and I are both retired and we live on Social Security and a small pension.”

But longtime residents of the 50-acre park next to Mulholland Highway say they are generally pleased with their options. They have until Thursday to decide whether to pick landlord Lawrence Rosenthal’s lease or the county’s. After that, the county’s offer will be withdrawn.

Rosenthal and assistant Joyce Bernstein, both of New York City, have been camped in the park’s recreation room for 10 days, revising their lease and explaining the options to a steady stream of tenants.

They are using a personal computer set up on a card table to calculate future rents and print out legalistic-looking contract forms for tenants to sign.

The Calabasas Village Homeowners Assn. has urged that tenants delay signing any contract until the competing offers have been studied. Today’s general membership meeting is designed to allow discussion of the differences between the two, said Murray Greenhut, association president.

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In general, both leases offer rents that allow similar increases that are pegged to future consumer price indexes. The county’s lease would run for seven years with a cumulative increase of 17.7%. Rosenthal’s would be renewable for up to 31 years.

The leases differ in the way that they deal with the sale of mobile homes. Rosenthal’s would tag on a 12% rent increase after a coach is sold the first time. The county’s would add only a 5% increase after the first sale.

Bernstein said she and Rosenthal have made up to three trips a month from New York in the past year to work out details of their proposed lease with the county Community Development Commission. That agency is in charge of the rent stabilization effort.

Gregg Kawczynski, the county’s rent stabilization administrator, said most other mobile home park owners have simply adopted the county-drafted lease as their own offer to tenants.

Exception in Chatsworth

Kawczynski said Friday that the one notable exception has been the 200-space Summit Mobile Home Park in Chatsworth. That park is claiming that it should be exempt from the lease requirement; a commission hearing on that claim is scheduled Jan. 26, he said.

“What is nice in parks like Calabasas is this is getting owners and residents together,” Kawczynski said. “People there either weren’t talking, or there was misinformation or mistrust.”

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New tenants at the 100 mobile home parks have been excluded from the county’s lease requirement because their rents were never regulated by rent control. “The rationale is the newcomers knew what they were moving into,” Kawczynski said.

Greenhut said his neighbors are glad for the protection that they are getting--although they rue the day that the county’s rent control ordinance expired. He said he feels sorry for the unprotected newcomers.

“They’ve come here as the last stop for what life is left to them,” he said. “They face tremendous increases down the road.”

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