Mobile-Home Park Group Tries to Buy Lease : Ventura: Residents fear that their income won’t keep pace with rent increases. But they would have to pay $32,000 per space to the family that rents sites to them.

Beneath swaying palms, between the tidy rows of 310 clapboard and aluminum dwellings, the elderly residents of the Ventura Marina Mobilehome Park are grappling for control of their future.

They own their mobile homes, but not the land beneath them.

The residents rent their lots from the family of Norma Peterson, who in turn holds a 25-year lease on the land from its titled owner, the Ventura Harbor District.

The lot rents are rising at a steady rate that will at least double the average monthly rent of $302.16 within 13 years, the residents say.

And many of the residents, fearful that increases in their Social Security incomes will not keep pace with the rent hikes, have begun a campaign to change that--by trying to buy the park’s lease.

The move is similar to attempts by residents in other California mobile home parks, who have bought the land under their homes. Residents in three more of Ventura’s 14 mobile home parks--Patrician, La Posada and Imperial--are studying the possibility of buying their parks.

But at Ventura Marina Mobilehome Park, the purchase organizers admit, there are three problems:

* The purchasers would only own the lease and not the land;

* Not everyone in the park wants to spend the $32,000 per space that it would cost to buy their lots;

* And Peterson family members are not sure that they want to sell the lease.

In May, an ad-hoc Park Purchase Committee set up by the residents offered $8.7 million to buy the remaining 25 years of the lease from the Petersons, in hope of extending that lease in negotiations with the Harbor District.

The Petersons did not jump at the offer.

“We don’t think they’re taking us seriously,” said Adell Johnson, chairwoman of the Park Purchase Committee. “We don’t understand why they’re not grabbing at it and laughing all the way to the bank.”

“The number wasn’t that interesting to us,” said Los Angeles attorney Mark Peterson, who is Norma Peterson’s son and the family’s spokesman. “It just wasn’t an appealing purchase offer.”

Peterson said the lease is worth more to the family as an ongoing source of cash from rent than it would be as a lump sum in a buyout.

But he said negotiations are continuing: “We are trying to come up with a price that makes sense for us, but because we’re not particularly interested in selling, it might be more than the tenants think it’s worth.”

For the residents, the park purchase would be a chance to control something that they say is now uncontrollable--the increasing rents.

In 1990, the Petersons hammered out an agreement with Ventura to end a lawsuit against the city’s 1981 mobile home rent-control ordinance.

The City Council had altered its ordinance to let Ventura mobile home park owners raise the monthly rent on a coach by 15% or $35 when it is sold--whichever is more--and to raise rent on all coaches by three-fourths of the increase in the Consumer Price Index, a national indicator of inflation.

In return, the city’s mobile home park owners agreed not to sue the city for a period of five years.

In addition, the council agreed to let the Petersons raise rent on all the spaces at the Ventura Marina Mobilhome Park.

The 5-2 vote passing the agreement left some residents there feeling bitter, resentful and trapped.

Ventura City Councilman John McWherter, who opposed the agreement with Councilman James Monahan, said the council now supports the move by mobile home residents to buy their parks from landlords, whom he called “gougers with a monopoly.”

“We want to get out of the rent-control business,” he said. “It’s not a very pleasant thing to be in.”

The city hires a certified public accountant to make sure that the parks follow the revised ordinance, which gives Ventura some control over the cost of a substantial chunk of its low- and moderate-income housing.

Most of the homes in the Ventura Marina park are anything but mobile. They are set up on blocks, hooked into utility lines and surrounded by lush landscaping.

Many have been expanded to double their original width and enhanced with high stucco ceilings and wall-to-wall carpeting.

“You’ve got this thing and you can’t just hook your car to it and drive it off,” said resident Russell Burns, a former Ventura City Council member and current member of the Park Purchase Committee.

“I would like to be secure in the fact that I’m not going to be pushed out because of the rent,” he said.

Burns said the $32,000 cost if the lease could be purchased would buy something invaluable for him and his wife: “We might both be dead a year from now, but there’s security in it. There’s no security in it the other way.”

Johnson said 143 of the coaches are owned by single, elderly women, living principally on Social Security and other government income. And 67% of the park’s residents are over age 70, she said.

“So you can see how they get an anxiety complex about the ever-increasing rent,” Johnson said.

But longtime resident Athlene Bruce, 96, said she does not worry about the rent increasing.

“It’s not that bad. If it just gets too bad, I may have to move out,” said Bruce, who has lived in the park since it opened in 1967. “If I had it to do over again, I’d move right here. I have a lot of friends here.”

And some residents flatly oppose the proposed buyout, saying they can’t afford to pay so much for something that they can never own.

“It makes no sense for the people who are living on fixed incomes and don’t have the $32,000 to plunk down,” said one woman, who asked not to be named. “I think the whole idea is for the birds. We’ll never outright own the land. Who knows what will happen? That lease could be canceled, and I don’t know what would happen.”

“I don’t think that it’s a good idea. My goodness, it’s not going to help anything,” resident Hazel Myers said of the buyout plan, which she cannot afford to join. “I’m living on Social Security. What else can I do?”

Johnson conceded that there is no guarantee that the Harbor District will agree to renegotiate the lease with the park residents when it expires in 2015.

But she said the buyout plan will not cost much more money to the residents even if they cannot afford to join in.

Another resident, Marion Woods, said buying his lot would protect his future.

“I want to have some control over my remaining years,” he said. “If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen, but at the present rate of increase, in a matter of another six, seven, eight years, I won’t be able to afford this place on what I perceive to be my future income.”