Escondido Vows to Enforce Reaffirmed Rent-Control Law : Justice: U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the statute is cheered by city government and mobile home dwellers.

Escondido city leaders celebrated their U.S. Supreme Court victory Wednesday by promising to enforce mobile home rent control with renewed vigor.

“We still have a lot of work left to do,” Mayor Jerry Harmon told a gathering of about 25 supporters at City Hall.

“It’s critically important that we redouble our efforts that Proposition K is enforced and send a message to those who continue to ignore and continue to skirt the law of the land that we will enforce it,” Harmon said, referring to the ordinance passed by Escondido voters in June, 1988, that was the target of nearly 40 lawsuits.

Although the city has not withheld enforcement of the rent control ordinance, Harmon said some mobile home landlords have ignored provisions of the law that require them to inform potential renters of their rights, such as being able to sign short-term leases and still have rent control protection.

But the owner of several mobile home parks, including one near El Cajon, said the decision means that “the owner of the home is essentially going to get the right to sell a portion of the landowner’s interest.”

“It means that a government can essentially take anyone’s property and give it to someone else under the guise of regulation,” said Jeff Kaplan, one of the founders of the California Mobile Home Park Owners Alliance.

Robert Jagiello, the attorney who argued the case for John and Irene Yee, owners of the Sunset Terrace and Friendly Hills Mobile Home Parks, and other mobile home park owners before the Supreme Court in January, commented when a reporter broke the news to him: “Well, we couldn’t have done much worse than that, now could we.”

The city had argued that skyrocketing rents in mobile home parks were gouging park tenants. The tenants were captive to those parks because they owned their difficult-to-move coaches but had to rent the pads on which they rested.

Mobile home park owners argued that the rent control amounted to a taking of their property and said that park tenants were able to sell their coaches at inflated prices because the new tenants were guaranteed artificially low rents under the rent control ordinance. Those inflated prices, the park owners argued, were profits that rightfully belonged to them but were instead going to the tenants.

The fight over rent control in Escondido mobile home parks began more than a decade ago after changes in state tax laws and rampant inflation made it unprofitable to run such parks, and tenants began grumbling over increased rents. Mobile home parks then became scarce as people found more profitable uses for parks, and no new parks have been built in California since 1980, said Gerald Lenhard, president of the Escondido Mobilehome Positive Action Committee, which represents the residents of mobile home parks.

Those parks that continued to operate increased rates dramatically, park tenants said, and conditions in the parks deteriorated as many owners failed to maintain them.

Lenhard said there were cases of bathtubs and sewers in mobile home parks overflowing with raw sewage because park owners failed to maintain the parks properly. Some parks also instituted what tenants felt were unreasonable rules, such as charging rent to a person who visited with a renter for more than a week, he said.

Although other cities in the state wrote rent control ordinances, many of them buckled under pressure from park owners to soften the laws, using provisions such as allowing park owners to change rents when tenants change, said Jeffrey Epp, assistant Escondido city attorney.

“With vacancy decontrol . . . the mobile home park owners could just jack up the rent when there was a vacancy, and, as long as they could do that, they didn’t mind too much. But Escondido refused to do that,” Epp said.

About 30 cities around the state had been targeted by lawsuits similar to the one against Escondido.

“The question wasn’t so much a matter of if a case would make it to the Supreme Court, but which one,” said David Hirsch, an attorney who heads a committee of the California League of Cities that deals with mobile home rent control issues.

“It was just a matter of Escondido being the one that got there first,” Hirsch said.

The state’s 450,000 mobile homes represent 4.5% of the state’s housing, with more than two-thirds of those homes situated in parks, according to a 1986 state study.

The court’s decision comes as a relief to many cities who feared that a ruling against Escondido could have dramatically affected other aspects of government regulation such as zoning, Hirsch said.

“The underlying issue had to deal with the question of when does a government regulation go so far as to require compensation,” Hirsch said.

Joel Hirsch, an attorney that had represented a consortium of mobile home park owners, said, “I don’t see this as being the nail in the coffin that I know the pro-rent-control people would like it to be.”

Hirsch said that the narrowness of the court’s ruling hinted that “there may be situations that are exactly the same as this one that would have been treated differently if they had been presented differently.”