SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : Mobile Home Rent Control Expanded

Mobile home park residents won a victory this week when the City Council agreed to expand the city’s strict rent control law to maintain limits on vacated park spaces.

The council voted 4 to 1 to direct the city attorney to draft a “carefully worded” amendment to the law to allow San Juan Capistrano to include vacant mobile home park spaces under strict rent controls.

Since 1978, the 2,940 residents of the city’s seven mobile home parks have been protected from exorbitant increases in the prices they pay for spaces through the city’s rent control ordinance--the only such law in the county. Under the provisions of the law, mobile home park owners can raise space rents only once a year based upon a special formula.

However, once a mobile home park space is vacated by a tenant the park owners can increase the rents to whatever the market will bear.

But after years of clamoring by the tenants, that provision may now change.

The vote by the council delighted a standing-room-only crowd made up mostly of elderly mobile home park residents. But several of the residents said they are withholding their celebration until the ordinance is in place.

“We’re happy, we figure we won a victory, but those of us who have been around a long time are still waiting to see what happens,” said Al Arps, a 26-year mobile home park resident who lobbied for the original rent control ordinance. “It will work out, it has to.”

According to Councilman Kenneth E. Friess, a longtime councilman who is credited with initiating the rent control ordinance, recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have upheld similar laws.

“Now we are moving to control rents under all circumstances,” Friess said. “The U.S. Supreme Court has given us the option to deal with this issue, and it is important we move forward on this. . . .”

Councilman Gary L. Hausdorfer, who cast the lone dissenting vote, said he opposed the amendment in order to protect the original rent control law from challenges by park owners.

“We have an ordinance that is extremely rare, the only one in Orange County,” Hausdorfer said. “ . . . I don’t want to do anything to endanger it.”