Lake Forest Mobile Home Owners Want Rents Controlled : Housing: A coalition of residents has drafted a proposed ordinance that calls for payments to be rolled back to Jan. 1, 1985, levels and the City Council to rule on requests for future increases.

LAKE FOREST — About 400 mobile home owners--many of them senior citizens living on fixed incomes--are expected to fill the City Council chamber tonight to protest escalating rents in the city’s four mobile home parks and to press for a rent-control ordinance.

“It is high time that our rents stopped going up 7% a year while a lot of our retirement checks that are based on the cost of living are increasing by only 1.5% to 2% a year,” said Carol Caille, president of the El Toro Mobile Estates Homeowners’ Assn.

In a move that has taken some park owners and city officials by surprise, a coalition of mobile home owners has drafted a proposed ordinance that its leaders will present to the council along with a supporting petition bearing about 1,200 signatures.

The draft ordinance calls for rents at the parks to be rolled back to Jan. 1, 1985, levels and for the City Council to rule on park owner requests for future rent hikes. The proposal was distributed to council members on Monday, said Ernest Rattino Sr., chairman of a newly formed committee lobbying for the city to take control of the situation. The ordinance would affect 1,238 mobile homes at the city’s four parks, including three facilities for senior citizens and one for families.

“Because of rents being doubled and tripled over the last 12 years, many people on fixed incomes are no longer able to afford living in mobile homes that they purchased originally because it was affordable housing,” Rattino said.

If it enacts such an ordinance, Lake Forest would become the second city in South County to have rent control. San Juan Capistrano’s rent control law, enacted in 1978, has withstood several court challenges. The law governs rents charged at the city’s seven mobile home parks, which house most of its senior citizen population. A controversial mobile home rent proposal in Laguna Beach, however, was defeated at the polls last fall after opponents argued that it would lead to citywide rent controls.

Several Lake Forest council members said Monday that they had not seen the mobile home owners’ proposal, although they had heard it was in the works. Mayor Helen Wilson said she knew nothing about the rent control controversy.

A representative of the mobile park operators and leaseholders said they were surprised and irked by the rent control proposal.

“The part that bothers me most is that they haven’t made one effort to sit down and talk about their concerns with the owners and the management of the mobile home parks. We heard about it only because the resident managers saw the petitions circulating in the parks late last week,” said Vickie Talley, executive director of Manufactured Housing Educational Trust, a nonprofit trade association of park owners.

Talley said she believes that most of the park’s tenants can well afford to pay the rents. She contended that there are existing programs sponsored by the federal government and the local mobile home industry to provide rent subsidies to assist the needy.

Supporters of the ordinance say, however, that rent increases have put inordinate pressure on the city’s three senior citizen parks--El Toro Mobile Estates, Prothero Mobile Estates and Forest Gardens--prompting “distress” sales of scores of mobile homes.

Moreover, residents protest that several of the park owners routinely raise rents to new mobile home buyers, which has made sales of the mobile homes even more difficult in an already depressed real estate market.

Rattino said that since Prothero Mobile Estates opened in 1977, the monthly space rents there have increased from $185 to an average of between $550 and $630. He said the minimum scheduled increase of 5% a year could raise the park’s average monthly rents to $1,000 by the year 2000.

In addition, some residents who paid up to $55,000 for mobile homes only a few years ago have found that the homes have depreciated sharply. They would have to sell their homes at a loss if they no longer can afford the rent, Rattino said.

Bill Davis, a 70-year-old resident at Prothero Mobile Estates, said rent increases have consumed his Social Security and robbed him of any chance of retiring from his car repair business. He would have to split his double-wide coach in half to move it, he said, and selling it is out of the question. “It is worth $30,000 less than I paid for it three years ago,” he said.

Eudice Menes, 69, said that to continue paying the rent on her space--which she said has almost quadrupled since she moved into El Toro Mobile Estates in 1976--she has been obliged to take in a roommate. Menes, a retired data processor who suffers from arthritis and relies on Social Security, said she definitely will be at City Hall this evening.

“If I knew what I know now I would never have bought a mobile home,” she said. “If the rent keeps going up, in another year or two I don’t know what I’ll do.”