SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : Mobile Home Park Owners Fight Law

A coalition of mobile home park owners unhappy with the city’s new strict rent control laws this week took the first steps to overturn them.

The owners hired a private firm to circulate a petition throughout the city asking voters to repeal rent controls on recently vacated mobile homes, said Vickey Talley, executive director of Manufactured Housing Education Trust, a Orange County park owners group.

The City Council last month extended its 14-year-old mobile home rent control ordinance to include controls on park spaces vacated by tenants.

But the new controls have prompted park tenants seeking to sell to “jack up the prices of their coaches,” said Talley, a San Juan Capistrano resident.

“It’s not fair,” Talley said. “We feel (this law) transfers the value of the land from the owner to the tenant.”

Talley said she hopes to present the petition to the City Council and get the law repealed. If that fails, the group will seek a citywide referendum, she said.

Park tenants who lobbied hard to get the law acknowledge their concern.

“It’s creating a bad climate,” said Al Arps, a 26-year mobile home park resident in the city. “The people feel they are getting taken to the cleaners.”

Al Simmons, another of San Juan Capistrano’s nearly 3,000 mobile home park residents, agreed.

“We figured something like this was going to come, but we are still very concerned,” said Simmons, 72, a retired accountant and mobile home park resident for eight years. “We think the petitioners are telling people all kinds of things that aren’t true.”

Simmons also dismissed Talley’s contention that tenants are getting higher prices for their coaches.

“In reality, the bottom has dropped out of the market,” Simmons said. “Coaches are selling for 35% to 55% of what they would have two years ago.”

Since 1978, 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 its provisions, park owners can raise space rents only once a year based on the consumer price index.

Until October, however, the owners were allowed to increase rents to whatever the market would bear once tenants vacate a space. On Oct. 8, the City Council voted to extend the ordinance to control the vacated spaces.

That city law took away the park owners only recourse for increasing rent beyond that allowed by the rent control ordinance, Talley said.