Mobile Park Rent Law Threatened

A petition drive that could jeopardize parts of San Juan Capistrano’s unique mobile home park rent-control law was validated Wednesday by the county registrar of voters.

The successful drive, which was circulated last month by a coalition of mobile home park owners, forces the City Council to either repeal a new change in the law that adds rent controls to recently vacated park spaces or put that portion of the ordinance up to a citywide vote. The council is expected to consider the matter Dec. 15.

News of the valid petition was not welcomed by tenants of the city’s seven mobile home parks, said Al Simmons, 72, a mobile home park resident for the past eight years.

“This is not good news,” Simmons said. “We’ve been fighting these guys for nearly 20 years. It gets tiresome.”

Simmons said he hopes the council puts the matter to a vote.

“Maybe a vote is the only way we can stop the landowners from harassing us and stop this kind of thing from going on,” Simmons said. “We are fighting probably 50 mobile home park owners on this. But I’m confident we can win an election.”

The petition was circulated by a private firm representing the Manufactured Housing Education Trust, an Orange County-based park owners group. Vickie Talley, the executive director of the group, said last month that their chief objective was having the new portion of the law repealed.

Since 1978, about 3,000 residents of the city mobile home parks have been protected from steep 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 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 law to control vacated spaces.