Mobile Home Rent Conflict Heads to Polls : Election: Statewide interest focuses on San Juan Capistrano, where voters will decide if recently vacated spaces should be subject to rent control.

A bitter rent control battle that pits the city’s mostly elderly mobile home park residents against the park owners goes to the polls Tuesday in an election that’s being watched statewide.

In the fight over Measure A, a countywide coalition of park owners seeks to rescind a new part of the city’s 15-year-old rent control law that extends limits on rent increases to recently vacated mobile home spaces.

If that provision is overturned in San Juan Capistrano, one of only two cities in Orange County with mobile home park rent controls, it would threaten such laws all over California, according to a tenants’ organization. Statewide, 90 cities have rent control laws, although not all apply to vacated spaces.

“It is very, very important, extremely so, that the tenants win this election,” said Jack Shafer, 70, of Anaheim, a mobile home park resident and regional manager of the Golden State Mobile Home Owners League, a nonprofit organization of mobile home owners.

“If they don’t, the park owners will keep on raising the rents and attacking the ordinances,” Shafer said. About 3,000 people live in San Juan Capistrano’s seven mobile home parks.

Park owners counter that rent controls are generally unjust, and that San Juan Capistrano’s law placing rent limits on vacated spaces is especially offensive. Rents on open spaces should be allowed to rise to market value for new tenants, said Vickie Talley, executive director of the owners’ coalition, the Manufactured Housing Educational Trust.

“It’s simply not fair,” Talley said. “It passes on an artificially low rent to people moving into the city . . . and allows those moving out of the city thousands of dollars in a windfall bonus in the sale of their coach. The lower the rent, the higher the coaches sell for.”

The election culminates the latest clash in a long-running battle over rents in San Juan Capistrano’s mobile home parks, going back to passage of the city’s rent stabilization ordinance 15 years ago.

The ordinance, adopted to protect elderly residents living on fixed incomes, limits rent increases to one a year under a strict guideline based on the state’s consumer price index.

Last fall, the City Council amended the law to include controls on recently vacated spaces, a move that was sharply criticized by the park owners, who launched a petition drive. The petition forced the council to either rescind rent controls over the vacated spaces or hold a referendum.

In the referendum, Measure A, a yes vote would keep rent controls on vacated spaces while a no vote would rescind that part of the ordinance.

Over the last three months, the dispute over Measure A has boiled into a local civil war waged by campaigners walking door-to-door in this community of 27,000 residents, by letter writers to the local newspapers, and by speakers at public meetings in City Hall.

It is an expensive exercise that park residents never wanted. Not only will it cost the city about $30,000 to hold the election, but it has pressed San Juan Capistrano’s approximately 3,000 park residents to scrape together $18,000 to run their campaign, some of which came from residents of parks in other South County cities.

“This thing was forced on us,” said Al Simmons, 72, a retired accountant, an eight-year resident of one of the city’s mobile home parks and a leader of a resident group called Help Our People Exist. “We didn’t ever want an election. It’s always hard to predict what will happen.”

The park tenants, most of whom own their mobile homes, claim that high rents for spaces prevent them from selling their homes and thus seriously devalue their investments.

The park owners, most of whom live outside the city, hope a simple majority of the city’s nearly 14,400 registered voters will oppose Measure A. The owners have contributed more than $28,000 to fight the measure, Talley said.

If the owners are unsuccessful at the polls, they have promised to sue the city immediately, in hopes the court will side with them, Talley said.

Former City Councilman Kenneth E. Friess, a strong proponent of mobile home park rent control who helped write the law in the late 1970s, said that only an extremely good showing by the tenants will get the park owners to back down from litigation.

“If this measure passes and passes well, it makes a statement to the owners’ association in the state that the community is strongly behind the issue,” Friess said. “It would, I hope, suggest to them it would be a good idea not to challenge the ordinance further.”

Such angry and expensive city elections on mobile home park rent control ordinances have occurred in Anaheim in 1991 and last year in Laguna Beach. In both cases, park owners prevailed.