SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : Mobile-Home Rent Control Is Retained

Voters overwhelmingly supported a controversial part of the city’s mobile-home rent control ordinance in a special election Tuesday, but the battle may not be over.

A representative for a group of park owners said Wednesday that they have no choice now but to sue the city in hopes of overturning rent control limits on recently vacated mobile-home spaces.

In the balloting over Measure A on Tuesday, 74% of the voters, or 2,525, voted “yes” to keeping a new amendment to the city’s 15-year-old rent control law that extends limits on rent increases to vacated mobile-home spaces. Another 26%, or 889, voted against the rent control amendment.

About 24% of the 14,600 registered voters in San Juan Capistrano voted in the election, according to the county registrar of voters.

The group of park owners--which initiated the election--said rents on vacant spaces should be allowed to rise to market value for new tenants.

“What this election has resulted in is enacting a law that essentially takes the value of the park owners’ property and gives it to the tenants,” Vickie Talley, executive director of the Manufactured Housing Educational Trust, said Wednesday.

“The park owners now are given no choice but to litigate it because their property has been taken without compensation,” she said.

Supporters of the rent control amendment, however, said it is legal and called the election a clear-cut victory for mobile-home residents, most of whom are senior citizens living on fixed incomes.

The park residents, who own their homes but pay rent on the space they occupy, said that high rents on spaces prevent them from selling their units.

“The whole state was watching this,” said Al Simmons, a mobile-home resident who formed a tenants’ group called Help Our People Exist. “If (the park owners) had been successful, there was a good belief they would have tried to attack the ordinances throughout the state by ballot.”

About 3,000 people live in the seven mobile-home parks in San Juan Capistrano, one of only two cities in the county with mobile-home park rent controls.

Former City Councilman Kenneth E. Friess, a proponent of the rent control limits who helped write the city’s original ordinance in the late 1970s, said he was not surprised by the election results because senior citizens consistently turn out to vote in elections.

“The park owners had an uphill battle,” he said. “But we never once discounted the parks’ owners because they are a formidable group, and they have a lot of money.”

Friess added that it would “be a real shame” if some park owners pursued legal action, especially given the huge support for the rent control amendment shown in the election.

The city’s ordinance limits rent increases in mobile-home parks to one a year under a strict guideline based on the state’s consumer price index.