Rent Feud on Mobile Homes Is Reignited : Housing: Park owners are pushing a statewide initiative to abolish price controls. Residents call the campaign misleading and the aim unfair.
A rent control tug of war between mobile-home park owners and their tenants has residents of the movable coaches in Ventura County fearful that they could one day be priced out of their own homes.
Many mobile-home park residents enjoy safeguards from spiraling rents, but park owners are mobilizing to recoup the millions of dollars of income they complain is wrongly diverted from their investments every year.
Consultants for the park owners are circulating petitions that would place before California voters an initiative to do away with state rent controls and leave subsidies solely to the discretion of landlords.
Organizers say the measure--being promoted as the “Mobile Home Fairness and Rental Assistance Act”--already has almost 80,000 supporters, although 385,000 signatures are needed by June 27 to qualify.
But apparent differences in what the title implies and what the measure would actually do have prompted cries of foul from park residents, many of whom are senior citizens living on Social Security or pensions.
“It sounds wonderful,” said Cherie Allen, president of the homeowners association at Buenaventura Mobilehome Estates in east Ventura. “But it’s the complete opposite of what it says it is. It would do a tremendous amount of damage to people living on fixed incomes.”
Supporters of the measure, which would almost certainly face a court challenge if approved by voters, argue that legislating rent subsidies for mobile-home owners rubs against the grains of capitalism.
“This is the only industry I know of where they say you must subsidize your tenants,” said Jim Murdock, a board member of the Western Mobilehome Assn. and property manager who oversees the 219-unit Royal Duke park in Oxnard.
“It grates against the whole American way.”
But critics accuse park owners of attempting to trick vulnerable tenants with confusing language.
“It’s not going to provide meaningful assistance at all,” said Maurice A. Priest, a Sacramento attorney representing mobile-home residents.
Park owners “have basically come up with a tricky title that sounds good,” Priest said. “They are trying to achieve through a misleading initiative what they have not been able to accomplish before local governments, the state Legislature or in the courts.”
If approved by voters, the mobile-home initiative would supersede existing state and local rent control laws as well as prohibit new ones.
It would also limit rent subsidies--which would be administered by park owners--to 10% of residents and allow for annual rent hikes equal to the annual increase in the consumer price index.
What has opponents most concerned, however, is that as mobile homes are sold or leased, 90% would not be subject to any rent control. The park owners would be able to charge whatever the market will bear.
Frank Hilton, a 76-year-old retired teacher from Moorpark, is so worried about the initiative that he has been signing his neighbors up for membership in the Golden State Mobilehome Owners League.
“They (park owners) would own us if this thing passes. They’d run us right out of here,” said Hilton, who estimated that league membership among park residents has doubled in recent months.
“The senior citizens would be unable to stay if they (park owners) were allowed to charge whatever they wanted,” he said. “They’d have us paying $600, $700 a month” for the space on which the homes sit.
Since 1988, when Hilton first moved into the Villa Del Arroyo Mobile Home Park on Los Angeles Avenue, his rent has risen from $302 to $390 a month.
“And at that time, we were provided water, sewage and trash,” he said. “Now we have to pay those, too.”
Moorpark’s mobile-home rent control ordinance, upheld in a special election in April, 1993, allows park owners to impose a 4% rent increase annually.
The state measure is sponsored by a group calling itself Californians for Mobile Home Fairness, a coalition chiefly made up of mobile-home park owners, who stand to gain millions of dollars if the initiative becomes law.
Property managers and mobile-home park owners say they are being unfairly singled out to help subsidize the poor and underprivileged.
The Western Mobilehome Assn., the most powerful alliance of park owners in the Western United States, is not officially endorsing the measure. But it does support qualifying it for the November ballot.
“Ever since rent control came in, we have been trying to balance the playing field,” said Barry McCabe, an association board member and president of De Anza Assets of Beverly Hills, which manages more than 40 mobile-home parks.
“Let the free market come back into play again,” he said.
There are 105 mobile-home parks scattered across Ventura County with more than 10,000 coaches, according to the state division of codes and standards, which regulates mobile homes.
Each mobile home is owned privately. But the residents pay a monthly fee for their space--much like a boat owner pays a slip fee to harbor or marina owners--that often tops hundreds of dollars.
The majority of California cities and counties regulate mobile-home rents through local ordinances. In most Ventura County cities, the rent control laws generally limit annual increases to a percentage--typically three-fourths--of the annual increase in the consumer price index, which last year was 2.6% for the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
Many of the local ordinances also allow park owners to apply for additional rate hikes due to increases in operating expenses or to recoup capital improvement costs.
Despite the controls, residents of the mobile-home parks say they have watched their rents climb steadily over the years.
“What we’re renting from the park is a piece of dirt with a driveway on it,” said Alice-Jean Davis, an Oxnard mobile-home resident of 23 years who is also a regional manager of the Golden State Mobilehome Owners League.
“If I could afford better, do you think I’d live in a tin house?” she asked.
Melvin Jarrell, a retired civilian employee of the U. S. Air Force, said his rent at Buenaventura Mobilehome Estates has risen from $165 in 1978 to the $364 a month he pays now.
“It went up another $12 the first of April,” Jarrell said. “That’s awfully high for someone that owns their own home.”
The methods used by signature-gatherers are often misleading, opponents of the measure complain.
“They’re going into the parks saying, ‘Sign here for rental assistance,’ ” said Steve Hopcraft, a political consultant hired by the Golden State Mobilehome Owners League.
“We’re afraid people are going to believe this is rent assistance, when the only assistance you get is a big rent increase,” he said. “We have gotten calls from senior citizens in tears, saying they signed the thing and don’t know what to do.”
Even state officials say they have heard more inquiries about the mobile-home initiative than most in recent years.
“This is a hot issue,” said Cathy Mitchell of the California secretary of state’s office, which administers state initiatives. “We’ve had a lot of requests for copies.
“One of the questions that has come up is how to withdraw signatures from petitions,” she said. “The only other time I’ve heard that question was during the school voucher campaign.”
People who have signed any petition can request that their names be withdrawn by contacting their county elections office before the petitions are turned in.
No one in Ventura County has requested that their name be removed from the rent control petitions, said Bruce Bradley, Ventura County assistant registrar of voters.
Petition signatures are verified by county clerks before they are sent to the state.
Initiative proponents, however, claim that mobile-home rent control advocates have improperly harassed those collecting signatures to qualify the measure for the ballot.
“We may seek judicial relief to restrain them from interfering with peoples’ rights,” said attorney Charles Bell, who works for sponsors of the measure.
“The initiative is at a critical juncture in the qualification process, so anything that interferes impedes the (qualification) process,” he said.
Assemblyman Jack O’Connell (D-Carpinteria), a longtime advocate for mobile-home tenants, is not worried about the signature-gatherers. He called the measure “definitely misleading.”
“It should be characterized as the mobile-home unfairness act,” said O’Connell, who has sponsored several bills on behalf of mobile-home tenants.
Coach owners “have an investment that cannot, for the most part, be picked up and moved to another space,” he said. “We need some predictability and some stability for the mobile-home residents.”
Others argue that the government helps perpetuate rifts between park owners and tenants because voters outnumber park owners.
“Mobile-home parks are unique, but rent stabilization is not necessary,” said Bill Schweinfurth, property manager for the 231-unit Lemon Wood park in Ventura.
“Sometimes it’s not the economics,” he said. “It’s the process that leads to (disputes) between the owners and the tenants.”
