Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Rent Control in Trailer Parks Focus of Meeting : Santa Clarita: Mobile home owners beg the City Council to help them keep expenses in check despite a law allowing changes.

More than 250 angry mobile home owners, many of them senior citizens, packed City Hall Tuesday night to voice their opposition to a proposed suspension of rent control in mobile home parks.

One after another, the mobile homeowners pleaded to the City Council to keep rent control in place, even though current city law calls for controls to be lifted now that the vacancy rate in the parks has risen above 5%.

“I may become one of the homeless people of this valley,” Skip Johnson, a wheelchair-bound man who lives in the Canyon Breeze mobile home park, told the council. Johnson said the fixed income that he lives on “barely covers space rent and the bare necessities of life.”

Park owners contacted city officials late last year saying that the vacancy rate had gone up past the level named in the 6-year-old rent control law.

“The park owners have agreed if [rent control] wasn’t suspended, they were going to take strong legal action,” said Bill Reed, president of the Santa Clarita Mobilehome Park Owners Assn., in an interview Wednesday.

Reed compared the situation to a $600,000 lawsuit won by owners of a mobile home park against the city of Malibu. He said that because of the number of parks in Santa Clarita, a court decision there could cost much more,

“The potential for a lawsuit [against Santa Clarita] would be in the range of $40 million,” said Reed, who represents 12 of 17 mobile home parks in the Santa Clarita Valley.

Reed’s mention of the Malibu suit during his remarks before the City Council did not sit well with at least one council member.

“I resent threats from shysters,” said Councilman Carl Boyer in a rebuke.

Council decided against suspending rent control right away. Instead, members decided to hire an outside firm to study the vacancy rate.

Pat Regilio, 60, a mobile home owner and a real estate agent, said she was happy with the council’s decision because it will keep senior citizens from being forced out of their homes, at least temporarily. “It’s really the only affordable, low-cost housing around for seniors,” Regilio said.

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Another mobile home owner, Dan McCarthy, 72, said he was not entirely heartened by the council’s motion to look into the rent control matter further. He says the city planner, who had headed the investigation into the vacancy rate “did not do his job.”

McCarthy and other mobile home owners maintain that the current vacancy rate was created in the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake in January, 1994. The city ordinance doesn’t include vacancies caused by natural disasters.

“They should take the vacancy rate from before the earthquake,” said McCarthy at his home.

Park owners say the vacancy rate is 10% above any loss of renters incurred by the quake.

McCarthy and his wife live in a double-wide coach on Space 76, for which they pay about $450 a month. The McCarthys say they get by on Social Security checks, but are worried about rental increases. “It’ll be impossible for you to save month to month,” said Nellie McCarthy, Dan’s wife.

Dan McCarthy added that if rent control is suspended, space rent rates will “go up. It’s just the attitude of the park land owners. I know it will go up, while the value of the mobile home goes down.”

Mobile home park owners say that in all likelihood, rental rates will go down, according to Reed, if the controls are loosened. “The accusation that we would raise rents is ludicrous,” Reed said. “Park owners are not that stupid.”

Park owners have not yet lowered rates, Reed said, because, according to the rules of the rent control ordinance, they would end up locked into keeping those rates for good.

Regilio said she is worried that if rent control is suspended, many senior citizens will be forced to move out and park owners will buy the homes, and in turn, rent them out to younger families.

“Like all tenants, they are slobs until proven otherwise,” she said.