STANTON : Mobile Home Tenants Drop Rate Hike Fight

Tenants of Stanton’s largest mobile home park are backing away from a fight with the park’s owner over a proposed rent increase.

Russ Bartlett, a resident of Katella Mobile Home Estates, appeared with dozens of neighbors at a City Council meeting last week to ask for the city’s help in changing a proposed lease calling for a 4% rent increase for each of the next two years.

This week, however, he sent a letter to tenants encouraging them to sign that lease.

“I can no longer fight the money and the park owners,” Bartlett wrote. “They definitely have more money and power than we do.”

The alternative being offered, a 6% increase next year with no set cap for future years, would be worse, Bartlett wrote, because many of the park’s elderly tenants would not be able to afford it and would be forced to move out.

Residents last week told the City Council that they objected to the 4% rent increase and were opposed to terms that would give the park’s owner the right to approve the sale of tenants’ homes.

Park owner Marsha Carter said she would hold rent increases to 4% if she could get 70% of the park’s residents to sign the new lease by June 30.

City Council took no action on the residents’ request.

“City Hall is not going to fight with us,” resident Ginger Jordan said in explaining the residents’ decision to accept the 4% rent increase, and, given that situation, “there is nothing you can do.”