Mobile Home Rent Measure

Thank you for your editorial position on Proposition 199 (March 19), the so-called Mobile Home Fairness and Rental Assistance Act. My own case is a good example of the park owner’s “fairness.”

I put my life savings into a mobile home in 1987, thinking there was rent control in San Juan Capistrano. The park owner then increased my space rent by 130%.

Unbeknown to me, our City Council had passed a resolution--not an ordinance--giving the owner “unlimited vacancy decontrol.”

My total space rent is now $570.68, plus utilities, making it about $610 a month. My total income from Social Security is $646 a month. You figure!

Two years ago these abuses brought the vacancy control issue to the city ballot box and vacancy control was established. Our only raises now are by the consumer price index, one a year.

However, our rents are now too high for a 40-year-old park and we cannot sell.

JEAN E. PARMAN

San Juan Capistrano

* While sitting here in my mobile home overlooking the Pacific Ocean, I read your editorial against Proposition 199 and it made my day. We live in a well-kept, well-managed park, but at 82 years, I worry what will happen in the future when I must sell without rent control for seniors. With much higher rent, nobody will want to buy when there is no ceiling.

To make it worse, the banks do not now give loans on the older mobile homes no matter how well-kept.

I am happy here now. Many of us have invested thousands of dollars for improvements because we want to end our days in a nice place. This mobile home is not mobile. The rent pays for the space involved. Right now, I pay $803 a month.

JOHN NEWMAN

Pacific Palisades

* Proposition 199 intends to bring about one simple, needed change--the gradual phase-out of mobile home rent controls. The initiative ensures that tenants who have rent control at the time of the election keep it as long as they live in their home. Only when the tenant moves out will his or her specific home be released from the local rent law.

However, there are no impacts for Los Angeles residents because the L.A. County Board of Supervisors ended mobile home rent control in 1992. When residents move from area parks, their spaces already decontrol.

Rent control creates a premium value for the tenant-owned coach sitting on rented land. That’s because current residents actually charge new buyers for the expected rent savings. That trailer must be paid for by the same low-income families the laws were enacted to protect. Of course, overpaying at the start negates the benefit of artificially low rents.

California lost over 600 parks and their roughly 55,000 housing units in the last 15 years. That’s a serious loss of affordable housing we’re not likely to replace: There is simply no incentive to build a park that’s likely to be price-regulated by the government. Vote yes on Prop. 199.

PAUL KRADIN

Californians for Mobilehome

Fairness, Los Angeles