Council to Consider Mobile Home Rates

The City Council on Tuesday will consider whether to allow mobile home park owners to hike rents greater than the cost of living for the first time in more than 12 years.

Prompted by demands from attorneys for several mobile home parks, City Atty. Mark Sellers has recommended that the council revisit the city’s coach-home rent control laws.

Sellers gave council members copies of a January 1998 letter from attorney Brent Swanson who represents three mobile parks, outlining recent court decisions that he says invalidate city rent laws.

“If the modest revisions are not voluntarily enacted, it is a certain recipe for litigation,” Swanson wrote.

Prompted in part by Swanson’s letter, the city in May formed a mobile home committee, which included park owners, tenants and city staff. The committee met only once before tenants, claiming that park owners sought to gouge them on rents, walked out.

The city instituted its mobile home rent laws in 1980, prompted by the decline of construction of the parks, which threatened to inflate rents through the high demand for a limited number of spaces. At the same time, Sellers said, the city needs to be sensitive to the rights of property owners.

“The tenants, who have their substantial savings invested in their coaches, may be a captive market at the mercy of their landlords,” he said. “On the other hand, a city’s denial of a just return on a landlord’s private property could amount to an unconstitutional taking of that property, which requires just compensation to be paid by the city.”