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This is going to be a two-bedroom, two-bath mobile home that is coming in. You can see I prepped the electric in the back, and under that little cone, there is the water,” said Gaughan. Gaughan showed WINK News the paperwork from FEMA, saying they will reimburse Par 4 for the monthly rent for the trailers. Tri-Park’s has been in the works since 2008, when the town of Brattleboro agreed to finance loans for water and sewage system upgrades if the co-op agreed to relocate flood-vulnerable homes. The Villages of Orleans Health and Rehabilitation Center in Albion, N.Y., was sued by the attorney general at the end of November.
The company said it had provided Ms. Burnworth with credits totaling $3,649 toward her mortgage when she encountered financial problems in previous years and did not demand repayment. Between food, medicines and a $61,000 mortgage, money is a constant worry. She hasn’t made a mortgage payment in nearly two years after losing her job. The lender — 21st Mortgage, a company controlled by Warren E. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway — is trying to foreclose on her home. And the federal moratorium on evictions put in place during the pandemic has been extended to the end of July. For more than two decades, Kimberly Burnworth has lived in a mobile home in rural West Virginia on a tract her grandfather acquired in the 1960s.
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The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, signed into law in March, included $10 billion for a Homeowner Assistance Fund, which earmarks money for the most vulnerable homeowners facing foreclosure. State officials lobbied the Treasury Department to make sure some of that money goes to residents of mobile homes. Treasury is expected to release new guidance soon on how the money can be spent. The plight of residents at Ridgeview is playing out nationwide as institutional investors, led by private equity firms and real estate investment trusts and sometimes funded by pension funds, swoop in to buy mobile home parks.
Advocates for residents, including MHAction, want lawmakers to put a cap on rent or require a reason for an increase or eviction — state legislation that succeeded in Delaware this year but failed in Iowa, Colorado and Montana. "We understand the anxiety that any rent increase has on residents, especially those on fixed incomes," Weiss said. "While we try to minimize the impact, the financial realities do not change." "Many of the folks living in the park were on fixed incomes, disability, Social Security, and simply were not going to be able to keep pace," said Kornya, who met with about 300 angry mobile home owners at a mega-church. In Iowa, Matt Chapman, a mobile home resident at a park purchased by Utah-based Havenpark Communities, said his rent and fees had almost doubled since 2019. Iowa Legal Aid's Alex Kornya said another park purchased by Impact Communities saw rent and fees increase 87% between 2017 and 2020.
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But residents still need to decide whether to leave their current homes, and that’s “a deeply personal choice”, said Kelly Hamshaw, a lecturer at the University of Vermont who focuses on housing and disaster resilience. Charlotte Bishop was standing at her kitchen window in January 2019 when she saw water streaming into her yard. A block of ice had clogged the brook that snakes around the mobile home park where she and her husband Rollin live in Brattleboro, Vermont. Bishop grabbed her keys and rushed outside to move their cars to higher ground.
"You went from an environment where you had a local owner or manager who took care of things as they needed fixing, to where you had people who were looking at a cost-benefit analysis for how to get the penny squeezed lowest," Bellus said. "You combine it with an idea that we can just keep raising the rent, and these people can't leave." When that didn't happen and a new lease with a 6% increase was imposed this year, they formed an association. About half the residents launched a rent strike in May, prompting Cook Properties to send out about 30 eviction notices. As residents decide whether to relocate, officials involved in the Tri-Park project hope it could represent a model for other flood-prone communities that wouldn’t benefit from standard Fema buyouts.
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There's also a growing industry, featuring how-to books, webinars and even a mobile home university, that offers tips to attract small investors. "All they care about is raising the rent because they only care about the money," said Jeremy Ward, 49, who gets by on just over $1,000 a month in disability payments after his legs suffered nerve damage in a car accident. That changed in 2018 when corporate owners took over the 65-year-old park located amid farmland and down the road from a fast-food joint and grocery store about 30 miles northeast of Buffalo. Police in Largo say two people who were found dead in a mobile home community on Monday died as a result of a murder-suicide. Neighbors are at a loss for words after a resident and friend of a mobile home community in Rochester Hills died from a fire that broke out at the property early Tuesday morning. The facility is owned in part by Bent Philipson, who also has an ownership stake in 68 nursing homes nationwide, and Benjamin Landa, who also has an ownership stake in at least 100 other facilities, according to investigators at the AG’s office.
But there is little industrywide data on forbearance requests granted or mobile home repossession actions during the pandemic. Some 42 percent of the owners who borrow to buy a mobile home typically do not get a conventional mortgage, which comes with consumer protections that can make a foreclosure difficult. Instead, they buy their trailers with high-interest “chattel loans,” which the courts treat as contracts and can lead to quick repossession court actions. “It’s my responsibility to take care of the house and make the payments, but it’s hard to keep a job when you have a sick child,” Ms. Burnworth said. She said she had already shelled out over $130,000 in principal and interest over the life of the loan, which carries a 9.25 percent interest rate.
Then, just a month after purchasing the park, the company offered to sell it to the residents — at a far higher price than the company had just paid for it. Once again, though, the deal fell through, when the company declined the residents’ offer in January. They formed a cooperative to offer to buy the park themselves and were on track to obtain financing from ROC USA Capital, which supports resident-owned communities across the country. GOLDEN, Colo. — When Sarah Clement moved to the Golden Hills mobile home park two years ago, she felt like she had won the lottery. After years of squeezing into one-bedroom apartments with her, her 7-year-old son finally settled into his own bedroom, his toys splayed out in the yard and his school just at the edge of the park. On top of rent increases, residents complained of being inundated with fees for everything from pets to maintenance and fines for clutter and speeding — all tucked into leases that can run upwards of 50 pages.
Facing both the rent increases and the cost of altering their homes to comply with the park’s new rules, residents are rushing to search for other housing but finding few if any options in Golden, a booming town just west of Denver. At an apartment complex up the road, one-bedroom units start at $2,400 a month, almost $1,000 more than Ms. Clement said she paid for the same size apartment there in 2018. The mobile home industry argues the communities are the most affordable housing option, noting that average rent increases across parks nationwide were just over 4% in 2021. Significant investments are needed, they said, to make improvements at older parks and avoid them being sold off.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing the owners of a Long Island nursing home who also have stakes of dozens of other facilities nationwide. It is the third suit she has filed in six weeks alleging financial fraud and abuse of nursing home residents. In a statement, Clayton Homes, the parent company of 21st Mortgage, said it didn’t make loan modifications, believing that offering borrowers a short-term credit for a missed payment works better.
If residents of mobile-home parks can’t keep up with rising rents, or can’t afford to make the often extensive alterations to porches, gardens and awnings that are required under the new management’s rules, they are swiftly replaced. With prices and rents for all kinds of housing soaring in many parts of the country, demand for manufactured housing is climbing. Many young professional families and college students turn to mobile home parks as a final vestige of relatively affordable housing. In legislation introduced this month, Mr. Boesenecker proposes requiring park owners to allow residents or a local government to make the first offer. Another bill is being drafted that would give residents access to a loan fund that would help them compete with private equity firms, many of which receive government-sponsored financing to purchase parks. “That’s where Tri-Park comes in, as an example of a new model for buyouts within mobile home parks, centered around making people whole and making sure they have somewhere to live that’s safer and more resilient,” Smith said.
They hoped the latest owner, Cook Properties, would address the bourbon-colored drinking water, sewage bubbling into their bathtubs and the pothole-filled roads. Photo of deceased suspect, Ricardo Ortiz Gomez, along with police responding to the scene at the Whispering Pines Mobile Home Park in Largo, Florida. At one point, officials say the suspect shot at officers, but no one was injured. Ellandra Rosas, who said she is the suspect’s aunt, identified him as “Fernando” but authorities have not named the suspect. Police confirm the suspect was taken into custody and the baby remained unharmed and was safely returned to family members.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has funded research on tornado-vulnerable mobile homes in Alabama and Mississippi, and recently granted $79,000 toward climate resilience research on mobile homes in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire. In Montana, where 10% of houses are mobile homes (compared to 5.5% nationwide), one non-profit in the city of Great Falls is elevating lots above the floodplain. Now, many of those communities are grappling with how to keep themselves safe, without driving up costs for residents, who often own their mobile home and rent their lot. With MHVillage, its easy to stay up to date with the latest mobile home listings in the Newport News area. When browsing homes, you can view features, photos, find open houses, community information and more. You can also narrow your search to show specific types of homes using the sort and filter options available.
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