LSC-Brief ‘Highlights Manufactured Housing Legal Pitfalls’ Suggests Protections ‘Insecurity’ in Manufactured Home Communities; Analysis Often Linked to Manufactured Housing Institute Firms
“The Legal Services Corporation’s (LSC) Housing Task Force released an issue brief today on the role of mobile and manufactured housing in housing insecurity and instability in the United States. The brief compiles pertinent research and provides experts’ insights into the unique issues that owners of manufactured homes face.” That is from their press release and for the legal issues brief by LSC posted below. Artificial intelligence (AI) pointed that LSC issues brief out to MHProNews recently. search and information tools such as left-leaning Google’s AI powered Gemini and left-leaning Bing’s AI Copilot disclose that their results should be double checked. For example, on 8.12.2024 Gemini’s fine print says: “Gemini may display inaccurate info, including about people, so double-check its responses.” Bing’s Copilot on that same date said: “Copilot uses AI. Check for mistakes.” For some 15 months, MHProNews has been conducted various tests using AI, mostly with what is now called Copilot but more recently also with Google’s Gemini. MHProNews has consistently shown the details that reflect what results were accurate, or mostly accurate, vs. some results that were apparently problematic – and explaining the facts and reasons why they were flawed. With that backdrop, in a recent Q&A Copilot provided the following result on a study not yet published by MHProNews or MHLivingNews, which is hereby being rectified with this article and related analysis. The following is relevant now, even though the press release is from March 2023. In fact, this legal brief and associated media release from the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) may be more relevant now than when it was first published, as will be explored in Part II of this report with analysis.
Per their website:
Legal Services Corporation (LSC) is an independent nonprofit established by Congress in 1974. For 50 years, LSC has provided financial support for civil legal aid to low-income Americans. The Corporation currently provides funding to 130 independent nonprofit legal aid programs in every state, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories.
According to Influence Watch insights on the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) on 8.12.2024 is the following. Newcomers should note that Influence Watch documents their findings from the organization in question as well as from media reports that span the left-right media divide.
In 2019, the LSC had a budget of $440 million distributed to over 130 regional organizations serving 1.8 million clients.
Despite a founding obligation to remain politically neutral, the LSC has been accused of a left-of-center political bias since its establishment. LSC grantees often take cases with the goal of establishing left-progressive changes to the legal system and even engage in outright political activism. …
Influence Watch also said the following about the history of LSC.
Before the Corporation’s Creation
Government-funded legal aid existed on a small scale throughout the late-19th and early 20th centuries. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) as part of his left-progressive “War on Poverty” campaign. The Office ran the Legal Services Program, which centralized federal funding for legal services across the country. On a starting budget of $1 million,1 the Program launched 269 nonprofits across the country to receive and distribute federal funds locally. 2 Nearly all of these organizations also engaged in advocacy against laws which they contended penalized low-income individuals. 3 They also became known for targeting local government officials with lawsuits. 4
The creation of the Legal Services Program precipitated a boom in major court cases brought by legal-aid lawyers. From 1964 to 1974, the Supreme Court accepted 64% of case requests or 70 cases, from legal-aid lawyers, compared to only one over the previous century. These lawyers were victorious in 43 cases, or 62% of the time. The resulting flood in legal changes brought by legal aid lawyers developed into the new legal field of poverty law. 5 …”
Influence Watch also noted this, among numerous other points.
1970s-1990s
The Legal Services Corporation reached the height of its scope and power in the late 1970s. President Jimmy Carter chose Hillary Rodham Clinton, husband to then-Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton (D) to head the Corporation; Clinton explicitly advocated for using the LSC to challenge laws and regulations that penalized low-income individuals. Due to her aggressive efforts, Clinton tripled the LSC’s budget to $303 million by 1980, its highest point ever in inflation-adjusted dollars. 1819
Not all legal aid type organizations get their funding from LSC. For example, consider this Q&A with Copilot to illustrate.
Does or has the Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR) Boston get some funding from the Legal Services Corporation (LSC)?
Be that funding as it may, one takeaway is that there are dozens and dozens of organizations that do pro-bono work on behalf of people of modest means, which can include the residents of manufactured home communities. Some receive some level of taxpayer funding, while others do not.
With that backdrop, Part I of this article will be the press release by LSC.
Part II was the LSC’s attached and the more detailed issues brief.
Part III will be additional information with more MHProNews analysis and commentary.
Part I
New LSC Brief Highlights Legal Pitfalls of Manufactured Housing and Suggests Protections
March 22, 2023
Contact
Carl Rauscher
Director of Communications and Media Relations rauscherc@lsc.gov
202-295-1615
WASHINGTON—The Legal Services Corporation’s (LSC) Housing Task Force released an issue brief today on the role of mobile and manufactured housing in housing insecurity and instability in the United States. The brief compiles pertinent research and provides experts’ insights into the unique issues that owners of manufactured homes face. Legal aid interventions, public policies and other protections that can help these homeowners are also highlighted in the brief.
The popularity of manufactured housing has surged in recent decades. Today, roughly 1 in 16 Americans live in manufactured housing.
The affordability of these homes makes them a preferred option for many underserved populations, including seniors on fixed incomes, immigrants, low-income families, people of color and persons with disabilities. The median income for manufactured homeowners is about $38,000, compared to nearly $80,000 for owner-occupants of other forms of single-family housing.
While manufactured housing is often viewed as an accessible avenue to home ownership for low-income Americans—the cost of a new manufactured home averages $122,500—it can also create acute vulnerabilities for these homeowners. Millions of manufactured homeowners live in “parks” where they own their house but rent the land that it sits on, leaving them subject to rent and fee increases.
These types of homes are popularly referred to as “mobile,” but more than 90% of manufactured houses never move. Relocating these homes would often destroy their structural integrity and can cost upwards of $5,000 to $10,000—a cost that is prohibitive to most of these homeowners.
If their landowner raises the cost beyond what the homeowner can afford, they are usually stuck without options. Facing eviction means losing their home—and their equity in it—when they are unable to relocate it off the plot. Instances of scenarios like these are rising, as out-of-state investors increasingly purchase mobile home parks and seek to boost their profits.
The brief identifies several policy changes that can protect manufactured homeowners from predatory conditions and losing their homes. Many of these focus on creating fairer leases, preventing egregious rent increases and giving homeowners the opportunity to purchase their lots.
Civil legal aid organizations also play a significant role in advocating for proper enforcement of state and local policies, providing “know your rights” trainings to vulnerable communities and representing those facing eviction.
The brief also includes state profiles of Washington, where a Manufactured/Mobile Home Landlord-Tenant Act provides relatively significant protections, and Delaware, where a Manufactured Home Owner Attorney Fund supports legal representation and advocacy for owners of manufactured homes in disputes with park owners.
“Through our Housing Task Force briefs, LSC is recognizing patterns that exist across the country that repeatedly disadvantage low-income people and create increased housing insecurity and instability,” said LSC President Ron Flagg.
“Housing is a fundamental factor in the health of the nation and in the ability of every person and family to prosper—so we must heed the warnings of these experts and listen to their calls for more resources, attention, and leadership for policy changes,” Flagg continued.
LSC launched the Housing Task Force in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which significantly increased demand for civil legal assistance with housing issues. 2021 was the first year that LSC grantees handled more housing cases than any other legal problem area. The Housing Task Force is documenting challenges that low-income tenants and homeowners experience and sharing its findings about housing insecurity and the role of civil legal aid in helping low-income individuals and families achieve stability and security in a four-part series of issue briefs. The first brief on illegal evictions is available here, and the remaining two briefs will cover long-term (extended stay) motel rentals and contracts for deeds.
Legal Services Corporation (LSC) is an independent nonprofit established by Congress in 1974. For 50 years, LSC has provided financial support for civil legal aid to low-income Americans. The Corporation currently provides funding to 130 independent nonprofit legal aid programs in every state, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories. ##
Part II From LSC Issues Brief is the bulk of the text of their report, which is linked here.
HOUSING INSECURITY
in the United States and the Role of Legal Aid
Mobile and Manufactured Housing
“Where’s the basement?” That’s what Cesiah Guadarrama Trejo remembers her brother saying after their family moved into a one-story manufactured home in 2009. Cesiah was a teenager at the time. The family had lost their previous home in the midst of the U.S. foreclosure crisis that hit in 2007, and her mom was looking for an affordable place to live. She had coworkers who lived in a manufactured housing community about 10 miles northwest of Denver. Before long, Cesiah, her mother and two brothers were living there too.
“My mom thought this was the best way to own a home again, and so I remember moving to this community not ever knowing these types of homes or places even existed,” Guadarrama Trejo remembers.
Guadarrama Trejo’s one-time unfamiliarity with manufactured housing is not unique. Despite representing more than 6% of U.S. housing (and a substantially higher portion in many rural areas), manufactured housing is, willfully or not, often ignored and overlooked as an important pathway to affordable homeownership for millions of Americans. In Colorado alone, nearly 100,000 households live in these homes.2
And if the vital role of these homes in the U.S. housing mix is often ignored, so are the unique and considerable challenges facing manufactured homeowners across the country. These homes may be “affordable” in some ways (the average sales price for a new manufactured home is $122,500,3 but they are also a key source of housing instability for low- income Americans and other underserved populations.
Among the major reasons: like
Guadarrama Trejo’s family, millions of manufactured homeowners live in communities where they own the physical house structure and rent the land under their homes from private landlords. It’s a situation that exposes owners to an array of real and potential harms, including arbitrary increases in “lot rents” and fees, evictions and various forms of abuse.
This is why Esther Sullivan, an associate professor at University of Colorado Denver and author of Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place, calls residents of these homes “halfway homeowners.”4
LSC seeks to raise awareness of how the challenges facing so many manufactured homeowners contribute to housing instability and insecurity across the country. This issue brief showcases how legal aid interventions, public policies and other protections can help these homeowners address the unique issues they face.
Today, Guadarrama Trejo is associate state director with 9to5 Colorado, a statewide advocacy organization that works on manufactured housing issues and educates residents of these communities to know their rights and organize their neighbors. She still lives with her family in their manufactured home and has fond memories of growing up in their community of roughly 400 homes. “It’s a little village,” she calls it.
But she is also clear-eyed about the risks of living there, especially with more and more out-of-state investors scooping up parks like hers. “All they have to do to upend people’s lives is jack up the rent or change the rules so it’s cost-prohibitive to stay here,” she said. “And then where do we have to go?”
AT ISSUE:
MANUFACTURED HOUSING
They started out as travel trailers for tourists wanting to get out and see the country. Over time, the trailers were adapted to provide affordable housing for veterans returning from World War II. The U.S. government came to rely on manufactured housing for other uses, such as providing transitional homes for survivors of hurricanes, flooding, wildfires and other natural disasters.6
By the 1960s, companies were adding new features and more square footage to the units in an effort to open a new pathway to the American dream of homeownership for individuals and families who might not otherwise be able to afford a home of their own. New federal performance and safety standards in 1976 called them “manufactured homes” and signaled that they were becoming an important feature of the American housing landscape.7
Today, they are referred to interchangeably as “manufactured” or “mobile” homes; and mobile home communities are often tagged with the disparaging moniker “trailer parks.” But in the overwhelming majority of cases, these homes are not truly mobile once they are delivered to a home site. Indeed, more than 90% of today’s manufactured homes never move after their first installation.8 The main reason: moving a manufactured home typically costs from $5,000 to $10,000 and significantly more in many cases. This represents a large fraction of the value of the homes themselves.9 Moreover, in many cases, moving the home would seriously degrade or completely destroy its structural integrity.
Despite this lack of mobility, as well as other challenges for owners explored below, the popularity of manufactured housing has surged in recent decades. Today, roughly 1 in 16 Americans (between 5.6% and 6.2% of the population) live in manufactured housing,10 and the percentage is significantly higher in many states (e.g., 18.3% in South Carolina, 14.5% in North Carolina, and 14.2% in Alabama).11
The affordability of these homes makes them a preferred housing option for many already underserved populations, including elderly people on fixed incomes, as well as many immigrants (including undocumented residents), low-income families, people of color, and persons with disabilities.12 The median income for manufactured homeowners is about $38,000, compared to nearly $80,000 for owner-occupants of other forms of single-family housing.13
CHANGES IN PARK OWNERSHIP POSE NEW CHALLENGES
Nick Smithberg, as Executive Director of Iowa Legal Aid, has a front-row view of the issues facing manufactured homeowners in his state, where these homes are approximately 4.3% of all single-family homes.18 It is not as large a portion of the housing stock as in many states, but Smithberg said manufactured housing plays a key role in providing housing for vulnerable populations.
“It is a significant sector of the housing market and clearly a very important source of affordable housing for many communities,” he said.
Smithberg and his colleagues at Iowa Legal Aid keep tabs on manufactured housing issues in the state because they see how these homeowners often struggle and need legal help. Iowa is known, he said, for having “relatively weak legal protections” for tenants in all forms of housing, and owners of manufactured homes are uniquely vulnerable.19 “In many, if not most cases, tenants are on month-to-month leases and landlords in these parks can arbitrarily increase lot rents to levels that can force low-income homeowners out, without doing much more than giving 60 days’ notice.”
A recent focus for Iowa Legal Aid is supporting residents of manufactured housing communities in disputes with the growing number of out-of-state investors who are buying up and taking over management of these parks. According to a 2020 analysis by The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, 74 out-of-state individuals and entities owned 144 manufactured home parks, or more than 26% of all such parks in the state. Because these out-of-state investors tend to buy larger communities, their parks included 45.6% of all manufactured home lots in Iowa.20
An example of an out-of-state investor coming into Iowa is Utah-based investment firm Havenpark Capital Partners. The company purchased a park, Midwest County Estates (Midwest) in the town of Waukee just outside Des Moines in 2019. In a matter of weeks, residents found a notice taped to their doors stating that lot rents were going up by at least 69%, from approximately $300 to $500 or more.21 Matt Chapman, who had lived in the Midwest community for more than a decade, said in an interview that the notice caused “a lot of fear and anger” among its approximately 300 homeowners. He noted that residents include many older people living on Social Security, as well as a smaller population of Latino families.
Chapman took it upon himself to organize his neighbors against the rent increase, launching an email campaign and Facebook page and reaching out to Iowa Legal Aid for advice and assistance. Immediately after Chapman’s outreach, attorneys from Iowa Legal Aid visited the community to provide “know your rights” training and offer legal assistance to homeowners, while working with Chapman to alert the news media to what was happening in the community. After fairly extensive media coverage and conversations between Iowa Legal Aid and Havenpark executives, the company scaled back the rent increase to $100. However, rents have gone up again to the level Havenpark originally announced.22
Chapman, who now serves on the board of directors of Iowa Legal Aid, said his community’s experience demonstrates the power imbalance between manufactured homeowners and the investors who increasingly are buying up the communities where they live. “Sometimes folks get exhausted, but we just have to keep trying and keep fighting so we can stay in our homes,” he said. Chapman added that Iowa Legal Aid’s ongoing involvement has provided his community with “a crucial partner and advocate” in its dealings with Havenpark Capital Partners.
The purchase of parks by out-of-state investors is an issue in other states as well.23 A recent report by commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle found that institutional investment in the manufactured housing sector has surged in recent years, with total transactions valued at as much as $4.5 billion per quarter.24
Colorado is among a number of states that have passed laws aimed at providing manufactured homeowners with the opportunity to purchase their parks in the face of interest from outside investors; these laws require park owners to notify residents up front of their intent to sell a park, while providing a set amount of time for residents to make an offer.25 However, park owners are under no obligation to sell the park to residents, even if they make a higher offer than others. Some other states have enacted right-of-first-refusal provisions that guarantee residents the right to purchase a park if they make a fair-market-value offer.26
Cesiah Guadarrama Trejo, the mobile home community resident who serves as advocacy director for organizing group 9to5 Colorado, highlighted the limited effect of Colorado’s “opportunity to purchase” law. She said that of 48 parks that sold in the 15 months after the law passed, only two were bought by the homeowners.27
“The truth is, it’s difficult to compete with the money that a lot of these corporate entities are bringing to the table,” she said.
She added that the timeline for residents to make an offer to purchase a park under the law is 90 days, which “goes by very quickly” when residents are working to organize themselves for collective action and find financing. 9to5 Colorado is currently advocating to extend the deadline for resident offers to 180 days.
Even in a state like Delaware with relatively strong protections for owners of manufactured housing, the buying of parks by out-of-state investors is causing problems.28 John Whitelaw, advocacy director at Community Legal Aid Society, Inc. in Wilmington, noted a generational shift among park owners as individuals and families who may have owned a park for decades sell to investors because they want to retire and other family members are not willing to manage the property. “We’re seeing a lot of large rent increases once these larger companies come in and want to extract more profit from these communities,” Whitelaw said.
CHALLENGES FOR HOMEOWNERS
No matter who owns their community, owners of manufactured housing face a range of unique challenges that can threaten their ability to stay in their homes. These include:
Few Consumer Protections.
Manufactured homeowners who rent the land where their home sits are ineligible for mortgages. Instead, the homes are titled as personal property, like a car or a truck, and can be financed only with a “chattel” mortgage or a personal loan.
These loans typically carry substantially higher interest rates and come with shorter, more restrictive terms than mortgages for real property.29 Homeowners relying on these loans also have no protections when it comes to foreclosure. If they default on the loan, the lender can take possession of the home without having to abide by laws designed to protect holders of federally backed mortgages, including the possibility of forbearance or lower monthly payments for struggling borrowers.30 During the COVID-19 crisis, these homeowners also lacked the special foreclosure protections included in federal stimulus measures.31
“Consumer protections just aren’t there for these homeowners. In Minnesota, which is considered relatively progressive on these issues, your entire home can be repossessed if you are just 60 days behind on your loan payments.”
Dave Anderson
Executive Director, National Manufactured Home Owners Association
Rent and Fee Increases. In many states, owners of manufactured home communities can increase rents with minimal or no justification and on relatively short notice.32 In addition, author Esther Sullivan said manufactured homeowners often are subject to “capricious park management” as park owners randomly impose new fees on homeowners for everything from owning a pet to having an extra car.
Dave Anderson, executive director of the National Manufactured Home Owners Association (NMHOA), said park owners increasingly are seeking to charge homeowners separately for utilities (including water, sewer, electricity and trash pickup), even though those services were previously included in their lot rents.
Heightened Risk of Eviction. Unpaid rents and fees, unresolved disputes with park owners over park rules and other issues, and transfers of park ownership to private investors are three issues that contribute to a heightened risk of eviction for manufactured homeowners. Another oft-cited factor is redevelopment of parks for alternative uses, such as the development of retail or more profitable housing. In the event of an eviction, manufactured homeowners often are forced to give up their homes (and forfeit their equity in those more traditional landlord-tenant relationships.
“When something goes wrong for a family like an illness or a lost job and they get behind on the lot rent, they’ll get evicted and they often can’t do anything about it.”
Meredith Bruch Managing Attorney, Foreclosure
Protection Unit, Northwest Justice Project
According to a 2020 analysis by The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, 74 out-of-state individuals and entities owned 144 manufactured home parks, or more than 26% of all such parks in the state. Because these out-of-state investors tend to buy larger communities, their parks included 45.6% of all home lots in Iowa.
Habitability Issues and Natural Disasters. Manufactured housing is an affordable and desirable housing option for millions of Americans. However, owners of these homes often confront habitability issues including availability of reliable power, water, heat, and air conditioning, as well as health and safety risks such as improperly
Another habitability challenge is exclusionary zoning policies that can result in undesirable locations for manufactured housing communities.36 “Often these communities are zoned out of residential space into commercial and industrial zones,” said Sullivan. They are “walled-in and fenced-off and can be isolated from the communities around them,” she said.
Manufactured homeowners are also vulnerable to natural disasters including extreme heat, hurricanes, tornadoes, In Washington, DC, and across the country, policymakers have had varying degrees of success advancing laws that protect manufactured homeowners from the challenges identified above. In 2021, Representatives Ro Khanna (CA-17) and Cindy Axne (IA-03) introduced legislation designed to protect manufactured homeowners from sudden, “predatory” rent hikes and to provide federal assistance to homeowners and nonprofit entities seeking to purchase manufactured home parks, among other goals.40
…
According to a 2020 analysis by The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, 74 out-of-state individuals and entities owned 144 manufactured home parks, or more than 26% of all such parks in the state. Because these out-of-state investors tend to buy larger communities, their parks included 45.6% of all manufactured home lots in Iowa.
…Delaware has enacted numerous protections for manufactured homeowners, including automatic renewals for lot rentals43 and a one-year minimum notice of lease termination in the event of a change in land use.44 Delaware residents in manufactured home communities also benefit from laws that limit lot rent increases to no more than one increase every 12 months. The rent increases are also generally limited to the rate of inflation.
Delaware also created a trust fund supported by landlord and homeowner fees to help homeowners facing a possible park closure so they can move their home to a new community or receive funds toward the purchase of another home.45 The legal defense fund can also help residents facing other challenges, such as excessive lot rent increases. And, state law provides homeowner associations with a right of first refusal to purchase a community that the park owner intends to sell.
John Whitelaw, advocacy director at Community Legal Aid Society, Inc., in Wilmington, said his organization keeps “plenty busy” on manufactured housing issues despite, and sometimes because of, these protections. For example, with the rise in ownership of parks in Delaware by out-of-state investors, Whitelaw and his colleagues have been involved in a significant number of “rent justification” cases where landlords raise rents on the land under people’s homes.
While Delaware law limits rent increases to a measure of inflation, park owners often justify higher increases by citing necessary capital improvements to a park. Capital improvements (and the resulting rent increases) are therefore becoming a key “profit source” for community owners, Whitelaw explained. In other cases, landlords argue that the rent hikes are meant to match the going market rate for other types of residential rental properties.
“For a low-income resident who has lived in that park for a long time, those increases can make the difference in whether they can stay in their homes,” Whitelaw said. In one case, Community Legal Aid Society, Inc., supported homeowners to bring a landmark case to the state Supreme Court limiting the ability of park owners to hike lot rents based on market rents. Citing the state’s 2013 rent justification law, the justices ruled that park owners need to justify rent increases that exceed the rate of inflation by citing direct costs of “operating, maintaining or improving the manufactured home community.”46
Meanwhile, many states have laws on the books that provide some
protections. While some states have relatively strong protections (see sidebars), protections are lacking in others. State-level protections can be grouped into two categories: fundamental legal protections; and protections in the event of eviction or park closure.
Fundamental Legal Protections. Most states have laws providing a minimal level of protection for manufactured homeowners who lease the land under their homes, but those protections vary significantly. These laws govern a wide range of issues such as:
Initial lease duration (6 months or 1 year, generally) and automatic renewal of leases in selected states. Requiring justification for termination of lot rental agreements—e.g., for nonpayment of rent or substantial and repeated violation of rental agreement, community rules by the owner. • Park maintenance and upkeep requirements to protect the health and safety of residents, including roads, lighting, water, and electrical.
Advance written notice for rent increases (30-90 days generally) and any changes in zoning or land use that will lead to eviction of owners (time periods vary).
Justification of rent increases, along with provisions for owners to petition the state in the event of unreasonable rent increases.
Access to alternative dispute resolution to resolve disagreements between homeowners and landlords over rent increases, and other issues (e.g., in Florida).41
Access to state funds for legal representation and advocacy in disputes with landlords over rent increases, eviction and other issues (e.g., in Delaware).42
The ability of residents to form community resident associations to represent them in dealings with landlords.
SPOTLIGHT
State Profile: Washington
Washington is another state with a relatively significant level of protections for manufactured homeowners. Under the state’s Manufactured/Mobile Home Landlord-Tenant Act, landlords must offer homeowners a written lot rental lease for a term of one year or more, and landlords are prohibited from raising lot rents during the agreement.48 Moreover, leases renew automatically for the same term as before, and landlords must provide three months’ notice before raising rent.
In the event of eviction, landlords in Washington must provide advance notice and can only evict residents for specific reasons such as nonpayment of rent (three or more times in any 12-month period) or violation of park rules. The state also has a dispute resolution program, and a landlord who plans to close a park permanently must provide 12 months’ written notice. The state offers relocation assistance for residents of parks that are closing.49
Meredith Bruch, Managing Attorney for the Foreclosure Prevention Unit with LSC grantee the Northwest Justice Project in Washington, said she still sees plenty of loopholes in state law that advantage park owners over tenants. For example, given high demand for affordable housing in Washington, Bruch said park owners often use minimum-income requirements to discriminate against certain populations and prevent them from even moving into their parks. This is a particular problem in Bruch’s service region of central Washington with a large population of low-income, primarily Latino agricultural workers.
In one case, Bruch said a client would have lost her opportunity to buy a home in a mobile home park without legal aid intervention, because the park manager refused to count food stamps toward her income. “They are purposefully pricing low-income folks out of these communities,” Bruch said.
Another problem for many families in central Washington is that owners will evict residents based on unsubstantiated claims of criminal activity—such as claiming that a resident’s child or children are members of a gang. “We saw a lot of that during the eviction moratorium with COVID-19, where residents weren’t paying rent so the landlord
accused them of criminal activity and gave notice of eviction,” Bruch said.
Bruch and her colleagues have been involved in several high-profile park closures. In one case, the Northwest Justice Project sued a county government that announced plans to purchase and close a mobile home park next door to the county fairgrounds. The lawsuit alleged that the county was violating both the federal Fair Housing Act and the Washington Law Against Discrimination by proposing the closure of a 50-year-old community where most of the residents were Latino. In the end, the lawsuit was unsuccessful. While the county is offering families compensation for the assessed value of their homes, the closure has forced residents to find other housing at a time when home prices have surged throughout the region.50
Protections in the Event of Eviction or Park Closure. In the event of eviction or park closure, states offer widely varying protections for manufactured home homeowners. These can include:
Required compensation to residents from the community owner in the event of park closure so they can move or purchase a new home.
Advance written notice of any changes in land use or zoning that will lead to eviction of owners. Advance notice of a landlord’s intent to sell a park, along with waiting periods allowing residents to put together an offer.
A right of first refusal for homeowners to purchase a manufactured home community that the owner intends to sell. Access to state funds to move or purchase a new home in the event of a change in land use.47
SOLUTIONS
Across the country, legal aid providers and private attorneys are joining with manufactured homeowners, organizers, policymakers and others to protect owners from eviction and other threats. Below are some of the solutions available to provide protection to manufactured homeowners that surfaced in LSC’s interviews and research on this topic.
Legal Aid. Esther Sullivan, author of Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place, said legal aid is the “last line of defense” for owners of manufactured housing in the United States. LSC’s interviewees discussed how legal aid providers are helping these homeowners, including: • Offering “know your rights” training and resources to owners of manufactured housing. • Advocating for proper enforcement of state and local policies intended to protect low-income residents of manufactured housing.
Providing eviction defense services and support, as well as post-eviction representation to pursue damages and recover property.
Offering representation in cases involving rent justification, insufficient notice of rent increases, and eviction and park habitability issues. Working with homeowners’ associations and community organizers to oppose park closures and other actions that put low-income residents at risk of losing their homes.
Working with and supporting homeowners’ associations and groups of residents seeking to buy their manufactured housing community in the event of a sale that could increase housing insecurity and instability for low-income residents.
“The chances of staying in your home for these homeowners are much higher if they have representation,” noted Joseph Chilton, supervising attorney in the Smoky Mountain offices of Legal Aid of North Carolina, Inc.
State and federal advocacy. Protections for owners of manufactured homes vary widely from state to state. Even in states with relatively strong protections, homeowners can still face considerable challenges when it comes to being able to stay in their homes, and they need legal assistance to enjoy the protections the laws provide. Among the keys to better, stronger protections are:
Longer notice for land (lot) rent increases, evictions, and park closures.
Caps on annual rent increases.
Stronger “good cause” justification for rent and fee increases.
Stronger lease protections, including one-year minimum leases and automatic renewals subject to the caps on annual rent increases referred to above. “Opportunity to purchase” and right-of-first-refusal provisions that can support homeowners to buy their communities, along with provisions allowing homeowners sufficient time to obtain the necessary financing.51
State or federal financial support for homeowners to move or purchase new homes in the event of park closures, as well as state funding for legal representation for homeowners.
Banking law changes to allow people to obtain federally backed mortgages for manufactured housing with protections similar to those available for owners of more traditional homes and to allow communities to come together more readily and borrow the funds to purchase a park, while limiting subsidies for nonresidents to purchase these parks.
Some of these provisions are at the core of proposed federal legislation, noted above, that is designed to protect manufactured homeowners.52
Organizing. LSC’s interviews for this issue brief indicate that when homeowners are organized and able to educate their communities and others about the issues, they are more successful in seeking and gaining critical protections.53 Homeowners’ associations in mobile home parks have become an important force in building the power and voice of homeowners in disputes with landlords, to the extent that state policies support their right to organize and speak out. In addition, many statewide associations of manufactured homeowners have worked for decades to advance homeowners’ interests and secure added protections in state law.54
Recognizing a need for more organizing in these communities, 9to5 Colorado created the Mobile Home Institute to train homeowners to empower them to take action against evictions, rent increases, and other challenges.55 As part of the training, participants learn how to form a homeowner’s group. “We want people to understand their rights and how to organize so if something happens, the community is ready to act,” said Cesiah Guadarrama Trejo, associate state director of 9to5 Colorado.
Public education and media coverage. There are many instances when media coverage of the challenges facing manufactured homeowners has resulted in landlords scaling back plans for large rent
“There can be fees tacked on top of fees, and for people whose housing costs are already 50% of their income, those added costs can really cause problems.”
Esther Sullivan
Associate Professor of Sociology,
University of Colorado at Denver
“One issue we’re seeing is when a mobile home is damaged by flooding or a hurricane, the park owner says the structure needs to be fixed or else you have to move it out. And either it’s too damaged to move, too expensive to repair or, it costs too much to move, so the homeowner is at risk of losing the home.”
Ashley Skaff
Senior Staff Attorney,
Legal Aid of North Carolina
increases, park closures, and evictions. Media attention and public education also can pave the way for expanded protections for homeowners when policymakers hear from constituents about the problems facing homeowners.56
Legal aid providers, organizers, homeowners, and advocates can coordinate outreach to the media around specific cases where homeowners are facing notable challenges, from habitability issues to the threat of eviction. Building public awareness of these issues and creating empathy for homeowners can help sow the seeds for needed protections.
“We want good and responsible owners to be able to hold onto these parks,” said John Whitelaw, advocacy director at Community Legal Aid Society, Inc., in Wilmington, Delaware. “It’s when landlords aren’t following the law or when they’re engaged in egregious behavior that we need to shine a light on what
they’re doing and work to protect these homeowners.”
CONCLUSION
In the midst of a nationwide affordable housing crisis, manufactured housing can be a lifeline for millions of individuals and families.57 It is also an important steppingstone to affordable home ownership. But owning and living in a mobile home is not an automatic ticket to stability and a better life. Far from it. In communities across the country, many manufactured homeowners are living on the edge, often just one rent increase or eviction notice away from losing their homes and living on the street.
Protecting these homeowners and supporting them to stay in their homes is critical to the broader effort to increase housing stability in the United States, especially as the country emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Legal Service Corporation’s research on this topic, combined with its interviews with on-the-ground civil legal aid providers and other experts, highlighted a number of strategies that are working to keep people in their homes. These strategies include:
Theprovision of a broad range of legal aid services, from “know your rights” training and education for residents to eviction defense and other forms of legal representation and advocacy. Assisting manufactured home residents with organizing so they can speak with a unified voice, build their power in negotiations with landlords, and (if possible) pool resources for the purchase of manufactured home communities. • Coordinated advocacy for better policy protections for manufactured home owners against rent and fee increases, advance notice of park closure and evictions, opportunities (and financial support) to purchase parks, and legal assistance to enforce these protections.
Media outreach and public education on the unique issues and challenges facing manufactured home owners and why they merit added protections.
Stronger and expanded partnerships
between civil legal aid providers, organizers, residents, and other stakeholders who can make a coordinated case for protections.
LSC supports legal aid providers across the country in their important work on housing insecurity issues and through this issue brief, seeks to bring increased awareness and added protections to manufactured homeowners across the nation.
Acknowledgments
This issue brief and the others in the series was made possible because of the work of the members of the Housing Task Force. A list of Task Force members appears at www.lsc.gov. LSC is grateful for the group’s energy, knowledge and commitment to understanding and addressing the needs of low-income people. LSC also would like to thank the legal aid providers and other advocates interviewed for and quoted in this issue brief, along with New York attorneys Michael Byowitz, Rabbi David A. Schwartz, and Joseph S. Tobin for their research and other contributions.
LSC Housing Task Force Co-Chairs
Michael H. Byowitz, Esq., New York, NY
Frank X. Neuner, Jr., Founder and Managing Partner, NeunerPate; LSC Board of Directors Julie A. Reiskin, Executive Director, Colorado
Cross-Disability Coalition; LSC Board of Directors
Writer
William H. Woodwell, Jr.
LSC Project Team
Ciara Beaulieu
Kaitlin Brown
Fatoumata Diabate
Helen Gerostathos Guyton
Marissa Jeffery Lynn Jennings
Elijah Johnson, Jr. Jessica Wechter
Suggested Citation
Legal Services Corporation. 2023. Housing Insecurity in the United States and the Role of Legal Aid: A series from the Legal Services Corporation Housing Task Force—Issue Brief: Mobile and Manufactured Housing. Prepared by William H. Woodwell, Jr. Unless specifically noted, all information contained herein is in the public domain and may be used and reprinted without special permission. Citation of this source is required.
Sidebars in the LSC issues brief above included the following.
STATE PROTECTIONS
What is a Manufactured Home?
A manufactured home is a home built in one place and then transported to a home site. Although often referred to as “mobile homes,” most of these homes are hard (and expensive) to relocate once they are installed, if they can be moved at all.
Between 1995 and 2017, 31% of new manufactured homes were sited in “land-lease” manufactured home communities where residents rent the land under the home; this percentage has been rising in recent years and reached 37% in 2018.5
By the Numbers: Manufactured Housing in the U.S.
— Nationwide, 22 million people live in manufactured housing, including owners and renters.14
— Manufactured housing is 6.3% of the U.S. housing stock and a higher share in many rural areas.15
— Thirty-seven percent of new manufactured homes are placed in manufactured home communities, while the rest are put on private land.16
— As of 2019, about 10% of new single-family homes were categorized as manufactured housing.17
About the Legal Services Corporation (LSC)
Congress created the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) in 1974 to promote equal access to justice. Today, LSC operates as an independent 501(c) (3) non-profit corporation and serves as the nation’s single largest funder of civil legal aid for low-income individuals. In 2021, more than 93% of LSC’s total funding was distributed to 132 independent nonprofit legal aid organizations with more than 890 offices across the country. Attorneys with LSC grantees help low-income Americans access assistance to resolve civil legal matters involving safety, economic subsistence, housing and family stability.
About this Housing Insecurity Series
While the COVID-19 pandemic increased overall demand for civil legal assistance, the number of people seeking help with housing issues grew at a disproportionate rate. In 2021, legal aid organizations funded by the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) closed over 713,000 cases, including over 250,000 housing cases. It was the first time that LSC grantees handled more housing cases than any other legal problem area. During this period, LSC launched a congressionally directed study to investigate the unmet legal needs surrounding eviction in the United States, along with a Housing Task Force to document other challenges that low-income tenants and homeowners experience. The Housing Task Force is sharing what it learned about housing insecurity and the role of civil legal aid in helping low-income individuals and families achieve stability and security in a four-part series. Read and download the complete series, along with other LSC resources on unmet legal needs involving housing and eviction, by visiting www.lsc.gov.1
MHProNews note: the entire LSC document is linked here. While the above should be accurate, there are times when copying and pasting items from a PDF document to a digital posting/editing platform can result in quirks. The original document should obviously govern when precision matters.
Part III – Additional Information with More MHProNews Analysis and Commentary
A) The following communication was sent by MHProNews to LSC. What follows is a close adaptation of that email.
from:
L. A. Tony Kovach for MHProNews.com
to:
rauscherc@lsc.gov
date:
Aug 12, 2024, 4:27 PM
subject:
Carl, media outreach on your manufactured homes issues brief
Carl, as a reminder, in March 2023 LSC issued a press release and an issues brief on manufactured housing.
With that backdrop, we plan to report on the items above soon. If you don’t mind, let me share a brief critique, as I think your organization’s voice and activities could be important in fixing what has gone wrong in manufactured housing. Your feedback is invited and valued.
In no particular order of importance are the following. To oversimplify, the following.
1) The industry can be broken into broadly two categories, the consolidators of the industry, which you address, and the balance.
2) Much (not all) of the ‘bad news’ that is generated in manufactured housing is caused by “predatory” companies who are routinely also the consolidators.
3) While there is no specific third party research, in our experience, most of the problematic or predatory behavior in manufactured housing is tied to companies that are members of the Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI) and/or to a MHI linked state association.
4) Some of the firms that have been charged with predatory behavior and various forms of failure to provide the services claims include Equity LifeStyle Properties (ELS). For years, we have combed through the publicly traded firms, again, often linked to MHI, to see what they say in their investor pitches and quarterly earnings calls. A bit further below are illustrations that ought to be in whatever follow up report(s) you do, because these get near the heart of what has gone wrong in manufactured housing, particularly the community sector that seems to be the focus of your report. Also useful is the second illustration, which is from MHI member Cavco Industries (CVCO).
5) ELS and others have openly said that supply constraints are an advantage to their business model. Understand that in our view there is a strong counterargument to their notion, which is addressed here. But this is there posture, and to anyone that grasps the law of supply and demand, it should immediately become clear why this matters.
6) Before going deeper, much of what your report says is fine, as far as it goes. I think you’ve done, for instance, a superior job on terminology compared to most outsiders looking into the industry. That said, there are several key points that are entirely missing and without them, with all due respect, I don’t think your solutions are solutions at all.
In no particular order of importance are the following ‘missing’ items from your issues brief.
a) Per a Word search of your document, the Duty to Serve (DTS) manufactured housing is not in your brief.
b) There is no mention of the FHFA.
c) HUD only appears twice in a word search and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development only appears once.
d) There are two national trade groups, one of which reflects the interests of independent producers and is arguably far more consumer focused than MHI. That would be the Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform (MHARR). It was for decades headed by a former MHI vice president. MHARR has argued that while there are a range of issues that face the industry, perhaps the two biggest are directly tied to the lack of competitive financing (the subject of DTS) and zoning barriers, which was addressed by Congress in the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act of 2000 (a.k.a.: MHIA, 2000 Reform Act, 2000 Reform Law, etc.). A key provision of the MHIA was its “enhanced preemption” provision. On paper, MHI and MHARR are both in favor of seeing that “enhanced preemption” provision properly enforced, but in practice, there is an evidence based case to be made that MHI is posturing. MHARR is serious.
Which brings us to the two graphics previously mentioned.
7) The first one is from the latest ELS IR pitch deck (page 20). ELS specifically say that limited development of new manufactured home communities is a “strategic advantage” to their business model and investment thesis. Note that they oddly say that NIMBYism contributes to that problem. More on this in the call out boxes and below.
So-called “enhanced preemption” and the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act of 2000 insights are linked as shown. Note: depending on your browser or device, many images in this report and others on MHProNews can be clicked to expand. Click the image and follow the prompts. For example, in some browsers/devices you click the image and select ‘open in a new window.’ After clicking that selection, you click the image in the open window to expand the image to a larger size. To return to this page, use your back key, escape or follow the prompts.
8) Imagine, to illustrate the point, if for the last 20 years there were only a few hundred apartment complexes built in the U.S. The law of supply and demand would tell us that the upward pressure on apartment rentals would increase, if there are no other rental housing options that filled that need. Further imagine that while several hundred complexes were built, thousands of complexes were bulldozed and redeveloped into something else (big box stores, whatever). That is the parallel to what has occurred in manufactured housing’s community space. Even if ELS owned Datacomp is modestly off on the number of new communities developed, their broad point is accurate. What is missing in the above is the point that there is apparently a net loss of manufactured home communities (MHCs) in the U.S.
Hold that thought.
9) From fellow MHI member Cavco Industries (CVCO) is this illustration. Note that since we published our initial fact check of this, Cavco modified it slightly in a follow up IR pitch deck. While someone could quibble over how many millions of new housing units are needed, their claim of 6 million is reasonable.
b) If there were thousands of more communities being developed every year, then the ‘predators’ could not pull the same stunts that they have been for the better part of the last decade. As recently as 2002, when I was working in the Houston market, some new communities were developed. There were substantial numbers of vacancies. Those newly developed community operators were willing to pay to move a home from community operator ‘A’ to their own property. They were buying occupancy. That is lacking in the current market dynamic. The playing field would no longer be so one sided against residents. Note that resident-advocate Tim Shehan’s remarks some years ago support that notion.
c) “Enhanced preemption” enforcement is a key part of the solution, and it isn’t mentioned in your brief at all.
d) IMHO, there has to be robust antitrust enforcement in manufactured housing (and the broader economy, for that matter). An oligopoly style monopolization has arguably occured in manufactured housing. To support that contention, is the consumer advocacy research by Samuel Strommen, similar but different arguments from James Schmitz Jr with the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, and literally hundreds of articles on our websites over the years that mention or hammer at that point. The late ELS chairman, Sam Zell himself said that he likes the oligopoly nature of manufactured housing, apparently because it makes it harder to spot antitrust behavior.
e) I’m not going to say that we sparked antitrust suits in the MHC sector of manufactured housing, but we are the only trade publication that has routinely hammered away at that need. In the last 15 months or so, there have been at least 4 class action antitrust suits launched in the MHC sector, several of which happen to be MHI members and/or are a member of an MHI-linked state association. In fairness to your research brief, the first of those suits occurred a few months after your document was published, so you can’t write about what has not yet occurred.
10) Summing up. There are many nonprofits and other voices that have said that more affordable lending and removing zoning barriers could benefit manufactured housing. That benefit would be useful to consumers and to smaller independents and start ups. When I first got into manufactured housing, ‘mom and pop’ operations would develop manufactured home communities (MHCs). That would be difficult to imagine today. Thus the need for preemption, which is already federal law.
In closing, and I welcome you and/or your colleagues’ feedback, it seems to me that on any issue until the complete dynamics are understood, any ‘solution’ proposed that fails to cover all the relevant details is likely to fail. While I think your research brief is useful, it is incomplete at best. I could go deeper and say that some of the sources you cited are problematic at best, but let’s not go there today.
I’d respectfully suggest that your organization take a second look at this issue, with the above in mind. The beauty of this is that DTS is already the law, it just isn’t being properly enforced. “Enhanced preemption” is already the law, but it isn’t being properly enforced. When CA created statewide preemption for ADUs, ADU production skyrocketed. To my knowledge, no nonprofit outside of manufactured housing has exposed these issues that are outlined herein.
Why not break ground with something that could in fact make a difference and do so more rapidly than almost anything else, because it is already federal law?
For about 15 months, we have been doing reports that include some fact checks with Bing’s AI powered Copilot. AI is far from perfect, as you likely know. That said, it is supposed to be logical and in our experience when it errs, and the error is documented, it will pivot, admit the error and correct its response. That said, two pull quotes below from Copilot at the base of this illustration are useful.
Better yet, if your organization/and or a state based affiliate took up a couple of cases on the lack of DTS and enhanced preemption enforcement, it could rapidly shake up the landscape. Something similar in support of antitrust action could also be a lead into possible stte AGs, DOJ antitrust or FTC action.
Your thoughts on the above are welcome. Thanks in advance for your reply.
L. A. “Tony”
—
L. A. “Tony” Kovach Managing Member
LifeStyle Factory Homes, LLC
B) As chance would have it, LSC sent this item to MHProNews in 2023. That message from LSC to MHProNews was regrettably missed. As a tip to those who are seeking to contact MHProNews by email, which we prefer, but if a message is missed, by all means, resent it a few days later. Add to the subject line “DBN-Resending this message.”
That noted, here was the message from LSC to MHProNews.
Dear Tony,
We are excited to announce that LSC has released an issue brief on the legal pitfalls of mobile and manufactured housing, the second topic in our Housing Task Force series. The brief cites research and news stories produced by other organizations, and we found outside subject-matter expertise invaluable in the writing process. This email is LSC’s way of saying thank you for your thought leadership and contributions to the Access to Justice community.
We are excited about how the brief turned out and hope you feel the same. Please share the brief with colleagues and friends! It’s also available on LSC’s website.
The Housing Task Force’s first brief was released last month and looked at illegal evictions. We’ll be releasing two more issue briefs this spring, exploring other dimensions of housing instability:
long-term motel rentals, and
contracts for deed.
Thank you again for your help,
Jessica
Jessica Wechter Special Assistant to the President
Legal Services Corporation
3333 K Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20007 …”
C) MHProNews will plan to follow up with LSC on the topics raised in Part III #A above. Stay tuned for a follow up.
D) It happens to be Labor Day 2024 when this is published. See the latest on our affordable housing related series on the Patch linked below or here.
E) New to MHProNews and/or MHLivingNews? Or have you been on a vacation and need to catch up on topics? We had a record month in August, with visits (readers) up over 20 percent from July 2024. To get the feel for our fact- and evidence-backed reports with analysis, see the recent Sunday recaps and/or the items for a look at issues that may related to the above.
Our son has grown quite a bit since this 12.2019 photo. All on Capitol Hill were welcoming and interested in our manufactured housing industry related concerns. But Congressman Al Green’s office was tremendous in their hospitality. Our son’s hand is on a package that included the Constitution of the United States, bottled water, and other goodies.
Tony earned a journalism scholarship and earned numerous awards in history and in manufactured housing.
For example, he earned the prestigious Lottinville Award in history from the University of Oklahoma, where he studied history and business management. He’s a managing member and co-founder of LifeStyle Factory Homes, LLC, the parent company to MHProNews, and MHLivingNews.com.
This article reflects the LLC’s and/or the writer’s position and may or may not reflect the views of sponsors or supporters.
