Mayor Jim Wood requested City Attorney John Mullen to meet with homeowners, and determine if there is any legal wrongdoing on the part of the manufactured home communities’ owners.
“I’m very concerned about harassment of seniors within their own communities on these issues, including prospective buyers being turned down by community owners four or five times when residents try to sell their homes,” Wood said. “That’s really telling the people they can’t sell their home unless the community manager approves it.”
The Oceanside Post tells MHProNews that the homeowners allege that the communities deny potential buyers, until the homeowner has no choice but to sell to the community owner at far below market value. The reason, they contend, concerns a pair of city ordinances that provide rent control, and require community owners to pay the homeowners to relocate if they want to convert the community to an alternate use.
“The community owners are rapidly buying up property,” said Frank Crowley, a representative of Oceanside Manufactured Homeowners Alliance (OMHA). “If he owns it, he doesn’t have to abide by rent control or conversion ordinances.”
OHMA was organized in the late 1980s to represent the rights of people owning manufactured homes in the 12 manufactured home communities in Oceanside. Presently, OHMA has more than 500 members who volunteer hundreds of hours to continue the fight against vacancy de-control and changes to their rent control ordinance
The homeowners also want to remove ambiguity from the section of the zoning ordinance that provides for relocation reimbursement. “We want to tighten up the definition of ‘relocation,’ and ‘comparable units,’” Linda Walshaw, a community representative at OMHA said.
Such costs may also include the cost of purchasing replacement manufactured homes for those residents owning manufactured homes that are not acceptable in other manufactured home communities as a result of its size, age or style, or establishing a new manufactured home community for the relocation of displaced manufactured homes.
An Oceanside zoning ordinance says that the costs could include moving the home or purchasing a new one for the resident if the homes are not acceptable in the new community.
One community, Mission View Manor, states that no homes manufactured before 1977 are permitted, and it is the sole discretion of the community owner to accept homes.
And some rules that complicate the selling process, like community owners the having right of first refusal, sometimes conflict the state’s Manufactured Home Residency Law (MHRL), according to Walshaw.
The MHRL was enacted by the state to enable an equal transaction between the property owners and homeowners, much like landlord-tenant laws, according to the California Housing and Development website.
However, in as much as the MHRL has protected the homeowners’ rights, the state law prevents the city from legislating in areas already addressed in the MHRL.
“It may be that we can’t remedy those problems because we would be preempted under the MHRL, but we may be able to learn from other cities that have addressed these issues,” Mullen said. ##
(Photo Credit: San Luis Rey Community)
