It was a good Christmas for residents of West Wind Estates in Rochester, New Hampshire, because on Christmas Eve they closed on the purchase of their 129-space community. This became New Hampshire’s 111th resident-owned manufactured home community and Rochester’s ninth. That’s an impressive number of resident-owned communities for such a small state.
Foster’s Daily Democrat tells MHProNews that the residents obtained training and technical assistance from the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund’s ROC-NH program. To begin, the residents organized and formed Stony Brook Cooperative in July 2014 in order to convert their privately owned manufactured-home community into a resident-owned community or ROC.
The cooperative then negotiated with community owners Ralph and Pauline Torr for the final purchase price of $3.5 million before finalizing the transaction with financing from the Community Loan Fund and the Torrs.
“Becoming an ROC means a bright future for the community and the stability to grow and prosper,” Stony Brook Vice President Diane Bozzi explained. “The process was on target and smooth.”
Now that West Wind Estates is a resident-owned community, homeowners there are eligible for products and services – like mortgages in a land-lease – that haven’t been available to them previously.
For 31 years, the Community Loan Fund has worked in towns and cities across New Hampshire to connect people and families with the loans, training and advice that allow them to have affordable homes and secure jobs and become economically stable.
Residents of communities that are not cooperatively owned usually own the home they live in, but not the land beneath it. Because of that, they miss out on most of the usual benefits of homeownership, including conventional mortgage terms, the appreciation of their home’s value and the availability of equity loans.
The Community Loan Fund helped convert New Hampshire’s first cooperative community in 1984. Since then, its cooperative assistance team has developed a conversion strategy, an annual leadership program, a bi-annual conference and a management guide for cooperatives. Its strategy is now being applied nationally by the organization, ROC USA. ##
Related articles: a video interview with Paul Bradley, ROC USA president, is linked here.
Paul Bradley accepting the prestigious Voorhis award, is linked here.
(Photo Credit: Foster’s Daily Democrat)
