When Ronnie Pinkham learned that the Bangor mobile home park she had lived in for 12 years was going up for sale, her first reaction was fear.
Corporate investors have been buying mobile home parks in recent years nationally. Large rent increases can follow.
But then a regional group notified Pinkham that she could organize to get residents to purchase Cedar Falls Mobile Home Park under a new Maine law.
“I instantly knew I wanted to take advantage of it, because I don’t want some big entity moving in,” said Pinkham, 48, of the park in the Capehart neighborhood. “We have 79 acres here, and I don’t want my elderly residents to be kicked out, or anything like that, or their lot rents to go haywire.”
Pinkham was one of just six residents who attended a first informational session over the summer with the Cooperative Development Institute, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit group that backs co-ops. An institute representative said the residents had less than a week to outbid a corporate investor offering their park owner $7.9 million for Cedar Falls. They would also have to get a majority of residents on board with forming a co-op.
So Pinkham and fellow resident Al MacNevin, 75, went door to door to the park’s 129 lots, sitting with residents to explain the state law. They met their goal, getting 58 percent of residents to sign on. With the institute’s backing, they submitted a successful $8 million bid to Keystone Management for the park.
Now the real work begins, and it has kicked off a debate about the law. Residents have until mid-February to cobble together the funds from local lenders and grant programs. Cedar Falls would be only the second community to do this in Maine after a $27 million deal to buy an Old Orchard Beach park was inked in October.
Mobile home parks have become a battleground because they are often the last bastion of affordable homeownership in a community. It is as hard to rent in Bangor as it is in Portland due to lower incomes and tight rental supply. The value of a typical home in the Queen City shot up by nearly 5.8 percent over the last year, outpacing the state average, according to Zillow.
Increasing corporate ownership has been a major trend in the mobile home park industry that was cultivated by mom-and-pop owners. More than 1 in 5 parks in Maine are owned by out-of-state investors. New owners often raise rents immediately after buying parks.
Those stories motivated the Democratic-led Legislature to pass the law that residents are now using to buy their parks. It requires park owners to give residents a 60-day notice of an impending sale. They must consider an offer from residents to buy the park. If a majority of residents support that offer, they have 90 days to complete the purchase.
In a separate move, lawmakers started a $5 million fund to help residents buy their parks. Only $1.8 million of that remains. It’s too early to say whether those funds will go to the Cedar Falls sale, a MaineHousing spokesperson said. Other potential funding sources include loan funds, credit unions, local banks and state or city grants, Nora Gosselin, who runs the mobile home park acquisition program for the group, said.
The competing offer in Bangor came from Flintstone Properties, a Vancouver-based operator that from 2017 to 2020 was the largest park owner in Maine with six communities. It sold its portfolio here in 2020 to national giant Sun Communities, which is known for sharp lot fee increases. Sun is transparent in investor documents about plans to raise rent annually.
That 2020 sale sparked fears among Cedar Falls residents that their park would also be flipped for profit to a company like Sun, but Flintstone’s president, Chris Howard, said it was a one-off. Sun’s offer was so good that he could not refuse it. This time, Howard said, Flintstone would have run the park long term.
Howard thinks the Cedar Falls residents are making a mistake. His company increases rents by a manageable $25 and $35 every year, he said. Flintstone also had aggressive plans to put manufactured homes for $100,000 each on the park’s 80 vacant lots with its capital instead of a loan given to residents.
“[The law] is stopping more affordable housing from being built in Bangor, which ultimately makes housing less affordable. It’s stopping operators like us from coming in, being good stewards of the community and doing $35 rent increases per year,” Howard said. “I don’t see this as a win for residents.”
The Cooperative Development Institute was the driving force behind the Old Orchard Beach deal. It is working to identify sources of capital to build up those 80 vacant lots on behalf of residents, Gosselin said.
“I think resident ownership and cooperative ownership is a really important stabilizing local control and affordability,” Gosselin said.
If lot rent increases squeezed out any of the residents at Cedar Falls — most of whom are on a fixed income — there’d be nowhere else for them to go, Pinkham said. While lot rents are still generally affordable in the park, there is a real fear they would shoot up under a new owner.
The 89 residents who are now on board with the sale see local ownership as a huge win. The effort has already built up a sense of fierce determination in the community.
“They’re worried about what a development company would do,” MacNevin said. “They might price some people out of the park, and we’d like to keep everybody here.”
