Housing
This section of the BDN aims to help readers understand Maine’s housing crisis, the volatile real estate market and the public policy behind them. Read more Housing coverage here.
Maine is seeing a flurry of mobile home park residents across the state pushing their local leaders to pass laws to stop excessive rent increases.
Sanford city councilors passed a new rule on Tuesday that, effective June 14, limits mobile home park owners to raising rents for residents by 3%. Additionally, park owners can only hike rents up once every 12 months and must give residents 90 days’ notice before the uptick takes effect, the rule states.
If Sanford’s mobile home park owners want to raise rents by more than 3% to cover growing operating expenses such as taxes or insurance, they must petition the Rent Stabilization Board, the ordinance states.
Sanford’s four mobile home parks — Marsh Brook Estates, Country Living, Old Colony Village and Pinewood Park — are owned by New York-based Phillips International. Together, the properties have 340 leased lots.
Michael Helie, a resident of Sanford’s Country Living park for nearly five years, said he was “paralyzed with joy” following the vote.
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“It was a relief to know that my financial stability is in a better place than it would have been if this hadn’t passed,” said Helie, who helped organize his neighbors and other park residents to ask the city council for help. “The city council humbly listened to our request for help and you could tell they cared.”
Sanford is one of at least three towns that are considering such a rule. It comes at a time when residents in several mobile parks across the state have banded together in recent years to buy their parks through a cooperative to keep them away from out-of-state corporations.
In most of Maine’s mobile home parks, residents own the home they live in, but pay rent on the land it sits on. Residents are also responsible for paying their own utilities and maintaining their lot.
This arrangement makes residents vulnerable to sudden rent spikes, especially when a park is sold to an out-of-state corporation, a report by the Genesis Community Loan Fund found. This can be especially crippling to mobile home parks, which have long been a source of affordable housing for residents, including many who may be older, disabled or living on fixed incomes.
Of Maine’s 32 largest parks, which have more than a third of the state’s mobile homes, 20 are now owned by corporate investors, according to the Genesis Community Loan Fund report.
And while mobile home park ownership efforts have successfully protected residents, that option is only available if and when a park goes up for sale, said Cheyenne Gallivan, spokesperson for the Maine Labor Climate Council. The coalition has helped Maine mobile home park residents organize to pressure their local lawmakers to pass rent protections.
Helie in Sanford has shouldered $75 annual increases to his rent each year, he said. When he moved into his park, his rent was $365, but that has since climbed to $590. If someone were to move into the park today, their lot rent would cost $900, Helie said.
“I was panicked because I’m on a fixed income, so I can’t get any more and I have other expenses,” Helie said. “I didn’t like it and I couldn’t afford it much longer, so I decided to do something about it.”
The vote in Sanford came the day before mobile home park residents in Hancock are expected to urge local selectboard members to temporarily cap rapidly rising rents with a moratorium while a permanent law gets created. The Hancock Heights Mobile Home Park is owned by Sun Communities, based in Michigan.
In Oakland, residents of the community’s four mobile home parks have pushed local lawmakers to approve permanent protections before the town’s 90-day moratorium on lot rent increases expires on June 25. Oakland’s parks, holding 102 units in total, are owned by out-of-state corporations, according to Gallivan.
Earlier this month, Oakland mobile home park residents launched a citizen initiative petition to put a lot rent moratorium on the town ballot.
“Helping the parks that are not up for sale to fight back against the corporate ownership that is jacking up lot rents and squeezing people dry is definitely taking off across the state,” Gallivan said. “It’s a grass movement that’s growing quickly here.”
