Priced Out: Fear and resistance in WA mobile home parks
The Cascade PBS documentary explores how one ownership group has bought up communities statewide and raised rents, straining low-income residents.
November 18, 2024
Video by Jaelynn Grisso
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Debbie Chandler’s landlord had threatened fines if she didn’t tidy up her lot in Hideaway Community, a mobile home park near Spokane. Because she suffers from chronic illness and a bad back, the 65-year-old former veterinary tech already struggled with yard work in the August heat, but the cloud of yellowjackets that dogged her as she worked made it nearly intolerable.
“I’ve already been stung so much this week, it ain’t funny,” she said.
The underground wasps’ nests all over the park were just one sign of poor upkeep at Hideaway. Chandler said she slipped on a perennial patch of ice surrounding the mailboxes last winter and badly injured her hip.
Hurst & Son LLC, a Port Orchard company that owns about 60 mobile home communities in Washington, purchased Hideaway in 2015. Since then, residents allege the company has cut down trees that once shaded the park, removed a playground, allowed roads to crumble and curtailed maintenance — all while hiking lot rental rates, charging extra for previously included utilities and imposing new fines.
“There’s literally absolutely no benefit, you know, of being here, other than the fact that we have a roof over our head,” Chandler said. “And even less so because of all that has been put on us and threatened. And you know none of us feels secure in our home here.”
The predominantly low-income residents at Hurst parks across the state contend that a combination of deteriorating conditions, hostile management practices, steep rent increases and other new costs, and the fact that they own their homes — but not the ground they sit on — has put them in a terrible bind. Many can no longer afford to live there, but leaving would mean abandoning the homes they own, and there is nowhere cheaper to go.
Many residents feel helpless and isolated, but they are far from alone. Hurst’s approach to operating parks corresponds with a growing nationwide trend that involves corporate investors scooping up locally owned mobile home parks, often by taking advantage of cheap government-backed loans and tax breaks, then following a pair of online entrepreneurs’ playbook for turning parks into profit machines.
To increase revenues, park owners can minimize spending on upkeep, hike rents, impose new charges and shift operating costs to residents. While investors rake in billions, thousands of American families are being priced out of one of the last bastions of affordable housing — and when the investors can make more money off the land than the parks that sit on top of it, the parks often go away altogether.
Hurst & Son’s owners, Caleb and Kristina Romack, did not respond to multiple requests for interviews. Since taking over the company, the couple have rapidly increased its acquisitions. The company has doubled its park holdings in Washington since 2019 and now owns the land under one out of every 40 mobile home rental units in the state. Hurst has also expanded its park ownerships into Idaho, Oregon, Montana and North Dakota during that time.
A company manager provided a one-page statement defending its rental increases and other new management policies as part of necessary investments in keeping parks financially sustainable.
“While our aim is to preserve mobile home parks, Hurst and Son is not a low-income housing provider,” the company stated. “At the same time, we want our communities to be mixed-income and we don’t want improvements to displace anyone.”
Some Hurst & Son park residents have organized into tenant associations to collectively push back on management practices. Residents have also filed hundreds of complaints with the state’s Manufactured Housing Dispute Resolution Program, sparking an investigation from the Attorney General’s Office that has resulted in calls to roll back unlawful rent increases and an agreement for hundreds of thousands of dollars in reimbursements to tenants.
‘Chain the customers’
It’s probably not a coincidence that Hurst & Son accelerated its acquisitions of mobile home communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Victoria O’Banion of the Northwest Cooperative Development Center, a nonprofit that helps residents of manufactured housing communities form cooperatives so they can purchase their parks.
When the nation went into quarantine, Washington and some other states instated temporary eviction moratoriums. A lot of tenants in apartments and “stickbuilt” houses simply stopped paying their rent in states with moratoriums, but people in mobile home parks, who had more at stake, kept paying their lot rent.
“Everyone knew that the moratoriums were not going to continue forever and at a certain point all of that money would be owed to a landowner,” O’Banion said. “If you own your home, the last thing you want is for your home to disappear.”
The federal government also offered billions in emergency rental assistance, passed down through local agencies and nonprofits to landlords with struggling tenants. Those disbursements are not always public, but Cascade PBS found Hurst received at least $220,000 through such programs in Washington. The real total was likely much higher.
Hedge funds and private equity funds like Blackstone Group, Apollo Global Management and Stockbridge Capital Group, alongside smaller regional real estate companies like Hurst & Son, had already been quietly building portfolios of mobile home communities for about 10 years. Institutional investors like the pension fund for Pennsylvania public school teachers and the government of Singapore have also increasingly invested in mobile home housing.
The pandemic triggered a rush on mobile parks. Investors began hounding “mom and pop” park operators all over the U.S. and Canada to sell. Many longtime owners knew they faced expensive infrastructure repairs or wanted to retire, often making the investors’ offers too good to turn down. The competition drove prices up dramatically, but by then many buyers had realized mobile home parks could still turn higher profits than other types of rental housing.
This was due in no small part to Frank Rolfe and Dave Reynolds, two mobile home park impresarios who founded Mobile Home University, which teaches aspiring park owners how to strike it rich during three-day “boot camps.” Their business model hinges on one simple fact: Because most mobile homes are costly and difficult, if not impossible, to move and their owners do not want to abandon them, the owners have little choice but to pay up when the landlord raises the rent.
“I don’t know of any other business that has this level of control over the customer,” Reynolds said in an internal publication about the history of the company. “Can you imagine a restaurant that has the legal right to chain the customers to the booth so they can never eat anywhere else, and raise the prices on the menu whenever they like?”
Reynolds and Rolfe advise owners to raise rents early and often; eliminate anything that could be a source of liability or require costly upkeep; make tenants pay for utilities and other operating expenses; and raise additional revenue by charging for things like parking and guests, imposing new rules and fining residents for breaking them, and buying out or evicting people who don’t pay so that their homes can be resold for a profit — all things that residents of many other corporate-owned parks around the U.S. have complained about.
By 2020, Hurst was just one of many investors seeking to buy up Washington properties.
“Parks were being bought sight-unseen, all cash, a million dollars over asking,” O’Banion recalled. “It just became this very competitive bidding war. Actually, that hasn’t stopped.”
Amid the pandemic, Hurst requested federal relief aid and received a loan of approximately $185,000 from the Paycheck Protection Program for struggling small businesses. Nearly all PPP loans were forgiven. Federal data indicates the company also received about $30,000 in other economic relief loans in 2020.
That same year, records show Hurst spent almost $36 million for the 11 parks it acquired.
Federal financing
While some investors do have millions lying around, many finance their projects with loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two federal government-backed lending programs designed to make housing more affordable by giving low-interest loans to low-to-moderate-income homebuyers and companies that want to provide affordable multifamily rental properties. Major investors have figured out how to tap into that system. In 2020, Fannie Mae provided $5.5 billion in financing for mobile home park purchases — a 120% increase over 2019.
“You would think that Fannie and Freddie would be monitoring that more closely, but there’s not a lot of oversight in that area,” O’Banion said.
Public records show that Hurst has used several different lenders to finance their purchases. Some of those lenders do offer the federally backed loans, but the records do not show whether Hurst obtained loans through either program.
Financial experts and watchdog organizations say many investors use the same strategies. After buying a park, they quickly raise rents. The increased income helps give the appearance the park has grown more valuable, which means the investor can get more money when they borrow against it, and use the new loan to fund the next park purchase.
Mobile home parks have unique tax advantages that allow owners to significantly reduce their taxable income and take bigger deductibles; and, if an investor decides to offload a property, a financial instrument known as a “1031 exchange” allows them to defer paying taxes on the sale proceeds if they buy a similar type of property. Collectively, these policies make it possible to shuffle debts, utilize taxpayer money to buy more properties and, in many cases, ultimately sell to developers and close the parks.
For example, a Puyallup park not owned by Hurst, Meridian Mobile Home Estates, closed in October 2022 after a Seattle company, Bradley Heights SS, LLC, bought it for $6.5 million. They have since sought approval to build eight apartment buildings, containing 236 units.
As corporate owners raise rates and sell off parks, working-class people are seeing home ownership and long-term stability slip away. Chandler, the Hideaway resident, said she spends about 40% of her disability check on her rent, and by the time she pays for her utilities, phone and insurance, she doesn’t always have enough money to eat well, although she tries to set aside about $20 a month for a small luxury like lunch with a friend.
If Hurst raises her rent again, she fears she will end up homeless.
“I’m not sure what I would do because now I don’t even own a vehicle to live in my car,” Chandler said. “And the hard part is I will be very picky about where I go because being the animal lover I am, I am not giving up my cats.”
Policy protections
Washington state law provides some protections against predatory landlord practices — placing restrictions on how rents can be raised, certain fees and maintenance responsibilities. The state Attorney General’s Office also oversees the Manufactured Housing Dispute Resolution Program, which can mediate concerns between mobile home residents and landlords. That program has seen tenant complaints double in recent years, to 731 in 2023. The office reported that about 130, or 18%, of last year’s complaints involved a Hurst-owned park.
Brionna Aho, spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office, wrote in an email that the dispute resolution program has secured reduced rental rates or reimbursements for some residents as part of its ongoing negotiations with Hurst & Son.
“Hurst & Son has issued $757,088 in refunds thanks to the Manufactured Housing Dispute Resolution Program complaint process,” Aho wrote last week. “More than half of those refunds — approximately $400,000 — have gone to tenants who submitted complaints to the program.”
Housing advocates have also appealed to the state Legislature to adopt additional protections and limit annual rental increases as the housing market has tightened. A 2022 analysis of Washington’s housing needs found that in Spokane County, where Hurst owns 12 mobile home communities, a renter would need to earn about $32,000, or half of the area’s median family income, to afford a one-bedroom apartment. (The Priced Out documentary states the company owns 13 parks in the county because it has two operations with slightly different descriptions registered at one of its locations.)
At that time, Spokane County needed about 13,300 more affordable rental units to meet its local demand. A buyer would need to earn about $103,000, or 123% of the median income, to afford a home of their own. That means Chandler, who lives on about $19,000 a year, would need around 170% of her current income to rent a low-end apartment, if she could find one.
In Kitsap County, where Hurst owns eight parks, a renter needed to earn $54,120, or 71% of the median family income, to afford an apartment. The county needed about 5,500 more affordable units to meet the needs of people who earned half of the median income. A buyer needed to earn about $122,000 to afford a home.
Leontina Hormel is a sociology professor at the University of Idaho in Moscow, where Hurst owns six parks. In 2023 she published Trailer Park America: Reimagining Working-Class Communities, a book about residents of a local park, owned by another party, that closed. She has also worked with Hurst residents, saying they have problems similar to those of their counterparts in Washington but fewer legal protections.
Hormel noted that when residents get forced out of their mobile homes, they also lose a source of support that is critically important for people who have few resources: their neighbors.
“We’re talking about people that, if they’re on their deathbed and they can’t afford to be in the hospital … your neighbor is going to be there to help you out to the next part of this world,” she said. “That’s what we’re talking about. Middle-class people don’t have to do that.”
Chandler said many of her neighbors in Hideaway Community already face more than their share of challenges. Some are single moms. Others are elderly couples or disabled veterans.
“Try, maybe, to put yourself in that situation,” she said. “We have backstories. We have family. We have lives and we’re happy not to make waves about things as long as things are fair.”