Proposal allows park owners to reset rents for vacated spaces
The Del Rio Mobile Home Park on 162nd Avenue in Ashland is seen here in this March 4, 2017 file photo. It is one of 19 mobile home parks in unincorporated Alameda County covered by county-enforced rent stabilization laws. (Darin Moriki/Bay Area News Group)
OAKLAND — A nearly two-year effort to strike a balance between unincorporated Alameda County mobile home park owners and renters may be coming to an end soon after county supervisors lowered the allowed annual rent increases at mobile home parks, but removed some restrictions on when rents could be raised.
The supervisors, by a 3-1 vote, gave their initial OK to the new rent stabilization laws at their Feb. 21 meeting and will reconsider it on March 21 once the county’s legal team and housing staff review the changes.
Supervisor Scott Haggerty abstained, saying the issue should have been reviewed by at least one more of the board’s committees.
“We’re trying to balance the equities here,” Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley said at the meeting.
“We want people to have affordability, which they do, but we want the park owners to have the ability to make it so that people aren’t living in filth, squalor, blight and debris,” he said.
If adopted in its current form, the allowed annual cap on rent increases for trailer spaces would be reduced from 5 to 4 percent.
Increases above that may be allowed under “extenuating financial circumstances,” such as unavoidable maintenance and operating expenses, although mobile home park owners must submit a petition to the county and have it reviewed at a public hearing.
Mobile home park owners will not be allowed to increase space rents above the 4 percent cap to account for previous years when rent hikes were not made.
Supervisor Wilma Chan cast the lone vote against the changes. She said she supported most of the law revisions, but would have preferred that landlords be allowed to create new and likely higher rental rates only when trailer spaces are vacated, trailer owners are evicted or trailers are abandoned.
Under that model, also backed by county housing leaders, rent increases for trailer spaces would be capped in other specific cases, including when trailers are sold or leases are transferred to another person.
“This is an issue that Nate and I don’t agree on,” Chan said.
The approved law changes would allow mobile home park owners to reset trailer space rents to any rate they want when residents are evicted, voluntarily move and take their trailer, or abandon their trailer.
“I think that’s important, because the mobile home parks provide affordable housing for people, but in order for them to provide affordable housing for folks, they also need to make sure they have the resources to maintain the parks, do what’s necessarily to keep the parks in good repair and keep the parks operational,” Miley said.
“We want to try to preserve as many of these parks as possible so there’s an opportunity for people to have housing at an affordable rate, and in many instances, people are there forever. Not everybody who lives in the mobile home parks are destitute and hard times; some people just choose to live there,” he said.
There are 19 mobile home parks, more than in any other surrounding city, spread across unincorporated Alameda County, according to the Housing and Community Development Department. Some nearby cities, by comparison, have fewer mobile home parks but more trailer spaces. Hayward, for instance, has 10 mobile parks with 2,131 spaces.
About half of the 622 trailer spaces in unincorporated Alameda County are concentrated in Castro Valley, while the remaining half are primarily located in Ashland, Cherryland and Hayward Acres, said Michelle Starratt, county assistant housing director.
Still, there are more mobile home parks, with fewer trailer spaces, outside of Castro Valley than in it, she said.
County staff members began reviewing current rent stabilization laws for mobile home parks amid growing concerns from residents that trailer space rents are becoming unaffordable in certain places, Starratt said.
n the nearly 15 public meetings that followed, mobile home park residents said repeatedly that up to 5 percent rent increases each year were unreasonable and seemed unrelated to a park’s operating costs, Starratt said.
Park owners, however, have said it is difficult to maintain parks and make it financially viable when there is no way to make up some costs by raising rents for trailer spaces that become vacant.
“It’s very expensive to maintain these types of properties and housing. Most of the infrastructure in all of these parks are over 60 or 70 years old,” said Castro Valley resident Shawn Alikian, who has owned and managed a mobile home park on Castro Valley Boulevard for two years.