Amid fears that their mobile-home park could be sold to developers, residents of Vista Del Rio are urging the Vancouver City Council to pass regulations protecting parks like theirs from being leveled to make way for something else.
Mobile homes are mostly owned by older people who can’t afford traditionally built single-family housing. Residents own their homes but rent the land beneath them from the park owner. The average price of a Washington mobile home in 2022 was $158,400, according to a study by LendingTree.
Owners of mobile homes in Vancouver’s 16 parks are not protected from the land beneath their homes being sold and used for another purpose, requiring the homes to be moved or demolished.
Under Washington law, park owners who sell the land for development must provide at least $10,000 to $15,000 in moving assistance depending on the home or compensate homeowners facing demolition by paying 50 percent of assessed market value in the tax year prior to the notice of closure being issued.
Residents and advocates argue these protections aren’t adequate.
“The intent is there … but it’s not practical,” said Kevin Callahan, who sits on the advisory council for the Area Agency on Aging & Disabilities of Southwest Washington.
For one, appraised values are often lower than market values, so half of an appraised home’s value would be a fraction of its actual market value.
Another issue is that, despite the name, many mobile homes can’t be moved.
Vista Del Rio resident Rick Seekins said his home has a permanent foundation; all of the homes do in the park. The 317 homeowners in his park would be forced to accept 50 percent of the home’s appraised value if it was developed into something else, Seekins said.
“They could all be leveled,” Seekins said. “We have enough of a homeless problem in this town right now without, for example, creating another 317 homeless, poor, limited-income folks who can’t afford to go somewhere.”
Even if someone had a home that could move, few mobile home parks in Vancouver have vacancies or would take a home older than 10 years, Callahan said. No new mobile home parks have opened in Vancouver in more than a decade, following a nationwide decline.
“You’re losing your home. You’re losing an economic nest egg if the park closes. So it’s economically catastrophic for people,” Callahan said.
Callahan, Seekins and others have reached out to the city to express support for a mobile home overlay zone — an idea brought up for the first time by city staff in a July workshop.
Essentially, city staff would overlay a specific mobile home park zone on top of a park’s current zoning to preserve the park’s existence. Bellingham, Seattle and Portland have versions of this overlay zone.
City staffers are working on a proposal for the city council to consider, said Bryan Snodgrass, long range principal planner for the city. They have not set a date to review the proposal with the council yet.
The Columbian reached out to every mobile home park in Vancouver to talk with park owners but only heard back from Gary Nielsen, co-owner of Vista Del Rio, which is for sale.
Nielsen is not against the potential overlay zone applying to Vista Del Rio because he and his co-owners do not want to sell their land for any use other than a mobile home park.
“There’s a moral good that would be earned by parks recognizing that they can’t just willy-nilly change the park,” Nielsen said. “I mean, these are permanent sites. It would be ridiculous to think about changing the use of the land.”
However, he doesn’t think the zone would be a good idea for every park in Vancouver. If a park’s homes are rundown and becoming too old, hurting the value of the park, he thinks an owner may want to sell to a developer.
“There are so many variables to it. It scares me that the government wants to come in to protect people from a few bad actors,” Nielsen said.
Vista Del Rio resident Seekins said it scares him that he must rely on the morality of his park’s owners rather than be protected by the law.
“That’s all we have — good faith,” he said. “We would just like to have a little more assurance, and that would be some kind of legislation or law or regulation that says, ‘OK, this is a manufactured home community. It’s worth an awful lot of money to the people that live in here, and therefore it’s protected.’ ”
