By JOHN WATERS Jr.
The Napa Valley Register

Friday, June 15, 2007

The state Assembly has passed a measure protecting mobile home residents from the growing trend of mobile home park conversions, a measure sponsored by Assemblywoman Noreen Evans, D- Santa Rosa.

AB1542 passed along party lines and now moves to the state Senate.

“This is a historic victory in the fight to protect affordable housing,” Evans said in a prepared statement. “It gives communities the tools they need when a conversion threatens to drive seniors and working families from their homes.”

Evans’ bill closes a loophole allowing mobile home park owners to subdivide and convert their communities into condominiums, essentially skirting local rent controls laws and potentially raking in huge profits in the process.

The bill, should it become law, does not ban conversions, but does allow local governments to protect affordable housing stock.

The city of Calistoga, in a preemptive move to preserve an affordable housing resource for its senior residents, rezoned the city’s four mobile home communities from a rural designation into declared mobile home districts. As a result, if local park owners wish to convert a mobile home property they must first apply for a zoning ordinance change.

Local park owners have said there are no plans for the kinds of conversions that have been threatening — even displacing — mobile home park residents elsewhere in California and the West.

“Without this bill, people living on fixed incomes will become homeless. Ultimately, it’s not just about that. It’s about seniors and working families getting screwed,” said Evans. “Land values are so high in many communities that ownership (of mobile home plots) is prohibitively expensive, and developers and land speculators are profiting by selling mobile home parks out from under them.”

There are about 40 mobile home park conversions pending across California, Evans said, including the cities of Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park, Hayward, Vallejo, Buellton, Carson, Ojai, and San Luis Obispo. Several cities and counties have adopted moratoriums to give the state Legislature time to act on AB1542.