US cities buy trailer parks to keep home prices affordable
Soaring home prices in some metro areas and cities have prompted park owners to sell their land to developers
Here in the heart of one of Colorado’s most expensive cities, Isabel Sanchez bought a mobile home seven years ago for just US$6,000. Her four-bedroom bungalow now sits on a lot she rents for $355 a month.
The mobile home park Sanchez and her family live in offers a glimpse of Boulder’s hippie past. Small houses and trailers, many dating to the 1960s and ’70s, sit close together on tree-lined streets.
“I love the space, I love the location, I love the community here,” Sanchez, 55, said recently, relaxing in a blue armchair in her spotless living room.
Affordable neighbourhoods like these have become hard to find in Boulder and cities across the country where home prices are soaring. In some metro areas, rising prices were prompting park owners to sell their land to developers, affordable housing advocates said.
“When the mortgage crisis came about it sort of slowed down, and now it’s heating up again,” said Carolyn Carter, deputy director of the National Consumer Law Center.
So Boulder and a handful of other localities, desperate to hang on to homes middle- and working-class people can afford, have stepped in to buy parks, fix them up, and transfer ownership to residents or to a non-profit on condition that rents be kept low.
In Oregon, Portland’s housing authority financed a deal last year that saved a mobile home park from being sold to a developer.
