3y ago

They’re even coming for mobile home parks now.

news.yahoo.com Rents spike as big-pocketed investors buy mobile home parks

For as long as anyone can remember, rent increases rarely happened at Ridgeview Homes, a family-owned mobile home park in upstate New York. When that didn't happen and a new lease with a 6% increase was imposed this year, they formed an association. About half the residents launched a rent strike ...

Ward is one of the residents at Ridgeview participating in a rent strike after new owners of the park announced they were raising rents by six percent. "I moved here because it's basically the most affordable living," said Ward, who is disabled and living off of a fixed income. The plight of residents at Ridgeview is playing out nationwide as institutional investors, led by private equity firms and real estate trusts and sometimes funded by pension funds, swoop in to buy mobile home parks. …

Residents, about half of whom are seniors or disabled people on fixed incomes, put up with the first two increases. They hoped the latest owner, Cook Properties, would address the bourbon-colored drinking water, sewage bubbling into their bathtubs and the pothole-filled roads.

When that didn't happen and a new lease with a 6% increase was imposed this year, they formed an association. About half the residents launched a rent strike in May, prompting Cook Properties to send out about 30 eviction notices.

“All they care about is raising the rent because they only care about the money,” said Jeremy Ward, 49, who gets by on just over $1,000 a month in disability payments after his legs suffered nerve damage in a car accident.

He was recently fined $10 for using a leaf blower. “I’m disabled," he said. "You guys aren’t doing your job and I get a violation?”

Blackstone company towns, except they don’t make anything. Rentier class will ultimately kick off the revolution.

The Torture Never Stops…

18 comments

Yeah rent lot fees are massive now, even if buying the house outright is a bit cheaper than a standard home.
Basically they sold what were previously considered "white trash" and cheap living to alternate life style chasing rich fucks and have pushed people out of even these modest living arrangements
The tiny home shit that was all over the media a few years ago was basically this.

Economy booming? Better make housing more expensive!
Economy crashing? Better make housing more expensive!
Buyers just cannot win.
- I can think of one time where they did :mao-shining:
  
  It’s funny that Mao is associated with the death of the landlords when all he had to do was discontinue the practice of putting down peasant uprisings. The peasants needed little in terms of empowerment. They just needed someone to get out of their way

the mobile home / "trailer" park thing in the US is insane. as said in another post in here, it's the most predatory housing scheme the US has going. even if you can buy the home (because they are cheaper, cash out the door than a house), you're still paying absurd lot rent and other utilities. also, the structure is absolutely not going to protect you in an extreme weather event. even if your weather is a permanent paradise, it's going to be falling apart in 15 years. if there's one bad storm, it's going to be fucked up. they are meant to be temporary structures. like for a construction company or a disaster situation. so of course someone was like, "oh yeah, you can live in this."
also, they are not mobile. they are usually over some county line and existing in some place that has zero services or housing regulations. and it is a little fiefdom where the guy who owns it probably owns the only gas station and convenience store nearby.
i've had various family that lived in trailer parks, and despite thinking they had some kind of equity, when they finally needed to leave the place for good, they were always walking away with nothing, even if they had "bought" the trailer. also, having seen trailer parks in the UK, they seem to have some kind of council standard at least. the units all look clean and the grounds well maintained. in the US, 90% of the time they look like a movie set for a movie i wouldn't watch alone.

sometimes funded by pension funds
gotta always get that fucking jab in there eh?
capital guts pensions and forced retirement to be financialised, so now every finance evil thing can also get blamed on the slightly better off workers with unions and benefits. fucking manufactured crab and bucket bullshit

Housing as a speculative asset (and capitalism, lol) needs to be absolutely demolished as a concept. It's one of the dumbest things imaginable.
:mao-shining:

You don't get to have a home, and/but you can't stay here :agony-soviet:

I've been thinking about buying some land and "running" a trailer park on it. Have some friends and family move onto it and we all just operate at cost. But finding land anymore that's developable is becoming hard. I just wanna live with my friends in the woods, why is that so hard??
- There are laws in many places to deliberately prevent that from happening. Like minimum lot sizes and minimum parking. And if there aren't any, they will assuredly introduce more once this idea becomes more popular due to housing prices. Plus any Nimby asshole can raise a stink and prevent you from building what you want.
- Isn’t that kind of the point? If you can afford the land, upkeep and community are relatively easy. That’s why the richest people have picked all the low hanging fruit and uprooted the trees that produced it
- As a species we've been doing it for eons.
  If time and energy are no object, you could just put up houses (or complexes) made of cob or straw-clay or rammed earth. There are a lot of online resources for natural building. You could give them green roofs, big windows/passive solar, and rocket mass heaters, and they'd be much more comfortable than most mobile homes. In a wet climate you could even go off the water grid with rainwater catchment cisterns, graywater routing, and composting toilets.
  You can check what the zoning is for privately held plots of land outside town, whether it's Agricultural or Rural Residential. If they don't allow trailers or you foresee some struggle over approval or you just want to go incognito, you could put up a berm, or a hedge, or a hedge on a berm.
  I have put a lot of time into thinking about stuff like this.
- because you're supposed to rent. you're supposed to suffer. you're supposed to be a subject.

They’ve been coming for parks for a while now. The first tenants’ unions in my area, by almost 5 years, were at local trailer parks whose water was so full of sediment that using it to wash your clothes would rip them up and stain them. Our area is cheap for rent, too. A couple years back I rented a house for $850, no roommates, utilities included. Meanwhile, rent for a “new” trailer? $1200. They suck people in by showing them prices for lot rent and try to hide the actual price until someone’s already signed the contract. And once you’ve signed, they can technically just not rent it out and take you to court for the full amount of the lease if you break it, but they’ll usually just be happy to take your first-and-last-plus-deposit

This isn't new; Warren Buffett owns a shitton of trailer parks. (Side note: they act like he's a good guy, but he's a fucking piece of garbage. His trailer parks are super predatory, and his whole investment strategy is building monopolies.)

so when does america start getting favellas
- we already beat favellas, we have tent cities

18 comments