The streets at Shady Lane Estates in Thermal used to flood whenever it rained.
Water pooled along the mostly dirt roads inside the mobile home park, mixing with waste from septic systems that regularly backed up. On wet mornings, parents loaded their children into cars and drove them through the contaminated mud to the front entrance so they could catch the school bus.
Summer brought a different hardship. In the Coachella Valley, afternoon temperatures often climb above 110 degrees. The park’s aging electrical system frequently failed, cutting power to older, poorly insulated mobile homes and leaving families without air conditioning. Rubi Castro, a mother of four, remembers placing her children in large buckets of cold water until the electricity came back on.
That chapter ended in late April, when Shady Lane reopened after a major rehabilitation.
The project, partly funded through a state program created to help restore California’s aging mobile home parks, replaced the park’s failing infrastructure. Shady Lane now has an upgraded electrical system capable of handling heavy air-conditioning use, new connections to local water and sewer service, paved roads and a shaded playground. Its 32 deteriorating mobile homes were replaced with new manufactured homes, and eight additional units were added.
Castro, speaking in June on a day when temperatures reached 113 degrees, said the heat has been intense since residents returned in April. But inside her new home, she said, the air conditioning has made life comfortable.
“It feels like we live in winter,” she said.
For the first time in years, she added, she is looking forward to the rain.
Shady Lane’s transformation under the ownership of the nonprofit Caritas Corporation is one of the first visible results of a broader overhaul inside California’s housing agency. In 2023, state officials reworked a little-used program that had been intended to provide financial help to struggling mobile home parks but had largely sat dormant for a decade because of a complicated application process and narrow eligibility rules.
The revamped effort, now known as the Manufactured Housing Opportunity and Revitalization program, or MORE, expanded the kinds of projects that could receive state help.
Shady Lane received $10.6 million through the program, in addition to funding from Riverside County and the city of Coachella. It was one of 28 parks awarded money and became the first rehabilitation project completed under the new version of the program. State housing officials say construction has started at 19 other mobile home parks.
In a state where affordable housing remains scarce and expensive to build, the completed project represents a rare success story. But it also highlights the scale of the challenge: California has thousands of older mobile home parks that provide some of the last relatively affordable housing options for low-income residents, and many need costly repairs.
According to the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the state has 4,635 mobile home parks with nearly half a million homes. Most units are occupied by their owners. Manufactured homes are generally far less expensive than similarly sized single-family homes or townhomes, making them a critical housing option for many Californians with limited incomes.
“While it is not as flashy or glamorous as a large, beautiful new rental apartment building, it is a vital source of affordable housing,” said Betsy McGovern-Garcia, vice president of Self-Help Enterprises, an affordable housing developer in the San Joaquin Valley that manages two mobile home parks.
Even with MORE funding, some projects remain delayed by permitting issues or have had to scale back because available funding is not enough to cover their original plans. Housing advocates say the nearly $140 million awarded to more than two dozen parks, covering more than 1,000 mobile homes, is likely only a fraction of what is needed statewide.
For now, there is no additional state money in sight.
The MORE program grew out of a bureaucratic overhaul of a 1980s state loan effort called the Mobilehome Park Resident Ownership Program. As the name suggested, the original program was designed to help mobile home owners, who typically own their homes but not the land underneath them, buy their parks and operate them as resident cooperatives. The program was later broadened to help nonprofits and local governments purchase parks.
After an early wave of acquisitions, however, the program fell into disuse. From 2013 to 2023, it issued only one loan despite having tens of millions of dollars available.
The 2023 overhaul expanded the program to address another urgent problem: the poor physical condition of many mobile home parks. Funds could now be used not only for purchases, but also for repairing and replacing park infrastructure and, in some cases, deteriorated homes. Private park owners became eligible to apply. The state simplified the application process and made loan terms more flexible, including the possibility that many loans could be forgiven.
Lawmakers also added $200 million in one-time funding through two budget bills.
“It better responds to the range of challenges facing park residents and owners,” said Brian Augusta, a housing policy lobbyist who supported the changes.
Roughly two-thirds of the money awarded through the program went to repair and rehabilitation projects.
Caritas Corporation had been the only organization to receive funding during the final decade of the old program. State housing officials encouraged the nonprofit to return that money and apply under the revamped program instead.
“It is an excellent program, much simpler,” said Tracy Bejotte, chief operating officer for Caritas. “They really got it organized.”
Bejotte said Shady Lane is evidence that the changes can work.
Residents agree the difference is dramatic.
“Before, it was a hard and dangerous place,” said Joel Beltran, who sells fruits and vegetables at a local store and lives in the park with his wife and five children. He remembers sparks coming from outlets in his former home.
“Today, it is like Disneyland,” he said.
The high cost of maintaining and repairing homes affects communities across the country, but California’s mobile home parks present a particularly difficult case. Residents are less likely to have the savings needed for repairs and less likely than traditional homeowners to rely on insurance or home-equity loans. Affordable insurance for manufactured housing can be difficult to find, and banks often do not view mobile homes as strong collateral.
The problem is especially acute for older units. Homes built before 1976, when stronger federal standards took effect, are more vulnerable to moisture, mold and fire damage. Many are poorly insulated, making them uncomfortable and potentially dangerous during extreme heat or cold.
Andrew Rumbach, a researcher at the Urban Institute who studies mobile home parks, said many pre-1976 units “probably are no longer fit to live in.” Those older homes are particularly common in California. Rumbach and his colleagues estimate that nearly 40% of the state’s mobile homes were built before the federal standards were adopted, one of the highest shares in the country.
Even when individual homes are in decent condition, the parks themselves often are not. Many were built in less desirable areas on the edges of cities and are more likely to lack reliable utility service. Increasingly, they also face wildfire risks. In many parks, sewer, water and electrical systems are owned and operated by the park owner.
“These systems are often run by whoever manages the park, which may be an absentee owner or a property manager,” said Gregory Pierce, a UCLA researcher who studies urban planning and water insecurity. “Even if they have the best intentions, that person may not be trained to operate a water system.”
While Shady Lane is largely complete, another project funded through MORE has moved slowly.
Buena Vista Mobile Home Park in Palo Alto, owned and managed by the Santa Clara County Housing Authority, received the largest rehabilitation award under the program: $24.6 million.
The money, awarded in winter 2023, was initially intended for a sweeping redevelopment. Older mobile homes would be replaced with new models, leaky gas lines and deteriorating roads would be upgraded, and the housing authority proposed a mid-sized apartment complex with a community center for renters in the park.
But in 2024, those plans were sharply reduced. Housing authority officials cited unexpected cost increases, inadequate funding, resident opposition and a state deadline requiring the mobile home renovation money to be spent by mid-2027. Under a revised plan released late last year, the work will focus only on shared infrastructure, including water, gas, electrical and sewer lines.
Residents of 49 homes were told they would be relocated during an estimated eight months of construction and then return to their existing homes. The move-out date was originally expected in February but has been delayed until September.
“It keeps getting pushed back again and again,” said Sabrina Ramirez, a child care worker who has lived at Buena Vista since 1999.
The uncertainty has been stressful, she said. But the summer delay has helped protect the dozens of outdoor plants she began cultivating during the pandemic, which now surround her 1960s-era home.
“My jungle is delighted,” Ramirez said. “I did not want to move them earlier in the year.”
She and other plant-loving residents have been working with neighbors outside the park to care for flowers, succulents and fruiting vines once construction begins.
The MORE program ultimately distributed $136 million in grants for repairs, replacements and acquisitions in 2023. It rejected applications seeking another $186 million.
That gap between requests and available funding reflects a deep need, but it may still understate the problem, said Kate Rose, deputy director of the Sacramento-based California Coalition for Rural Housing. Some park owners may not have known about the new program in time to apply. Others, particularly small family owners, may not have had the capacity to complete applications before the deadline.
For projects that were not selected, or that never applied, there is no clear source of future help. Most of the money came from one-time state budget allocations, and California’s tight budget for the coming year includes no new funding for the program. The remaining money came from a special fund supported by mobile home park permit fees. According to the latest state figures, that fund had $27 million and has grown by less than 0.5% over the past two years.
Rose described that amount as insignificant compared with statewide need and not enough to support another major round of funding.
That leaves few options for owners trying to stabilize older mobile home communities.
When Self-Help Enterprises acquired La Hacienda Mobile Home Park in Fresno, McGovern-Garcia said, the nonprofit did not have a long-term revitalization plan.
“We just knew there had to be an intervention,” she said.
After years of legal disputes and conflict between residents and the previous owner, the park was in poor condition. All but one of the homes were built before 1980, McGovern-Garcia said. Nearly two dozen were abandoned and boarded up. Most had moisture damage and mold.
Self-Help applied for a $3.7 million improvement grant with the hope of offering homeowners low-cost or deferred-interest loans to replace their homes. The application was not funded.
“It would have completely changed the trajectory of the community,” McGovern-Garcia said. “It is like getting the golden ticket in the mobile home world.”
Original source: CalMatters
