Summer brought a different danger. In the unincorporated Coachella Valley, afternoon temperatures routinely climb past 110 degrees, and the mobile home park’s old electrical system often could not keep up with the demand from air conditioners. When the power failed, the aging, poorly insulated homes became stifling. Rubi Castro, a mother of four, recalled cooling her young children in large buckets of cold water while waiting for electricity to return.

That changed in late April, when Shady Lane reopened after a major renovation backed in part by a state program created to preserve and improve California’s aging mobile home parks.

The rebuilt community now has an upgraded electrical system designed to handle dozens of air conditioners, connections to local water and sewer utilities, paved roads and a shaded playground. The park’s 32 older mobile homes were replaced with new manufactured units, and eight additional homes were added. The project now provides 40 homes for more than 140 residents.

Castro, speaking on a June day that reached 113 degrees, said she had been comfortable since moving back in April. Inside her new home, she said, “it feels like we live in winter.” After years of dreading storms, she added that she now “can’t wait to experience the rain.”

The transformation of Shady Lane under the ownership of the nonprofit Caritas Corporation is one of the first visible results of a major revamp inside California’s housing bureaucracy.

For years, a state program intended to help struggling mobile home parks was so difficult to use that it sat largely dormant. In 2023, the state reworked and renamed it the Manufactured Housing Opportunity and Revitalization program, known as MORE, giving it a broader mission and more money to address one of California’s most overlooked forms of affordable housing.

Shady Lane received $10.6 million through the program, along with support from Riverside County and the city of Coachella. It was one of 28 parks awarded funding and is the first rehabilitation project completed under the revised program. Another 19 projects have broken ground, according to the state Department of Housing and Community Development.

For a state struggling with high housing costs and an affordable housing finance system often criticized as slow and expensive, the completion of Shady Lane is a rare success story. But the early record of the MORE program also shows how difficult it remains to repair and preserve older mobile home communities.

California has 4,635 mobile home parks, according to the state housing department, with space for nearly half a million homes. Most units are owner-occupied, and they are often far less expensive than comparable single-family houses or townhomes. For many lower-income Californians, they represent one of the few realistic paths to homeownership.

“While it’s not as shiny or flashy as a big beautiful new rental apartment, it’s 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 parks.

Still, even projects that secured MORE funding have run into permitting delays, funding gaps or reduced ambitions. The state awarded nearly $140 million to more than two dozen parks with more than 1,000 mobile homes, but advocates say that addresses only a small portion of the need. No new major funding round is currently expected.

The MORE program grew out of a 1980s state loan program called the Mobile Home Resident Ownership Program. Its original purpose was to help mobile home residents buy the land beneath their homes and operate parks as resident-owned cooperatives. Later, the program was expanded to help nonprofits and local governments acquire parks.

After early activity, the program faded. From 2013 to 2023, it issued only one loan despite tens of millions of dollars sitting available.

The 2023 overhaul widened the program’s purpose. Money could now be used not only to buy parks, but also to repair and replace infrastructure and, in some cases, dilapidated homes. Private owners became eligible to apply. The application process was simplified, and loan terms became more generous, with the possibility that many loans could eventually be forgiven.

Lawmakers also added $200 million through two one-time budget measures.

“It’s more responsive to the range of challenges that park residents and park owners are seeing,” said Brian Augusta, a housing policy lobbyist who supported the changes. About two-thirds of the money awarded through the program has gone to repair and rehabilitation work.

Caritas Corporation was the only organization to receive money through the previous version of the program in the decade before the revamp. State housing officials encouraged the nonprofit to return that money and reapply under the new program.

“It’s a great program, much easier,” said Tracy Bejotte, Caritas’ chief operating officer. “They really got their act together.”

For residents, the change is visible. Joel Beltran, a produce vendor who lives at Shady Lane with his wife and five children, said the park had once been a difficult place to live. He remembered sparks coming from outlets in his old mobile home.

“Today, it’s like Disneyland,” he said.

The need for repairs in California’s mobile home parks is widespread. Lower-income residents often lack the savings to fix their homes and may have fewer options for insurance or loans than traditional homeowners. Manufactured homes, especially older ones, are often difficult to insure affordably, and lenders may be reluctant to use them as collateral.

Homes built before 1976, when stronger federal manufactured housing standards took effect, are especially vulnerable to moisture, mold and fire damage. They often have poor insulation, making them uncomfortable and potentially dangerous during extreme heat or cold.

Andrew Rumbach, a mobile home park researcher at the Urban Institute, said many pre-1976 units are “probably no longer suitable to be living in.” California has an especially large share of those older units. Rumbach and his colleagues estimate that nearly 40% of the state’s mobile homes were built before the federal standards took effect, one of the highest shares in the country.

Even where the homes themselves are sound, the parks often rely on aging infrastructure. Many were built on cheaper land at the edges of communities and may not be connected to public utilities. Some are increasingly exposed to wildfire risk. Water, sewer and electrical systems are frequently owned and operated by park owners rather than public agencies.

“These systems tend to be run by whoever runs 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 of intentions, that person may not be well-equipped to run a water system.”

While Shady Lane has been largely completed, other MORE-funded projects have moved more slowly. Buena Vista Mobile Home Park in Palo Alto, owned and managed by the Santa Clara County Housing Authority, received the largest award among the 28 funded rehabilitation projects: $24.6 million.

The money, awarded in winter 2023, was originally intended to support a broad redevelopment. Plans called for replacing decades-old mobile homes, leaky gas lines and deteriorating roads. For renters living in the park, the housing authority proposed a mid-sized apartment complex with a community center.

By 2024, however, the project had been sharply reduced. Housing authority officials cited cost overruns, insufficient funding, resident opposition and a state deadline requiring the mobile home park funds to be used by mid-2027. Under a revised plan released late last year, the work will focus only on shared infrastructure, including water, gas, electric and sewer lines. Residents in 49 homes are expected to relocate during about eight months of construction and then return to their existing units.

The move-out date was initially set for February but has since been delayed to September.

“It keeps getting pushed back and pushed back,” said Sabrina Ramirez, a childcare worker who has lived at Buena Vista since 1999. The uncertainty has been stressful, she said, though the delay has benefited the many outdoor plants she began tending during the pandemic around her 1960s-era home. “My jungle’s loving it. I did not want to move them during the beginning of the year.”

Ramirez and other residents with plants are working with neighbors outside the park to care for flowers, succulents and fruiting vines while construction is underway.

The MORE program awarded $136 million in repair, replacement and acquisition funding in 2023, while denying applications totaling another $186 million.

That gap reflects the scale of the need, said Kate Rose, deputy director of the California Coalition for Rural Housing. It may also understate the problem. Some park owners may not have known about the revamped program in time to apply, while smaller owners may not have had the capacity to complete applications before the deadline.

For parks that were not funded, there is little immediate relief available. Much of the program’s money came from one-time state budget allocations, and the next state budget does not include another infusion. The remaining source is a special fund supported by park permit fees. At last count, that fund held $27 million and had grown by less than half of 1% over the previous two years. Rose called that amount “peanuts” compared with the statewide need.

That leaves owners of older parks with limited options.

When Self-Help Enterprises acquired La Hacienda Mobile Home Park in Fresno, McGovern-Garcia said the organization did not have a complete long-term revitalization strategy. “We simply knew there had to be an intervention,” she said.

The park had endured years of legal conflict and tension between residents and the previous owner. Its condition reflected that history. All but one of the units were built before 1980, McGovern-Garcia said. Nearly two dozen homes had been abandoned and boarded up, and many of the remaining units had water damage and mold.

Self-Help applied for a $3.7 million MORE grant to help homeowners replace their units with low-cost or interest-deferred loans. The application was denied.

“It would have changed the entire trajectory of the community,” McGovern-Garcia said. “It really is like getting Willy Wonka’s golden ticket for the mobile home world.”

Original source: CalMatters

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