Mobile Home Rent Control: Designing Local Regulations

Abstract

Harsh, often desperate, circumstances surround the rental of mobile home park sites-circumstances that far exceed the national crisis in affordable housing. As a result, park residents need their interests as tenants protected. Mobile home park tenants are often some of society's most vulnerable persons, the elderly and poorer citizens, while the park owners have considerable power, sometimes monopoly power, over all mobile home park sites. Many abuses of that power occur. At stake for tenants is what is frequently their only asset—the mobile home itself. As a result, antieviction statutes and mobile home rent control laws are being used today in many California communities and in some other states.