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…
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:
Economy booming? Better make housing more expensive!
Economy crashing? Better make housing more expensive!
Buyers just cannot win.
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 communists did also help organize a lot of peasants before the revolution. That being said, they just created the conditions for a successful uprising, they didn't guide the uprising beyond coordinating when they happened so the landlords couldn't put them down one by one.
so they couldn’t put them down one by one.
this is the most important part of communism
I mean, seriously, we've got all our own tools. Just... you know... look the other way every now and again.
I keep thinking this every time I see a headline like this, especially as the price of necessities that still require labor inputs go up (food, water, etc)
People are going to choose paying for food over housing every time, much easier to fend off an eviction
the rental market is going to be what starts it in the west
I'd believe it, if I didn't believe that westerners are a lost cause because they've all been lobotomized
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.)
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.
my double wide is on land i own on a foundation and is like 35 years old and in great shape. had one roof job and some cheap siding put on it before i bought it. been through storms and an earthquake. probably just depends on the design/quality like many things.
ok cool yeah mine is technically "manufactured" it can't be moved it was built in 2 parts and assembled on the foundation. but very interesting i didn't know about those grades. i've seen full renovations done on ones like mine and they can be amazing looking like vacation homes. mine is still very outdated interior but we've just been too exhausted/broke to do a full renovation yet. surprisingly it's gained 30k in value after we only paid as much for it as someone would for a new pickup truck.. but i guess the housing market is insane. i still think like a tornado or something would obliterate this place and we have plans to eventually build a storm shelter/garage
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.
NYer article: "What Happens When Investment Firms Acquire Trailer Parks"
Residents of such parks can buy their mobile homes, but often they must rent the land that their homes sit on, and in many states they are excluded from the basic legal protections that cover tenants in rented houses or apartments, such as mandatory notice periods for rent increases and evictions. One sign that a large investment firm has taken over a neighborhood is a dramatic spike in lot rent. Once a home is stationed on a lot, it is not always possible to move it; if it is possible, doing so can cost as much as ten thousand dollars. Most buyers aren’t eligible for fifteen- or thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages, so many of them finance their homes with high-interest “chattel loans,” made against personal property. “The vulnerability of these residents is part of the business model,” Sullivan said. “This is a captive class of tenant.” A leader of an association for mobile-home owners in Washington State has compared life in a mobile-home park to “a feudal system.”
. . .
Rolfe met Dave Reynolds, an accountant whose parents owned a mobile-home park in Colorado, at a mobile-home-investing conference in 2006, where both of them were speaking. Soon afterward, they created Mobile Home University, a program for potential park owners which offered, among other things, three-day seminars in Southern California and Denver, for almost two thousand dollars a ticket. (The program is currently being offered virtually.) Later, they established a partnership that invests in mobile-home parks. In 2017, Rolfe was reported to have compared a typical mobile-home park to “a Waffle House where customers are chained to their booths.” (He has said that the quote was taken out of context, and was meant to refer only to the “incredibly consistent revenue” of mobile-home parks.) Esther Sullivan, who attended one of Rolfe and Reynolds’s Mobile Home University seminars in California while researching her book, summarized the advice that they offered participants: “Look for a park that’s got high occupancy and that doesn’t need a lot of investment. Take out any possible amenity you’d ever need to invest in, such as a playground or a pool that’s going to need insurance. Make sure it’s got a nice sign, and pawn off any maintenance costs onto your tenants.”
JFC
Take out any possible amenity you’d ever need to invest in, such as a playground or a pool that’s going to need insurance.
So not only exploit at-risk people for pensions, but also make living less convenient
well let's hope they have the guns to stop the sheriff from doing anything. sewage in bathtubs and brown water? fuck paying anything.
Basically the premise of the bell riots in ds9. Don't have your papers? To the camp
Yeah it was actually pretty solid to add that into the canon
You don't get to have a home, and/but you can't stay here :agony-soviet:
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
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.
because you're supposed to rent. you're supposed to suffer. you're supposed to be a subject.
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.
