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…
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.