Latino mobile home park residents denounce conditions, allege discrimination

Mariano Jacobo Piñón, a resident at the Fairgrounds United mobile home park in Lake County, Ohio, said that for months he warned park managers about the lack of maintenance at the grounds, especially regarding a tree near his house, but that they did not listen to him.

"One night a hurricane warning came and I was with my wife and granddaughters at home and we felt a huge blow. It was the tree that fell on the roof and broke the house. Now we can't live there. We don't know what to do because the managers and no one has helped us," said Piñón, an immigrant from Mexico.

At nearby Perry Mobile Home Park, resident Vicente Hernández, 53, a trailer mechanic, said the worst time is the winter, "because they don't remove the snow and the children have to walk in the mornings to catch the bus to school, and often they slip and fall. There are also problems with the sewage drains. The fumes come back up and make us sick."

Piñón and Hernández are among the Ohio residents who filed a lawsuit in 2022 against the companies that own the two mobile home parks and the company that does the water metering. The lawsuit alleges that the companies violated state law by refusing to provide written lease agreements, unlawfully increasing the costs of living at the parks, failing to maintain the common areas and engaging in harassing and discriminatory conduct.

Hernández and Fairgrounds United resident Ricardo Rodríguez, 40, said that since their mobile home parks changed owners, services that were once included as part of the rent, such as water, are now billed separately at much higher prices.

"The rents have gone up in these properties, the bills have gone up, and the maintenance is very bad. The sewage is exposed to the air and causes a lot of nausea and headaches," said Veronica Isabel Dahlberg, executive director of HOLA Ohio , a nonprofit group assisting Latino state residents, which has advised mobile home park residents who sued. "The managers are very aggressive with the residents. People are afraid to talk to the park managers because they are afraid they are going to lose their home. So that is no way to live."

The residents said they sued even though many of them are undocumented.

"They always tell us that if we don't like it, we can leave. But we are going to keep fighting, because many people think that because we don't have documents, we don't have rights, but we are human beings," Rodríguez said.

Noticias Telemundo asked Jones Estates Fairgrounds LLC and Jones Estates Perry LLC, the companies that own the two parks, for comment on the lawsuit.

Melissa Solomon, Jones Estates' director of corporate governance and transactions, said by email that the company will not make "any comments on the pending litigation." 5 Star Metering, the water service provider, which that is also being sued, did not respond to a request for comment.

In August, Lake County Common Pleas Judge Patrick J. Condon ruled that Jones Estates did send a one-year lease to the tenants, so that claim will not be pursued at trial.

Regarding the charges for water and sewage services, the court considers that "there are factual issues regarding the actual charges" and that "they are excessive," he wrote, so that allegation will go to trial.

The complaints about the lack of attention to requests from Latino residents and accusations of discrimination will also go to the trial, the judge said.

Hearings related to the lawsuit are expected to begin in the first weeks of December.

Mobile home parks — but not mobile Of the 7.22 million residents of mobile homes (also known as manufactured homes ) in the U.S., 1.32 million, or 18%, identify as Hispanic, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development's 2023 American Housing Survey .

Residents can buy their homes, but they often must rent the land on which the homes are located, often in lots known as mobile home parks — a term that experts say does not reflect the nature of the homes, since most cannot be easily moved for relocation.

"They are not mobile because the house is attached to a concrete slab, and in many cases they are old. If you try to move it, there is always the chance that the house will break and be damaged, and it costs between $8,000 and $12,000. It is very expensive," said Yvonne Maldonado, a co-director of Manufactured Housing Action , a nonprofit group that focuses on such communities. "Also, the most important thing is that there is nowhere to move it, because many states do not allow you to move a house or a plot of land or to another park."

Since 2016, Maldonado has lived in a mobile home park in New York state. She said she has also experienced the constant rent increases firsthand, going from paying $695 when she arrived to $1,100 today.

"But in 2019, a law was passed in New York state that puts a limit on the annual rent increase for manufactured homes — but that does not happen in all states," she said.

Complaints in Colorado In Foxridge Farm, a mobile home park in Arapahoe County, Colorado, Ana Eugenia Báez, 55, and other residents say the park has enforced arbitrary parking policies, creating parking spaces far from their homes for which they have to pay an extra fee, towing cars parked on the streets without notice and charging extra fees when residents receive visitors with cars, among other things.

Although park rules allow two to four spaces per dwelling depending on the type of home, residents say that is not enough, saying the mobile home park is far from any public transportation and residents need cars to get to work. They also say the new parking lots are unsafe.

"Even though we live in prefabricated houses, we have the right to live with dignity," Báez said.

Andrea Chiriboga-Flor, executive director of Justice for the People Center , a nonprofit legal organization that advises Foxridge Farm residents, said: "These residents are struggling because the landlord over the last two years is not only raising the rent but is also putting in place unfair rules that we believe are not legal. From one day to the next, they decided that no one can park on the street, and now you have to pay for your parking. That has caused a crisis in the park, and there are families who have had to move against their will."

Complaints by Báez and her neighbors prompted an inspection by the Colorado Mobile Home Oversight Program this year. It found that Ascentia, the company that owns the park, had violated several state laws. Ascentia appealed the decision, and the neighbors and the company are in the middle of a legal process in administrative court.

Asked for comment, Ascentia, which has 39 such communities in seven states, according to information on its website , said in a statement that the parking rules are not new and that they date back decades but had not been implemented and are "norms for the improvement of the community."

The company said that over two years, it invested $350,000 to build the parking lots and that they are "lit and have security cameras." Most of the violations detected by the Colorado Mobile Home Monitoring Program "have been resolved," Ascentia President Marko Vukovich said in a statement.

"The two pending issues for hearing concern the state's demand that we not be allowed to charge residents for the use of new parking lots, and its demand that the decades-old ban on street parking be declared unreasonable. We consider these demands to constitute an unconstitutional abuse of state power," Vukovich said.

A home — but not classified as real estate More than a fifth of manufactured-home owners earned less than $20,000 a year in 2021, and more than half earned less than $50,000 a year, according to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP), a nonprofit organization that monitors the manufactured home market .

Because they are cheaper homes, they are attractive to lower-income workers, including migrants who have recently arrived in the country or who are undocumented. "However, these houses are not classified as real estate but as personal property, and that means they have fewer protections," said Esther Sullivan, an associate sociology professor at the University of Colorado in Denver and author of the book " Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place ."

The situation means that, in many states, residents of the parks are excluded from basic legal protections that cover tenants of rented houses or apartments, such as mandatory notice periods for rent increases and evictions, among other things.

Of the 1.32 million Hispanic-led households living in manufactured homes, 869,000 report owning their units, according to census data . Of those, half are in manufactured home communities where they pay rent for their lots; the other half do not.

While decoupling housing from the underlying land lowers the upfront expense of homeownership, it comes with significant challenges for the tenant-owners, a report by the nonprofit group Prosperity Now found in 2021.

Over the past decade, as income inequality has increased, corporate investors have turned to mobile home parks as a growth market.

"We have recently seen private equity enter the manufactured housing market," PESP housing research coordinator Madeline Bankson said. "And what we typically see is that they often raise rents significantly — we also see a lot of issues that residents report due to maintenance problems."

In their acquisitions of manufactured housing parks, many private equity firms have enlisted the help of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored lending enterprises that guarantee most mortgages.

PESP notes that Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac funded nearly half (49%) of the privately owned parks it monitored, which has caught the attention of national lawmakers.

In June 2023 , Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.; Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; and John Fetterman, D-Pa., sponsored a bill to establish minimum standards for tenants in such parks that receive federal funding through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or the Federal Housing Administration.

"As the housing crisis continues to impact American families, predatory landlords are raising rents and taking advantage of mobile home tenants who lack adequate legal protections," Shaheen told Noticias Telemundo in a statement.

Cheaper, but with risks With an average price of $127,250 in 2022, manufactured homes "are a vital source of affordable housing for rural and low-income families," according to PESP researchers.

Though mobile homes are cheaper, they come with financial and safety risks.

Banks may not be as open to financing that type of housing. Depending on the location and the house, the quality may be poorer, said Juan Pablo Garnham , head of communications and policies at Princeton University's Eviction Lab.

In addition, most states do not have laws like New York's that cap rent increases in mobile home parks, "so even if you own your [mobile] home, the cost of renting the land can go up a lot," Chiriboga-Flor said.

During weather emergencies, the homes have structural limitations. During hurricanes, the National Weather Service has said, 72% of deaths occur in homes, and of those, 54% occur in mobile homes.

Garnham said residents should try to avoid homes that are more than 30 or 40 years old because they deteriorate more easily. There can also be issues with moisture and mold, and in some cases the homes are not well-connected to water or electricity or gas.

Chiriboga-Flor recommended that people review any mobile home contract before they sign it. She also urged mobile home park residents to organize their communities and if there are complaints, to do it as a group, which is more effective.