Rhode Island is facing a housing crisis, and the problem could become more acute as investment firms try to scoop up mobile home parks across the state. But the residents of these trailer parks aren’t always at the mercy of outside investors. Rhode Island law allows the residents to exercise a right of first refusal if they agree to purchase the trailer park themselves.
Portsmouth Town Councilor Sharlene Patton is leading an effort to convince the residents of Sunny Acres Trailer Park to band together and buy it. They’re receiving help from an organization called the Cooperative Development Institute. As reported by the Providence Journal, Patton has encountered opposition, and at times, outright hostility from neighbors.
To learn more, morning host Luis Hernandez spoke with Nora Gosselin, CDI’s director of resident acquisitions, and Portsmouth’s Sharlene Patton.
Interview highlights
On a Rhode Island law allowing residents of a mobile home park to purchase their property, nullifying a sale to an outside firm
Nora Gosselin: All New England states, including here in Rhode Island, have a form of an opportunity to purchase or a first refusal law. The model really started in the mid-’80s in New Hampshire, and residents started using that law to come to the table as a buyer and purchase their communities as a cooperative or a residence association; all the land and infrastructure in common… In Rhode Island, I think since the late 1980s, we’ve had this law that allows residents to receive notice of sale and then come to the table.
As a homeowner in a manufactured housing community, you have this strange relationship where you are a renter on leased land... Their biggest asset is on that land. They can’t just pick up and move so they have the right, if the will of the community is there, if the financing makes sense, to buy that community.
On the challenge of convincing residents to purchase a mobile home park
Gosselin: It’s a very unfair rock and a hard place that resident homeowners are put in. In today’s market where you have buyers like Crown Communities, the interested third party here — it’s a private equity company. The price escalation for these communities is incredible in the last five, certainly 10 years. Folks tell me like, “I like the idea of resident ownership. I literally just cannot build that into my budget. It should not be this momentous, expensive, insane process for me to become a landowner in addition to the homeowner here.”
On what will happen if Sunny Acres in Portsmouth is sold to an outside firm
Sharlene Patton: [The firm] could come in after five years and say that they want to redevelop the land into something else. Right now, the law is that they give the [home] owners a one year notice [and a] $4,000 relocation amount. But that also means that you need to remove your home from the property and then whatever it costs, you’ll get reimbursed the difference of that once your home is off the land.
On her efforts to ask Sunny Acres residents to purchase the community
Patton: A group of us… were going door to door to explain the situation [to] get signatures. Some people, I think, don’t understand or don’t want to get involved... I think that they’re not interested because of the amount — $13 million is a very high amount. Everyone knows that the lot fees will go up. We don’t have a guarantee or a set amount of what they could be… Either way, lot fees will go up no matter who purchases. But if it’s owner-occupied, you have a little more leeway, guaranteeing that we can keep it low-to-moderate income housing…We’ve just been trying to explain what’s really going on. It’s been kind of hard. We’ve had some pushback from the management, collecting their own signatures for the out-of-state company to try to go against us.
I grew up here. I’ve seen the changes. It’s a great community. We have children to seniors living here. A lot of low income families live here. Why not preserve what we have and come together and work together? [That’s] what I’m hoping that we all get to.
