The San Jose Housing and Community Development Commission is recommending not to raise rents for residents living in the city’s 58 mobile home parks.
A majority of commissioners on Thursday didn’t support a proposed 10% increase to space rents once a mobile home is sold. The city Housing Department proposed the increase as a way to provide more revenue for capital improvements as it updates its decades-old mobile home rent policy. Commissioners voted 9-4 to accept only changes to the policy that conform with Assembly Bill 2782, which ended long-term leases from being exempt from excessive rent hikes.
Under the existing policy, property owners are allowed a 3% to 7% rent increase on each parcel every year. Anything more than that requires city approval, and owners can’t increase rent to market rate prices except when a property is abandoned, a resident is evicted or when a sale falls through.
The proposed changes will be heard by the San Jose City Council on Jan. 27.
“There wasn’t real data to support any of the changes,” Commission Chair Ruben Navarro told San José Spotlight.
Mobile homes, or manufactured homes, are typically owned by the people residing in them — though they don’t own the land. Homeowners pay mobile park owners monthly to rent plots of land, and park owners maintain everything outside the home, including gas and water pipes.
Commissioner Ryan Jasinsky, a mobile home park owner, said raising rent at the time of sale will protect existing mobile home residents. He said it will allow owners to sustain the mobile home parks while reducing fair return hearings. This is when a landlord requests a rent increase among all residents above the allowable amount in order to get a fair return on investment.
“You cannot properly prepare for that if you’re on a fixed income,” Jasinsky said at the meeting. “If everyone wants these communities to be around for 20, 30, 40 more years, something has to change or the system will break. We will see fair return hearings, we will see park sales. We will see park closures.”
The city has more than 10,000 mobile home spaces across 58 mobile home parks that fall under the rent policy, according to city data. They are considered one of the city’s last affordable housing options. At San Jose Verde Mobile Home Park, space rent varies from $800 to $1,650 a month.
Dozens of residents and advocates spoke against the proposed rent increase.
Jacky Morales-Ferrand, former city housing director, said there is no evidence that raising rents is necessary. She said when mobile home park owners wanted similar changes in 2017 when she was director, the housing department did not support it.
“Balancing the interest of mobile home residents and owners is never easy,” Morales-Ferrand said at the meeting. “The staff memo does not clearly identify the specific problem that vacancy decontrol is intended to solve … without that it’s clear that this proposal is merely designed to provide additional revenue for park owners.”
Nancy Stevens, a mobile home resident in Millpond Mobile Home Park, said increasing rent will make it harder to sell her home and cause her to sell it at a lower price. Real estate agents estimate that for every $100 in space rent increases, the value of the home drops $10,000.
Mobile home owners said most property owners require buyers to make at least three times the housing expense, including space rent.
Stevens said that the average space rent of the homes for sale now in her park is $1,269 a month. If a park has 370 homes, that would mean property owners are collecting nearly $470,000 every month, or a $5.6 million a year.
“To me it’s just greed. They are already making so much money,” Stevens told San José Spotlight. “I’m hoping I can sell before (this proposal) happens.”
Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X.