Have you been following crosscut.com’s investigative series on how mobile home parks in Washington state are becoming less affordable? What is being done to protect one of the last reliable options for lower-income housing?
The first article I read in this ongoing series states: “Port Orchard-based mobile home management company Hurst & Son LLC has taken over 60 mobile home parks since 2017 and has since enacted major rent hikes and stopped covering park utilities and upkeep. Now residents are fighting back.”
Mobile parks are known to be havens for older adults; recent changes are putting vulnerable populations at risk. In the first article, 78-year-old Judie Short, a resident of Aberdeen’s Leisure Manor Estates, was quoted, “When we moved in five years ago, it was going to be an affordable place to live… now everybody’s nervous and nobody knows what’s going to happen next.”
After Hurst & Son LLC acquired Leisure Manor and a string of other mobile home parks, tenants have seen steep rent increases and alleged problems with maintenance that did not exist before.
Hope is on the horizon. “Leisure Manor has since become an example of how mobile park residents can band together with other communities to push back and defend their homes,” write the authors of the article.
That was back in August of 2023. Since then, Crosscut.com has published several additional articles about this difficult situation.
Here are links to the Crosscut series, by lead author Farah Eltohamy, in chronological order:
August 30, 2023:
https://crosscut.com/investigations/2023/08/wa-mobile-home-communities-organize-against-economic-eviction
October 6, 2023:
https://crosscut.com/investigations/2023/10/washington-ag-calls-rent-fee-rollbacks-aberdeen-mobile-park
December 1, 2023:
https://crosscut.com/investigations/2023/12/tumwater-mobile-home-tenants-lobby-against-rent-hikes
December 22, 2023:
https://crosscut.com/investigations/2023/12/what-tenant-protections-will-wa-lawmakers-consider-2024
February 6, 2024:
https://crosscut.com/investigations/2024/02/wa-mobile-home-tenants-add-health-complaints-investigation
