This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
The roads used to flood at Shady Lane Estates whenever it rained.
Water pooled on the mostly-dirt roads that ran through the mobile home park, combining with the waste of constantly backed-up septic tanks. Early on those wet mornings, parents would pack their kids into cars and ferry them through the noxious slurry to the front gate to catch the school bus.
Summer days weren’t much better.
Afternoon temperatures regularly exceed 110 degrees in unincorporated Coachella Valley. The park’s antique electrical system regularly failed, knocking out AC units and turning the decades-old, poorly-insulated mobile homes into family-sized kilns. Rubi Castro, a mother of four, remembers placing her small children in large buckets of cold water until the power lurched back on.
That chapter of the park’s history came to a celebrated end in late April when it reopened, renewed.
Funded partly through a state program aimed at rehabilitating California’s aging mobile home parks, Shady Lane’s robust new electrical system can now endure the draw of dozens of air conditioners. Pipes connect the park to the local water and sewer utilities. The roads are paved, there’s a shaded playground for kids and each of the 32 old mobile homes has been replaced with new, built-to-last units — plus eight more, to boot.
Castro, speaking on June a day that topped out at 113, said it’s been warm out since she moved back in April. But she’s comfortable in her new home where, she said proudly, “it feels like we live in winter.”
She “can’t wait to experience the rain.”
The glow-up of Shady Lane under the ownership of the nonprofit Caritas Corporation comes courtesy of another dramatic overhaul inside California’s housing department.
Back in 2023, as CalMatters reported, a state program designed to throw a financial lifeline to dilapidated mobile home parks had gone largely unused and forgotten for at least a decade thanks to a labyrinthine application process and a focus too narrow to help most applicants.
That year it was stripped down to its studs, rebuilt and renamed the Manufactured Housing Opportunity and Revitalization (MORE) program.
Along with funding from Riverside County and the city of Coachella, the Shady Lane overhaul received $10.6 million, one of 28 parks to receive an award and the first rehab project to be completed. Another 19 have broken ground, according to the state housing department.
For a state facing a crippling housing affordability crisis and an affordable housing financing system often characterized as sclerotic and costly, the transformation is a rare bit of unquestionably good news.
But the short history of the program also underlines just how challenging it is to maintain and rehabilitate old mobile home parks, a largely overlooked source of the state’s scant low-cost housing stock.
California is home to 4,635 mobile home parks, according to the state housing department. Together they provide space for nearly half a million units. Most are owner-occupied. They’re also significantly cheaper than comparably sized single-family homes or townhouses, making them one of the few homeownership opportunities that is even plausibly affordable to Californians with lower incomes.
“While it’s not as shiny or flashy as a big beautiful new rental apartment, it’s a vital source of affordable housing,” said Betsy McGovern-Garcia, vice president of Self-Help Enterprises, an affordable housing developer in the San Joaquin Valley which manages two parks.
Even after receiving state funding through the MORE program, some projects are still mired in permitting delays or have been scaled back for lack of funding. And despite awarding nearly $140 million to more than two dozen parks that hold more than 1,000 mobile homes, housing advocates say that likely covers just a small fraction of the need.
No more money is on the horizon.
A new program for old parks
The program emerged from the bureaucratic makeover of a 1980s state loan initiative called the Mobile Home Resident Ownership Program. As implied by the name, it was initially focused on helping California’s mobile home owners — who typically own their units, but not the land on which they sit — to buy their parks and run them as resident-owned cooperatives. Later, that narrow purpose was expanded to fund park purchases by nonprofits and local governments.
After an initial wave of acquisitions early on, the program fell into disuse. Between 2013 and 2023, it awarded only a single loan, despite having tens of millions of dollars in the bank.
The 2023 overhaul expanded the program to serve a separate, pressing concern: The sorry state of many of California’s mobile home parks. Funds could now be used not just to fund purchases, but to repair and replace park infrastructure and even the dilapidated units themselves. Private owners could apply. The application was simplified and the terms made much more generous such that many of the loans might ultimately be forgiven.
To top it off, lawmakers threw in an additional $200 million through two one-off budget bills.
“It’s more responsive to the range of challenges that park residents and park owners are seeing,” said Brian Augusta, a housing policy lobbyist who advocated for the change. Case in point: Roughly two-thirds of the funds awarded through the program went to repair and rehabilitation projects.
The Caritas Corporation was the one organization to receive funding through the older version of the program in the preceding decade. Officials at the state housing department encouraged the nonprofit to give the money back and reapply for more funding through the new one.
“It’s a great program, much easier,” said Tracy Bejotte, chief operating officer at Caritas. “They really got their act together.”
The proof, she said, is Shady Lane.
“It used to be a rough, tough place,” said Joel Beltran, a produce vendor at a local shop, who lives at the park with his wife and five children. He recalls how sparks would leap from the outlets of his old mobile unit.
“Today, it’s like Disneyland,” he said.
The challenge of aging parks
The high cost of home upkeep and repair is a challenge bedeviling communities across the country, but mobile home parks in California make for a particularly tough case.
Park residents are much less likely to have the spare money necessary to make home repairs. Nor are they as likely as traditional homeowners to be able to turn to insurance or home loans. Affordable coverage for manufactured housing can be hard to come by and banks don’t typically see them as worthy collateral.
That’s especially true of older units, many of which were never designed to get old in the first place. Those built prior to 1976, when more onerous federal standards went into effect, are particularly vulnerable to moisture, mold and fire damage. They are often poorly insulated, making them uncomfortable — even dangerous — when temperatures fall or spike.
Many of these pre-’76 units are ”probably no longer suitable to be living in,” said Andrew Rumbach, who has studied mobile home parks at the Urban Institute. They’re also disproportionately common in California. According to estimates by Rumbach and his colleagues, nearly 40% of California’s mobile homes were built before federal regulations kicked in, among the largest shares of any state.
Even if a park’s units are in good shape, the parks themselves are often not. Frequently located on the least desirable tracts of land along urban fringes, they are much more likely to be disconnected from public utilities and, increasingly, at risk of wildfire. Sewage, water and electrical infrastructure is frequently owned and operated by the park owners themselves.
“These systems tend to be run by whoever runs the park, which may be an absentee owner or a property manager,” said Gregory Pierce, a UCLA researcher who studies urban planning and water insecurity. “Even if they have the best of intentions, that person may not be well-equipped to run a water system.”
Still waiting
Even as the Shady Lane project has been mostly wrapped up for months now, the promised overhaul of Buena Vista Mobile Home Park in Palo Alto has barely begun.
Of the 28 rehabilitation projects awarded funding through the MORE program, Buena Vista, owned and managed by the Santa Clara County Housing Authority, received the most: $24.6 million.
Awarded in the winter of 2023, those funds were initially slated for a full-scale redevelopment project. Decades-old mobile homes would be replaced with new models, as would the community’s leaky gas lines and patchy roads. For the park’s renters, the housing authority proposed a mid-sized apartment complex with a community center.
But in 2024, those ambitions were radically scaled back. Housing authority officials blamed the change of plans on unanticipated cost overruns, a lack of sufficient funding, resident pushback and the fact that the state’s mobile home renovation funding came with a use-it-or-lose-it deadline of mid-2027. In a new plan released late last year, only the park’s common infrastructure — the water, gas, power and sewer lines — will be replaced. Residents from 49 homes have been told that they will be relocated during the eight months of construction and then returned to their existing units.
The move-out date was originally scheduled for February. It has since been bumped to September.
“It keeps getting pushed back and pushed back,” said Sabrina Ramirez, a childcare worker who has lived at the park since 1999. The uncertainty has been stressful. But the delay through the summer has been good for her dozens and dozens of outdoor plants — a pandemic passion project that now surrounds her 1960s-era home. “My jungle’s loving it. I did not want to move them during the beginning of the year.”
She and Buena Vista’s other plant parents are coordinating with neighbors outside the park to care for the flowers, succulents and fruiting vines once construction begins.
Tapped out
The MORE program ultimately doled out $136 million in repair, replacement and acquisition grants in 2023, but denied applications that added up to another $186 million.
That mismatch between the money requested and the funding available reflects how much need is out there — but it’s also likely an understatement, said Kate Rose, deputy director at the California Coalition for Rural Housing, a Sacramento-based nonprofit. The owners of many parks may simply not have applied because they hadn’t yet heard about the new program. Others — mom and pop owners — might not have had the bandwidth to submit an application on time.
For those projects that lost out or never applied in the first place, additional help is not on the way. The bulk of the program’s prior funding came through one-time budget allocations. The coming year’s strained state budget does not include a top up. The remainder came from a special fund fed with park permit fees. At last count, that fund had $27 million and has grown at less than half of 1% over the last two years. That’s not enough for another statewide funding round, said Rose, who described the total as “peanuts.”
For owners of aging mobile home parks, that doesn’t leave many other options.
When Self-Help Enterprises acquired La Hacienda Mobile Home Park in Fresno, “we really didn’t have a long-term revitalization plan,” said McGovern-Garcia. “We simply knew there had to be an intervention.”
After years of legal turmoil and bad blood between the park’s residents and the prior owner, the site was in rough shape. All of the units except one were built before 1980, she said. Nearly two dozen had been abandoned and left boarded up. Most were beset with water damage and mold.
Self-Help applied for a $3.7 million improvement grant hoping to provide the home owners with low-cost or interest-deferred loans to fund the replacement of the units. They didn’t get it.
“It would have changed the entire trajectory of the community,” said McGovern-Garcia. “It really is like getting Willy Wonka’s golden ticket for the mobile home world.”
