Santa Rosa mobile home park residents won’t let city forget its unfinished rent control law

At Thursday’s marathon session to set Santa Rosa City Council's policy priorities for the year, several residents showed up to remind officials the recent rent control law governing mobile home parks remains unfinished.

“We have a real mess,” mobile home owner and longtime advocate Roger McConnell said during public comment. ”This has gone on and on...We need help. We need to get this done. Please.”

On Dec. 6, the council updated a decades-old law restricting how much mobile home park owners can raise rent each year on the land under residents’ homes.

Previously, Santa Rosa’s mobile home rent control, governed by different laws than other housing, was tied to 100% of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). That’s the measure of prices for goods and services paid by consumers, with a 6% cap.

For 2023, that would have been 5.7%.

Over the years, Social Security payments, which many mobile home owners rely on, have failed to keep pace with CPI. That’s left some residents struggling to keep up with rent, even with the 8.7% cost of living adjustment for 2023.

Mobile homes are one of the few affordable housing options available, leaving those pushed to the financial edge with little other choice.

With that in mind, council members decided to limit rent hikes to 70% of the CPI with a 4% cap, the tightest limits in the county.

It was the culmination of years of advocacy by mobile home owners and a move meant to ease pressure on older lower income residents, who make up the majority of those living in Santa Rosa’s parks, according to surveys.

But, the updated ordinance went into effect 30 days after the vote on Jan. 6, leaving hundreds of residents at about a third of the city’s 16 rent-controlled parks with Jan. 1 rent increases unprotected by the new law.

That meant Carriage Court, Coddingtown, The Country, Roseland and Wayside Gardens got an increase of 5.7% instead of the 3.99% others received. Another park with a Jan. 1 rent hike issued a 4% bump.

“I’m here because I feel like I’ve been cheated,” Barbara Sue Wilson of the Country Mobile Home Park told city council members and staff Thursday. “With this 5.7% increase, I am lucky to have a little bit of money left over from Social Security. I ask you please fix this ordinance, and please don’t wait a whole year...”

“I am 85 years old, and in my home, I have to put layers and layers of clothes on because the gas bill is the only thing I can control.”

In council meetings leading up to last year’s vote, residents and advocates pushed officials to put a moratorium on rent increases until the law went into effect or pass an urgency ordinance so the law would be effective immediately.

The city attorney said, however, such actions require a high bar of demonstrated public health and safety impacts.

Still, when Windsor moved to change its own mobile home rent control law at the end of last year, officials put an urgency ordinance in place.

The result has been confusion, anger and disappointment in parks not covered by the new law and even in some that are.

At Santa Rosa Village, park owners at first took the stance that, despite a March 1 rent increase date, the old ordinance should apply because they gave residents the required 90-day notice before the new law took effect.

Park management sent out a late January message saying as much, and even though owners reversed course the next month under pressure from the city, it added to the stress and uncertainty that has surrounded the ordinance’s rollout.

Since the new year, residents have continued to show up at city council meetings to press for a solution, and while council members have assured they’re looking into fixes, they’ll have to thread the needle to also avoid stepping on park owners’ legal rights.

Dean Moser, president of HCA Property Management, Inc., which manages a quarter of Santa Rosa’s mobile home spaces, said that already the city went too far with new rent restrictions and gave short shrift to park owners’ concerns.

“We’ve had a hard time with the city,” he told me. “They went overboard against the park owners. From our side, the city rammed it through.”

He said that park owners and managers put huge sums into mobile home community infrastructure and shared spaces and are also hit hard by rising costs and inflation. The city’s actions have caused some owners to pull their charitable investments in Sonoma County housing programs, he added.

Later in the day during Thursday’s city goal setting discussion, several city council members raised the issue of revising the mobile home rent control law as a priority for their homelessness prevention and “housing for all” strategies.

Housing and Community Services Director Megan Basinger said staff was working with city attorneys to address concerns, but details were spare.

Council member Chris Rogers told me one possibility to even the playing field for park residents and owners could be to average out rents between this year and next to restore an equal baseline.

“If we’re serious about addressing homelessness, we need to first stop the bleeding and prevent people from slipping into homelessness in the first place,” he said.

For Tom LaPenna, president of the Santa Rosa Manufactured-Homeowners Association and a leader of the recent rent control efforts, whatever path forward, it needs to happen fast and with much clearer communication along the way.

They won’t give up until it’s seen through, he told me. Residents got the issue on officials’ radars by swarming the goal-setting meeting at the Flamingo Hotel in 2019.

At the same occasion, four years later, this time at the Bennett Valley Golf Course, LaPenna addressed the room.

“We need the help and we need it quick,” he said. “We need you to act, and we need you to respond.”

“In Your Corner” is a column that puts watchdog reporting to work for the community. If you have a concern, a tip, or a hunch, you can reach “In Your Corner” Columnist Marisa Endicott at 707-521-5470 or marisa.endicott@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @InYourCornerTPD and Facebook @InYourCornerTPD.