Detached homes and multifamily apartments get most of the attention when the subject is housing, but more than 18 million Americans live in what are often called mobile home parks—which are de facto the largest source of affordable housing in the United States.
As lot rents rise, this source of affordable housing is at risk. But there has emerged a growing movement of resident-owned cooperatives, also known as ROCs. Today, more than 22,000 families who own manufactured housing units in more than 300 manufactured home parks across the United States are member-owners of these cooperatives.
On Oct. 16, Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ) and Shelterforce co-sponsored a webinar featuring a panel of residents, advocates, and technical assistance providers who discussed the ins and outs of how to build land security for manufactured housing owners, by enabling mobile home communities to work together to acquire and own the land jointly.
The moderators were NPQ economic justice senior editor Steve Dubb and Shelterforce CEO and publisher Schlonn Hawkins. The panelists were:
Andrea Chiriboga-Flor, executive director of Justice for the People Legal Center in Denver, Colorado.
Kelly Jensen, board president at Paradise Village Cooperative in Johnstown, Colorado.
Doug McElroy, past president of the board of the Pleasant Park Mobile Home cooperative in Great Falls, Montana.
Emily Thaden, president of ROC-USA, a national organization that supports resident ownership of mobile home communities nationwide.
Editor’s note: This transcript has been lightly edited.
Steve Dubb: Andrea, talk a little bit about your article for NPQ and the work you’ve done organizing with Montevista in Denver.
Andrea Chiriboga-Flor: I’m the executive director for Justice for the People Legal Center. I’m an organizer. I’m not a lawyer, and that’s very intentional. I never will be. But I do tell lawyers what to do, because we feel it’s important to weaponize lawyers and lawyering skills to build movements in Colorado. In 2022, a mobile home park went up for sale in Denver, and residents organized, and we were able to purchase this mobile home park with about 78 families, most of them Latinx residents, working class people. And so that’s mostly what [my] article [in Nonprofit Quarterly] is about, but also the 10-year fight that it actually took to get to this point where it’s possible to purchase mobile home parks. Throughout the conversation, I’ll be talking more about that journey, what it really took to get here. I’m really happy to be here with you all.
Schlonn Hawkins: Doug, please talk briefly about your work with organizing and in leadership at Pleasant Park in Great Falls.
Doug McElroy: I’m a resident member, owner, and also the former president of residential community in Great Falls, Montana. I’ve resided in this community for over 20 years, and I’m employed with a nonprofit organization and have several years’ worth of experience serving on boards and councils. When we began our exploration into becoming a resident-owned community, I was able to bring that experience to our community. I began serving on the board during the initial stages of our pre-purchase as the vice president of the board, and then I was later voted into the position of president in May of 2022. I served out my term at the end of this year in May, and I decided that at that point in time, I’d take a step back and let the community have a different perspective and open the doors for more membership involvement. We became a resident-owned community during the pandemic, so … we navigated our way virtually. Everything was via Zoom online, and that was a bit of a challenge in itself, but we did it, and in September of 2020, we became a resident-owned community.
We have 48 sites in Pleasant Park Community in Great Falls, and we currently have two vacant lots and two empty homes. But our greatest challenge so far has probably been in navigating the property management acquisition. We’re still growing through it all. And I love the park, and honestly, it’s probably by far, one of the most affordable housing options, in my humble opinion.
Dubb: Kelly, could you talk briefly about your work and leadership role with Paradise Village in Johnstown? And if you want to throw in some stuff about ROC USA, you can do that as well.
Kelly Jensen: I live in Johnstown, Colorado. That’s about 40 miles north of Denver. I have lived in my community now for 28 years—the last two as a cooperative. Quite a bit of difference from ownership owned by someone else, and owning your own park. I spent 40 years working on the railroad. I am now retired and work part time at the Y, so I do a little bit of nonprofit work, too. I have enjoyed working these kind of leadership roles all my life. I started in 4H at a very young age, and all through the railroading career, I sat on councils. I was a union rep. I worked both sides, management and union side, so a little bit of everything.
We have a 40-unit community here, 76 percent Hispanic. So that creates some kind of problems and hurdles, because I don’t speak that much Spanish. I’m learning more and more every day, but everything we do is in Spanish and English, so that’s one thing that we have to really work towards here. I am very happy to be here, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m so glad we’re a cooperative now.
Hawkins: I’m very happy to share this time with Emily. She’s also a board member of Shelterforce, and a huge champion of this work.
Emily Thaden: I want to thank NPQ and Shelterforce for creating this opportunity for us to talk about resident-owned communities and the challenges that manufactured housing communities are facing across the country. The work you do is so impressive and important.
I am the new president of ROC USA, and so I’m the least seasoned on this call in terms of expertise, but I’m really, really excited to be joining ROC USA. We are a social enterprise that is committed to helping residents in manufactured housing communities to community organize, purchase their communities, and then democratically govern them as resident-owned co-ops. Our vision is to bring the resident-owned community model to millions of families and to millions of residents in manufactured housing communities across the country. To date, we have helped 332 communities become ROCs, and that includes 23,000 homes in 21 states. I’d love to see that number scale, because there are 43,000 manufactured housing communities in America that are potentially at risk of displacement and other pressures where they could greatly benefit from some form of a community ownership or nonprofit ownership model.
Dubb: Manufactured housing—or mobile home parks, as they’re commonly called—are the most common naturally occurring form of affordable housing in the United States, but there are a lot of misconceptions about them. [Let’s] set the stage and talk about how these communities work and the challenges they have today.
Jensen: Most people … when they think of a trailer park, they think of trailer trash. We’re anything but trailer trash. We all have occupations. We all have families. We are all contributors to our communities—both our own small community of the mobile home park and also of our large communities. We’re all very hard workers. We are people that care about each other, and as I became more involved in this, I know my neighbors now more than I knew them before. I lived here 28 years and barely knew anybody. After we got this together, we all worked together, and now I know people. I know them all by first name. I know their kids and everything. That’s something I never would have done before.
The stigma is there. It’s really hard to get rid of. And a lot of times people go, where do you live? And most people will say, Oh, I live in “that part of town.” They will not tell you they live in a mobile home park, because people look down on you. There’s no reason to do that. We have got attorneys, we’ve got doctors, we’ve got therapists, we’ve got office workers, we’ve got factory workers, we’ve got farmers. We’ve got everyone living here. Everybody that works here works hard. There’s nobody that just sits around and does nothing. We are contributors to our communities.
Chiriboga-Flor: For us, we realize that mobile homes are especially important for immigrant populations in the Latinx community, for a lot of reasons. First, some Latinx families can’t apply for public subsidies or can’t apply for mainstream loans based on immigration status. And so sometimes owning a mobile home is the only way for folks to own a home.
As an organization that focuses on the intersections of race and gender and class, it’s really important to acknowledge that that is a really important source of housing for certain populations.
Obviously, mobile home is a misnomer, [but] I use that term. Most people use manufactured housing now. I use [mobile home] because in Spanish, it’s hard to translate manufactured homes in a way that makes sense. People still kind of call mobile homes trailitas, which is an endearing way of saying trailers.
I think [of] a few other misconceptions: the density is actually a lot higher than people say. People think that they’re very spread out, but actually, there’s sometimes five, six people living in a home. So that’s a misconception. [Another misconception] is like, who is living there? I think Kelly spoke really well to that. But yeah, these are working class people. These are our workforce. In mountain towns, sometimes it’s the only workforce housing.
Once you start to notice mobile homes, you’ll see them everywhere, especially in Colorado when you’re going through the mountains. And it’s kind of interesting that the highest population or density of mobile homes is actually in the city, in the urban areas, and so for all different types of regions—at least in Colorado—this is a vital source of affordable housing.
One other thing I’ll say is that a lot of the homes are pre-1976, pre-HUD standards, [when] it had to revamp their standards to improve conditions. But when parks become owned and rent stabilizes or decreases, sometimes people are actually able to replace their homes, improve their homes. And some of the newer homes, modular homes and manufactured homes, can be just as safe as stick built homes. Because I think, as we’ve seen, we’re seeing these hurricanes all across the East Coast and in Florida. That’s always a concern. But instead of thinking, how do we completely replace these with apartments or whatever, we need to think about how we stabilize these communities so they can improve their own homes and their security living there.
Jensen: One thing that’s hard about living in a mobile home park: it’s hard for people to make improvements, because we can’t get the loans that other people can get. If you want to make any improvements, it will be a personal loan with very high interest rates, and it’s just very hard to do. And then with the older homes, there’s only so much you can do legally to make them a better place to live. People have done it. I mean, they’ve made their homes beautiful. They’re their homes. … But it’s hard to do. The money is just hard to get if you live in a mobile home community.
Hawkins: What is a resident-owned community and how does it operate? And what are the benefits and challenges of cooperative resident land ownership for mobile home owners?
McElroy: One of the things that I think is a benefit to being a resident owned community is that suddenly the entire community understands that there not only are rules that we make, but there are responsibilities as well. We get the opportunity to create a community that we are a part of, that we appreciate, and we have control over. We have control as a community, as members, to be able to determine what sort of rates we need to set our—for lack of better terms—our lot rent to in order to make sure that our budget needs are met. So resident-owned community is exciting for people to be able to be a part of, but it’s also an opportunity for us to learn what our responsibilities are in order to improve ourselves.
Jensen: Being a part of resident-owned community, we’re in charge of everything we do. It’s a business. It’s no longer just there’s an owner out there that’s going to tell us what to do. We are now the owners. So we have to make our rules, we have to make our bylaws, and we have to make sure everybody follows those. If there’s something that just doesn’t fit in with what’s going on, we have the right to change that. We can make it fit what we need to have done.
It’s so nice to be able to say we haven’t had to raise our rent for two years because we’ve got a budget. We stick with that budget, and we’re way below any other housing costs here in Colorado. Colorado’s terrible. Close to me, a one bedroom apartment is over $1,600 a month. We have kept our lot rent down to under $700 a month. So there is quite a bit of difference there. We can have a whole family for less than what a one bedroom apartment can rent for. And like I said before, you know everybody in this community. You work together. If we know we’ve got streets that need to be repaired, we work to try to get that done. We’ve got a building that needs to be painted. Everybody [says], can I help? That’s something that you don’t get in a lot of other places but you do get here. So there’s a lot of advantages. You know your neighbors. You watch their animals, they watch yours. You help them shovel sidewalks. It’s just a good place to live. A very good place to live.
Thaden: I’d love to just take a step back, because we might have some folks on the webinar that don’t understand why you would need a resident-owned community.
What’s happening in manufactured housing communities all across the country is that increasingly, private equity investors [are] moving into the space, and so this is putting pressure on communities, because owners are putting manufactured housing communities up for sale. And the owners own the land underneath the homes that Kelly and Doug previously owned, right? They owned their homes, but they didn’t own the land. And then, literally, if you hear some of these private equity actors in the marketplace, they gleefully communicate that you effectively have homeowners held hostage, and so you can increase the lot rent to exorbitant degrees. And to Dre’s point, these homes are not mobile. These homes, for all intents and purposes are not mobile, so residents end up being stuck with the option of either having an extremely unaffordable homeownership scenario or potentially being displaced. And oftentimes, when the residents are displaced, the owner of the manufactured housing community will turn around and resell their home because it’s considered an abandoned property. This is a huge problem, right? These are untenable scenarios for some of our lowest income homeowners in America.
What the resident ownership model is about—if it is doable and feasible financially—is giving residents the choice to be able to collectively organize and purchase, and then to Kelly’s point, collectively govern and manage this park moving forward, so that they end up actually controlling the fate of their neighborhood. They get to control the fate of their home and their community. So the benefits are really, really amazing, because the lot rents end up being stabilized. The homeowners are deciding that they need to do increases. And when residents are in control of the fate of their communities, just like Kelly mentioned, you’re also controlling the improvements that you make to your community within your budget. And so it’s just a really, really impressive model. And the resident leadership is really astounding.
But I do want to point out that that also does present challenges similar to [what] Dre [lifted] up: in communities that are facing multiple structural barriers, families who are faced with working three jobs, it is a tremendously large assignment to turn around and say you are now running a multimillion-dollar asset, and you have to govern, and you have to find property management and you have to do the budgeting. And so what we try to do at ROC USA is to provide a lot of training and support. But it does create barriers for some communities to contemplate whether they can do the model.
Chiriboga-Flor: I do want to make it clear: we’re not a ROC in the sense of ROC USA. We were able to purchase the property through a third party, Sharing Connection Inc. They’ve never done anything like this before. What tends to happen in this space is that community land trusts and other organizations have stepped into acquisition work for mobile home parks, and so we’re sort of learning together, but it’s a rescue real estate project, which means that Sharing Connection Inc. will be the owners for about three to four years until the residents can take over.
The rent has not been raised. It won’t be raised. Part of my job as a community organizer and independent party in this is to support the residents and support the board and their leadership development to take over this, because ROC USA is not the model for everyone for a lot of reasons. It just doesn’t always fit. And so even though they’re such an important part of the ecosystem, I do think that we need to make sure that we’re thinking about alternatives, because also, like in Colorado, we have parks going up for sale every single day. Maybe not every day, but every week. And so I think it is important to think about alternative models.
But the other existential crisis, along with investors—some of the biggest investors in our country, really are investing in these parks because it’s a cash cow for them, to be honest—is mass displacement, which we’ve also seen.
If you’ve seen [the documentary] “A Decent Home,” [it features] 9to5 Colorado, where I used to work. We fought for four years for this mobile home park. That park ended up closing, but the legacy is very big in terms of policy that passed after that. But … a reality for communities is facing mass displacements, or these investors coming in.
Dubb: How are resident-owned communities created? Kelly and Doug, you both have direct experience with that. Dre too, in your way. How do people come together to become co-owners? Talk about that from your perspectives and how people went from “we couldn’t possibly own this” to, “yeah, we want to own this!”
Jensen: We started out with [finding] notes on our door saying our places were for sale, the park was for sale. And at that time, all of us were just, what are we going to do? I mean, it’s a hard thing … when you get that certified letter on your door saying, you’re up for sale.
We were approached by the previous owner who said, do you think you people could purchase your park? Well, of course we couldn’t. There was no way we could come up with $3 or $4 million. But with the help of ROC and Thistle, we had people come in. They explained us the process to us. That night, we elected a board of directors, and they walked us through the whole process. [In] Colorado, every park has the first right of refusal, so that helped us. They had to deal with us first, and it had to be in earnest. It couldn’t just be, oh yeah, we’ll deal with you, then we’re going to take a bigger offer. We had 90 days to close our deal. (Now it’s 120 days to close your process.) You set up everything at that time. And you’re working with a group of people who’ve never done this before, so thank goodness that there are technical advisers there to help you. They walk you through that every step of the way. They help you write all of your rules and regulations. They help you do your bylaws. They help you with all your closing papers. They help you find an attorney so you make sure everything’s legal. It’s a very fast and furious 90 days, but it was well worth it. It’s been great.
McElroy: From our experience, we had actually initially looked at the option of resident-ownership about 12 years ago, so … 8 or 10 years prior to us becoming a resident-owned community. NeighborWorks Montana was the organization that assisted us with looking into that to begin with. With their assistance, we were able to approach the owner at that time, who also owns two other mobile home communities within our community or within our town. He had a price set, and we negotiated back and forth, and we were never able to reach an agreement. For other reasons, one of the other communities was able to reach an agreement with the owner and purchased their community.
And then a few years down the road, the second community was able to become a resident-owned community. And then we were the third, out of the group that the previous owner had, to reach the negotiation table, in 2020.
We were in a time crunch with getting on board with getting our work together, making our final purchase. There was investors that had come in, and there were a couple of other communities in different locations of town that these investors … purchased. And they have increased their lot rents enormously. We really wanted to make sure that we weren’t the third one that the investors were able to purchase, and so we rushed through getting our community lined up to become a resident-owned community in order to be able to have that control over our lot rents and the other extensive improvements that the out-of-state investors wanted to implement.
So timeliness was quite a factor for us. But in addition to that timeliness, trying to organize individuals with various skill sets and trying to determine who was going to be good for leadership. That’s probably one of the biggest attributes to becoming a resident-owned community, figuring out what people within the community can bring to the table to make sure that we’re moving forward as a community and doing so effectively.
Dubb: How big a difference in the rent is it? Like, how many hundreds of dollars a month are we talking about?
McElroy: We had a small increase in our lot rent when we made the purchase. We went from $355 at the time up to $406 in order to meet our budget. Since then, we’ve had another lot rent increase. However, the investors that came in and purchased the other two communities, they were sitting roughly about the same, maybe little bit higher than us, and now they’re ranging anywhere from $508 a month to $795 a month. And I think we’re sitting at $427 right now.
Jensen: Ours went up almost $200 a month, but that was because we had three loans that we were covering. And the financing—ROC USA helped find our financing for us. Several different groups were working with us. We had a group from Colorado. We got one of the first interest-free loans that they had put out, and we used that loan to help pay interest down on the other two loans so we could keep our rates lower.
There’s people working all around you at all times. They’re all there to help you. There’s people doing the legal part. There’s people with financing part. But nothing’s done without contacting the members of the group first to make sure that everything is OK, and is this something you really think you can do? Is it’s something you want to go on with? And you have up until the very time you sign those closing papers to decide whether or not you want to go through with the deal. And everybody, at first, they’re hesitant, but as you see what’s going on around you and you see rents increasing 200, 300, $400 every year, and we’ve kept ours lower, it makes sense.
But you’re never left alone. And that’s one thing, if anybody’s thinking about this, if you work with an organization, they don’t just push you in there and say, OK, now you go find the money and everything. There’s always somebody there to help. You’re never working alone. You’ve got people supporting you at all times, which helps a whole lot.
Thaden: Just to add a quick stat to that, in the investor-owned market, lot rents are going up over 7 percent annually. In ROCs, they’re going up 0.9 percent annually. So that’s the level of savings and stabilization that communities are seeing.
Dubb: Dre, you want to talk about the organizing process? You’ve been involved with this for a while.
Chiriboga-Flor: I just want to talk a little bit about the timeline of how we got to this point where we have one of the strongest opportunity to purchase laws in the country now … it wasn’t elected officials just doing the right thing, right? This always takes organizing, direct action, pressure, tactics, lawsuits, all these things to get to this point. My work started as a public transit organizer in Westwood in southwest Denver, where we’re purchasing this mobile home park and transitioning it to resident ownership. Two mobile home parks shut down, and 90 families were displaced, and at that point, there was no guarantee for relocation assistance. There was 10-day notice that the landlord had to give the residents before selling. That’s no time. Now we have 120 days plus usually another 120 days to come up with financing. Throughout the past decade, we’ve seen this mass displacement happen. We’ve seen corporate investors such as Havenpark LLC, RV Horizons, Impact Communities, Kingsley Management, these huge companies come in. Essentia is another one—buying up parks, because in Colorado, there’s no cap on rent and rent control is illegal here, just like in 30 other states. So it’s not uncommon. And so investors know they can get as much money as they want, even though now you can only increase rent once a year, but there’s no limit to what that looks like. And so most of the folks I worked with were Latinx population, mostly women of color, not surprisingly, leading the charge, looking out for their communities, testifying at city council meetings, testifying at the Capitol, testifying in court against their landlords. I just really think it’s so important to acknowledge the history of what it took to get here and recognize that it was mostly the work of women of color, who are the most marginalized and impacted by displacement rent increases a lot of times. And a mobile home park, Denver Meadows, which was featured in “A Decent Home —that park did close after four years, but the legacy is not only opportunity to purchase laws, but laws that provide just cause eviction. So that means that residents can’t be evicted because their skirting is wrong or their house is a different color than it should be. Now you have to have just cause in order to evict.
We’re trying to look out for residents who are owned by corporate landlords, as well as creating pathways towards community ownership. For other states who are really thinking about this, there’s not a lot of community organizers that specify mobile home parks. In Colorado, we’re behind the scenes. We’re doing the door knocking, we’re building relationships. We’re building the trust. And having infrastructure for community organizing is so incredibly critical to get to this point. This mobile home park in southwest Denver that we just bought, I already had relationships in that community, so they knew to come to me. They trusted me, and so we were able to organize in less than 120 days.
Something I say is “an organized community is a healthy community,” and that’s real. We need to organize proactively, so that when the park goes up for sale or crisis happens, we can actually come together and create strategies and decision-making processes. Organizing, having organized communities, is important so that we’re not waiting until everything is coming together and there’s so much risk involved.
Hawkins: Thank you, Dre. To build upon that, all of you have talked about the threats and the challenges for residents in the mobile home communities. … Can you all talk about how policy can help tenants buy land of manufactured communities from landlords and collectively own property themselves? So, Dre you talked about that women of color leading the charge, doing the testimonies, advocating, those sorts of things. Talk to us a little bit about the policy for the tenants.
Chiriboga-Flor: In Aurora, where this mobile home park was, the women who were leading—who are a resident board—were able to pass a resolution to create a task force dedicated to mobile homes. And we made sure that most of the positions on the task force were mobile home residents, and yes, they were often women of color who were leading. And then we also passed a moratorium on redevelopment of mobile home parks. And we did try to pass opportunity to purchase. That policy didn’t stick, but it ended up passing at the state level after a lot of mobilization. Those are some of the policy changes that are really essential.
The city of Denver, when I started organizing, was very hostile as far as mobile home parks. They really wanted to mark them as future development, because these are big plots of land. At that point, there was a policy that said that you couldn’t replace an old mobile home with a new mobile home, which really meant that the parks would shrink until they were no longer viable to operate, so that they would disappear. This was very, very intentional. Ten years later, Denver committed $2.5 million for the purchase of this park. It’s a performance loan, which means it’s probably forgivable, so it’s night and day what has happened between these two years. It took not just policy change but public awareness of why it’s so important to preserve this type of housing … If you want workers in your city, building your city, running your city, you need to have affordable housing, and this is a great way to preserve that.
Seeing how that has changed, just in the city of Denver—their perspective, and now their willingness to pass, even now we’re passing zoning policies to protect mobile homes—all of that took organizing, all of that was behind the scenes kind of work, and sometimes public work. But yeah, I just can’t emphasize enough why that’s such a crucial piece of this, to get to this more ideal place.
Thaden: Nine states currently have opportunity to purchase. A lot of them … are in New England, where really, the movement for resident-owned cooperatives was founded and built a lot of momentum. We need more states to be looking at this issue and recognizing that residents should have the right to purchase the land on which the home they own sits.
And so I really hope to see, to Dre’s point, movement building. We need to be organizing and building a movement to advance those policies in other states. But [opportunity to purchase] is not enough. … It took $2.5 million of public subsidy—and Colorado actually has been a tremendous leader off of this momentum that’s been built from the groundswell on the ground— [and] they have actually brought to bear, I believe it is $17 million that will support resident-owned communities and the acquisition of additional manufactured housing communities to help them become co-ops.
It is the combination of those enabling public policies with public funding, because these parks have gotten so expensive with the investor pressures that most of the time, low cost financing is not going to cut it, and so we actually need some public dollars going into these deals in many communities to help residents create this enduring affordable housing stock moving forward.
Similar to what was built in Colorado, resident leaders across the country (many of them through the ROC association that Kelly is a director for at ROC USA) built that momentum on a federal level, and in the 2023 fiscal year omnibus bill at the federal level, $235 million was passed. It’s the first-time-ever federal pot of public dollars that will flow down to support manufactured housing communities and resident-owned communities.
So Kelly, I don’t know if you want to talk a bit about the organizing work that went into that, but this is a historic moment in time. Really, the flashlight is on this as a viable and critical part of the solution for affordable housing in the U.S.
Jensen: She’s talking about the PRICE initiatives [Preservation and Reinvestment Initiative for Community Enhancement] and it was a letter writing campaign I’ve never seen anything like in my life. We had people—residents from all communities all across the United States—writing letters to senators, congressmen, local governments, everybody, governors: please, we need this help.
A lot of these parks have been purchased with infrastructures that are so run down. That’s one reason that people were getting rid of the parks. They didn’t want to put any money into it, so we bought them, so now we have to fix them. So a lot of the money goes into infrastructure for the whole parks. It goes in for replacing older homes in parks. It’s fantastic. We’ve got it now for 2023. [For] 2024 we only came up with $10 million but it’s still on the budget, which is a good thing. We’re working on letter writing campaigns again for 2025 to make sure it stays there, so then it’s going to become an actual part of the budget year after year. It cannot be dropped, and that’s what we’re working on. But this is to help anybody, basically, that is in a mobile home community that needs help with infrastructure, replacing homes, helping people have a decent place to live that’s affordable. We’ll take all the help we can get.
Dubb: Thanks, Kelly. It takes a partnership to make these conversions work, right? So what role is provided is done by the national, what role is done by a local assistance provider, like a Thistle, and what role is done by the residents themselves? And Dre, obviously, you were working without the national, so you can sort of talk about the process in your place. What was dependent on the sort of rank and file residents, if you will, and what was done behind the scenes?
[Doug,] what did you do at the local [level], when you were creating the co-op, where was resident organizing key, where was the support of the national key, if NeighborWorks Montana was working on it? Break this down a little bit for folks.
McElroy: NeighborWorks Montana was our primary contact. They coordinated between us and ROC USA for acquiring the funding that we needed, but they also [helped] us find the resources we needed, as far as finding an engineer to help us with initial inspections so that we knew what we were getting ourselves into to begin with. So you’re looking at infrastructure needs, and in the older communities we have a lot of infrastructure that needs to be updated, and so NeighborWorks Montana has also been very strategic in helping apply for the PRICE grant for our community as well. We’re eagerly waiting for that result. The [technical assistance] has been very vital in helping us to navigate not only the bylaws and the rules, but working through a budget. When they’re low income to begin with, many people don’t understand a budget, and so when you’re trying to get 100 and some-odd individuals on board with understanding what that budget is, the technical assistance is very vital, strategizing and helping with that role as well. So we’ve had connections with ROC USA.
We are one of the unique parks in that we also were required to purchase several contract homes within the park in order to be able to make the purchase from the previous owner. So we have more than one loan that we’re working through, and ROC USA has helped us with navigating how to work through that loan agreement, and making sure that we’re all lined up so that we’re fiscally responsible. That fiscal responsibility is … one thing that I can’t really stress enough. That’s a very vital part of [being] partners with NeighborWorks Montana and ROC USA.
Jensen: Our connections were with Thistle, and at the beginning, all I knew was Thistle. I didn’t even know ROC USA. … Thistle helped us with everything that we needed to do. They put us in connection. They were our go-betweens, and our TAs were fantastic people. We have new ones now, but the ones that we started with are still part of the process, and they do so much to help so many people.
ROC, when I did find out more about them, there is so much that they have to offer, not just with your financing and all that, but also all the things you need to know about evictions, about fair housing. They’ve got several different programs that you can take—educational sessions …one-on-ones … webinars, whatever— but there’s always somebody there that can help you get you through your problems.
And … we’ve got some programs on mental illness. And a lot of people, when you get into these situations, you’re stressed. There’s so much coming down on you. What are we going to do now? Where’s our next meal coming from? Is my family going to have roof over my head? There’s programs there to help you with that.
If you want to learn, there’s a lot of different things you can learn, things that will help you. And it’s available to everybody in the community, not just the board of directors it’s to every resident of the community, which I think is fantastic. Everybody can learn if you want to.
Thaden: Kelly, you’re talking about ROCKET, and so we’ve been really working hard, I think, to build out virtual training materials, and then also materials that we can be taking into communities to really be supporting residents with their governance and their community engagement and building social cohesion in their communities as well.
Kelly’s mentioned Thistle, Doug has mentioned NeighborWorks, Montana. ROC USA has a network of nine all-star … certified technical assistance providers. And those are the organizations that really are on the ground. They’re the ones that are getting to know the communities in the areas that they serve and really supporting communities so that they can be successful and not feel alone when they’re trying to go through such huge decision making on a pressured timeline on the front end, to decide if they want to become a co-op.
What I think is critically important to recognize is that they don’t go away. That ongoing technical assistance and support is offered to the communities after the fact, so that you’re not reeling when you’re dealing with new issues and now managing these big, giant assets. I think that that’s really beneficial. And so ROC USA, for the areas that aren’t covered by our network, we also do the work directly. We have some ROCs in Texas, for example, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, where we don’t have a network certified technical assistance provider, but we wanted to stretch, because we saw the need. There were so many communities in other places that we felt that we could help. And so when we do that, we’re … we stand up basically having technical assistance support on the ground in those communities as well, either through staff at ROC USA, or through finding partnerships.
Dubb: And Dre, I know you’re working outside the ROC network, but what was done by the people’s center that you lead, what was done by the residents, and other technical assistance providers?
Chiriboga-Flor: I worked at 9to5 Colorado for about nine years, and I just want to give a shout out, because the work that they do is amazing. It’s changing policies through grassroots organizing, which is very difficult to do, but that’s the only way to create permanent, sustainable change, really.
Having relationships within the community, like I mentioned, was really helpful, and it’s worth it to look into other providers or nonprofits that could play that role as an interim owner. So for example, Habitat for Humanity has some community land trusts in certain states. They have, I think, a couple in Colorado, so they could serve as a long term community land trust nonprofit owner, or an interim owner. Elevation Land Trust in Colorado, they’re doing amazing work. They did acquire a couple parks in Durango, which is the west side of Colorado, and … those are basically resident controlled communities.
And then Sharing Connection Inc., I was connected to through the city of Denver, and they’ve done land rescues with mostly small businesses. Small businesses are renting their units, and then it goes up for sale, and then they come in, and then they’re the owners for a certain period of time. And so the public campaign about this—encouraging more actors that can play a role in acquiring, financing, those kinds of things—is so important because Sharing Connection and Elevation Land Trust, they’ve never done this before, but it was organizing. It was pushing them. It was them kind of realizing this is a good deal for them, to be honest.
Montevista, for example, the owner was netting like, $40,000 a month—not doing a lot of repairs, obviously, so that’s one of the reasons why. But this is actually a sustainable model for financing. Not in every single case, but in a lot of cases in Colorado.
And so my goal, as someone who’s really trying to build out the ecosystem for housing and land justice work in Colorado, is also bringing in other partners, maybe unlikely partners, who would invest in this type of community. But it’s been very successful.
Having organizers on the ground building that trust with communities is so critical. Like I said, most of the communities I work with are Latinx, some undocumented folks, and … they’ve been messed over by government entities, nonprofits, because of their status. A lot of them have experienced wage theft. So there’s reasons to be wary of a nonprofit just coming in and saying, hey, we’re going to help you. And so I communicate with those residents, the board of residents, every week, all the time, building that trust, resolving conflicts, implementing conflict resolution processes throughout. Having that kind of foundation is so needed, because these are 70 families who just committed to living with each other for maybe forever. And so they’re going to have to make these decisions together. They’re going to have to be able to resolve conflict together.
All of those pieces—the policy, the movement lawyering, which is part of what we do to help build power, the organizing, the fundraising— have to come together in order to make this work. The sooner you can start establishing those connections, those resources, the more likely whatever you’re working on will succeed.
Hawkins: Are there any scenarios in which residents don’t want to or are unable to become cooperative owners themselves? And what might be the alternative solutions in that scenario?
Chiriboga-Flor: I think that it is so important to recognize [that] the existential threats are private equity companies coming in and doubling rents, or mass displacement. But I guess the question is, what’s in between? And from my perspective, and I know the ROC model is evolving, but it did originally come from white retired communities in New Hampshire. So most of the ROCs are in New Hampshire.
The folks that I’m working with work two to three jobs. They’re young families. They have little kids, and so maybe they don’t have that type of time or commitment to run a whole community. It’s not a small piece of work to do that. And so sometimes a community land trust [where] the onus is more on the nonprofit to kind of run the day to day can be a better model for folks, and it can also just ensure that the housing stays affordable, which we know is number one issue, period. That is it.
Number two is habitability and maintenance. And I think there are kind of solutions in between that could work. And I think that’s why I don’t want to say the ROC USA is the end-all be-all. It’s a very important piece of this, [but] what are other alternatives, based on culture, based on income, based on, just capacity to run a whole business? We need to be more nuanced and fluid when we’re thinking about solutions.
Thaden: I think that’s exactly right. We are increasingly serving more Hispanic and Latinx communities with the ROC model, and the challenges that Dre is identifying are very real. At ROC USA, we’re very much interested in exploring, [whether there are] changes and updates that we could be making to our models or to our services so that we are, in fact, adding value in serving these communities in the best way possible, and [are we] really making sure that we’re centering the racial equity and the discrimination and structural issues that these communities are facing [so] that we can create more access for these communities and not create undue burden? We don’t have answers for that yet, but I do think that there is opportunity and need for additional nonprofits to enter into this space.
There are so many communities that are at risk, and we are one solution. We are not the only solution. And those other nonprofits that could potentially enter the space—I come from the community land trust movement before the ROC movement. They also will need public subsidy dollars, and they also will face the same challenges that our communities are facing today, which often is about comprehensive property management services. It’s very unique to do property management in manufactured housing communities or ROCs, and so I think we also have to think creatively about how we help get both public subsidy dollars and then the services that are necessary and the partnerships that are necessary to move more nonprofits into the space.
Dubb: I want to go to audience questions; thank you, everyone, for your questions. They’re amazing. We’ll try to get to as many as we can. I’ll start with one which, I confess, I hadn’t really thought about, but the ROC model typically is conversions, right? It’s buying existing properties that were owned by mom and pop owners, or whoever owned it, and the residents organized. The question is whether there are any instances of starting a manufactured home community at the get-go, as a cooperative, as a resident-owned community. Has that ever occurred, or is that something that you’re thinking about in the future?
Thaden: I cannot guarantee that I have all of this right, at four months in as the new president. My understanding is that that is being explored by one of our certified technical assistance providers, which, interestingly, is a partnership with a health system that is interested in seeing if building a new resident-owned community or manufactured housing community could provide that workforce housing solution. It is tremendously challenging—because of stigma and because of zoning and because of the state of the manufactured housing industry—to actually be building new manufactured housing communities from scratch. But there are groups that are doing that. Next Step is doing that work in manufactured housing communities, and I would be really interested to see if that can take off and become more successful over time, if we could be offering the cooperative model to residents, if it makes sense.
Hawkins: This [question] is from Chapel Hill, North Carolina: “One of my projects is mobile home community engagement. Over 95 percent of these residents are Spanish speakers. How can I connect these mobile home residents to ROC USA, and what would be the first step?”
Jensen: My community is 76 percent Hispanic. Everything we do is in English and Spanish. We make sure that no one is left out. And the state of Colorado also now says everything that we do has got to be in English and Spanish. If another language is requested within 48 hours of the meeting, that also has to be given.
Because … we do have so many Hispanic people in this area, it’s just been a way of life up here. That’s just the way we’ve done everything. And it just makes sense to do it that way. So it can be done. One thing, a lot of them don’t like a lot of publicity. They’re willing to help. They want to volunteer. It’s hard for us to put people on committees, but they are willing to help. So that’s one thing out of the ROC model that we don’t quite exactly follow, because we don’t have a lot of committees, but we do have people that volunteer to help. And to me, that’s just as important as having a committee. If I have somebody that says, yes, I’ll be willing to send out your letters for you, I’ll do anything, that is just as important.
And we all work together, but we’ve gotten over a lot of that hurdle. I don’t know if it’s because of the area that I’ve grown up in. That’s the way I’ve grown up my whole life, speaking English and Spanish, speaking around me. So it’s just the way of life up here. You can make it work, and it does fit into the ROC model. It does work.
Dubb: [Do] any of the ROCs provide loans to residents for improvements to their own units, like a revolving loan fund? Is that something that either of your co-ops are doing, or Emily, anything that you’ve seen on a broader national scale?
Thaden: ROC USA is a CDFI or community development financial institution. We are not making loans to individual homeowners for improvements. I do believe that some of our certified technical assistance providers have done some things in this space. Specifically, I believe New Hampshire Community Loan Fund [has] a portfolio of around 186 resident-owned communities. And they’re moving into that space, because I think that we all see it as a need.
We’re doing a lot of advocacy at ROC USA to try to get mainstream single family housing financing for manufactured homes. This is such a huge need. When 1 in 20 people in America live in a manufactured home, it is absolutely not OK that they are being excluded from our housing finance system. And so we feel that we have to go very hard at this with both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under their duty to serve rule, to be making sure that homeowners are getting equitable access to financing that they should be receiving.
McElroy: There’s an organization called MoFi, and we’ve posted that on our community bulletin board for any of our residents who might have a need to acquire some sort of loan assistance to be able to make improvements on their own, and so it’s my understanding that those loans are available for that purpose.
Hawkins: When forming a resident-owned community, is there a certain number of folks that have to agree to start with? Is there a minimum? So do you need 10 residents? Do you need 25? How many to start?
Jensen: Our first vote was [to establish] majority rule, and from that meeting, we went on. We had another vote when we were going to put in our offer. And to do that, we had to have 86 percent of our people agree to it. So the percentage is different for every community, but I know it’s pretty high. You can’t do it, say, like, 10 people out of 40 say, yes, we’re going to do this. All of this is run as a democracy. The majority always rules. One vote per household. So if you have 40 units, like we do, we had to have a certain percentage. We had to have, I think it was … 32, I think, had to be approving of it before we could even go on with the purchase. … And then after that, then you figure out how you’re going to work it out to make sure that everybody’s covered, because they’re all going to be covered by the co-op rules one way or another. They may not be members, but they will be covered.
Dubb: How would you think of the difference between a resident-owned community and a community land trust, so folks who are thinking about both of those categories have a clear understanding of what are the similarities and differences.
Thaden: Community land trusts are, traditionally, leasing the land under where homes are located, and the residents receive a 99-year ground lease. So effectively, they’re owning it, but that land is held in trust. The land is held in trust so that it continues to serve community purposes.
Most of what community land trusts are known for is actually single family affordable homeownership opportunities, where they hold the land in trust underneath the home, and then they sell the homes at affordable purchase prices to lower income residents who agree in the future to restrict the price for which they can sell their home, so that while they receive the benefit of an affordable house, they pay it forward for future generations. In the co-op, or resident-owned community model, the residents are forming a cooperative, and that cooperative then is structured to then own the land, so it’s collectively owned. Rather than having the land go in trust and be ground-based, it is collectively owned through the corporation structure. And through the bylaws—and Kelly or Doug, you can speak more about this—the community agrees that in order to help retain the affordability and so that the community is serving households with lower incomes, when the homes get resold, they offer the home out for lower income families first to see if they can get a buyer who would then be joining the cooperative. It’s through the co-op model that the land cost gets stabilized, and that’s how you’re baking in the lasting affordability for the residents who live there over time.
Jensen: I think it’s probably standard, Emily, that if two offers are given, you look at the income, everything of both families, and if they’re equal, you do consider the low income family first. If you just have one bid on it, if you have one offer, that’s one you can take, but it is to keep it low income housing or moderate income housing.
It’s not trying to make a killing on your property; it’s trying to keep people in affordable housing. And one thing, too: it’s nice to know that they can’t be sold out from underneath you. Once you are a co-op, the property stays a co-op unless you go into forbearance or something like that, under no fault of your own, or maybe it is because you couldn’t make the payments, but once you become a co-op, that land will always stay a mobile home park, a manufactured home park. It’s not going to be anything else. It’s always going to be your home. It’s peace of mind, it’s yours.
Hawkins: I want to direct [the next question] to Dre as an organizer: Are there any resource grant opportunities for organizing manufactured home communities? This [question is from] a community organizing entity with a community land trust arm stewarding limited equity housing co-ops for over 30 years. They’ve begun working with manufactured home communities on ROC conversions, but are wondering what is out there for organizing in general?
Chiriboga-Flor: That’s a good question, and I feel like funding for organizing ebbs and flows a lot. During COVID, organizing for racial justice, for gender justice, was very prevalent, and now it’s kind of dissipated again, to be honest. I think that’s one of the hardest types of funding to come across.
In Colorado, I do look to community foundations. Some of them have small grants. Some of them are bigger. I’m also part of Right to the City Homes for All network. That’s sort of my political home and where I really learned to be an organizer. Being part of national organizing entities can … connect you more to funders for this work. And to be honest, when I first started working on mobile homes, there was no funding for housing organizing at all. It was just not there. And we had to organize the funders to understand why organizing for housing was really important. And it took a few years. For a while I was just doing voluntary organizing, and then finally started getting funding for it.
That’s not like a super ideal answer, but that is the truth. We actually have to push our funders to understand that in order to build power and make systemic change—if that’s what they want, if that’s what funders really want, to change the way our system works so that people can thrive and not just be surviving—you have to fund this type of work. It’s taken a lot to get to this point where organizations like Justice for the People are not fully funded, but funded to a point where we’re sustainable and can continue our work. So that’s where we’re at right now, but we’re reaching out to local foundations. Displaying your work and what impacts it really has, I think, is critical. But I think a lot of organizers and people who are doing movement work can pretty confidently say that in order to create dignified, permanent, sustainable housing, there has to be this foundation of work that’s happening at the same time. If that’s their goal, that’s what they have to fund.
Dubb: What can be done to make these models more genuinely accessible to folks who do have two other jobs and so forth? … Are there specific ways to make ROCs and community land trusts or limited equity co-ops, to throw in another type, more accessible to the folks who actually need this housing? Anybody can jump in on that.
Chiriboga-Flor: In an ideal world … we’ve tried to fund or give stipends to people to do this work, at the very least. So, for example, in Denver Meadows, in the community I worked with for four years, we actually hired someone part time to do a lot of the organizing work, because the goal is to make sure that a bunch of folks in the community have the skills to be autonomous, to do this on their own, without a paid outside organizer. And that did cause conflict. So I haven’t really figured out what is the ideal model.
In Montevista, we have folks that just went to the Housing Colorado Conference in Keystone. We are paying those two people to be there out of our nonprofit pocket, making sure that they had stipends for travel and things like that, always having interpretation, childcare, food, at meetings. It’s not easy, and I haven’t found a solution, because I think sometimes when you bring money into it or paying one person to do the work, it can cause conflict. But if the rest of the community can agree, this is a good investment, this makes sense, it can make it more sustainable so that person can actually do that full time or at least half time, so they’re not, yeah, working two jobs. But obviously that calls for resources. And so when we talk to our funders, we try to be real about what it actually takes to do this work long term.
Thaden: I think that in the ROC model, the goal is that people are effectively within the community, taking turns, right? That’s the hope. Somebody might be stepping up to serve as president, like Doug has done, and then that we can pass that on to other community members, so that the burden is not just being shared by a small group of board members, but it is something that gets shifted over time, and hopefully with community cohesion and coordination, that we can minimize the amount of time that that’s taking based upon the time of your life when it’s possible for you to step up and play more of a leadership and engaged role. Now that’s an aspiration, and we know that that’s really hard. And in some communities, being able to find the time for that engagement is really hard. And so, as I mentioned earlier, we’re definitely going to be trying to embark on a process to really figure out, are there other pieces in the ROC model where we could be lessening the burden but still making sure that the residents control their fate and the decision making for their communities? And I don’t know where that work is going to take us, but that’s definitely a hope of mine.
Hawkins: How does someone leave an existing community? Do they sell their ownership share to the next resident that moves in? Is there equity built in some cases?
Jensen: When you sell your property, when you sell your home, you also give up your membership of the co-op. That is then picked up by the next buyer. Our membership fee was our security deposit, so that’s put in a fund, and that’s only used for the memberships. So when you came in, you paid $125 to join the co-op. When you leave, when you sell your home, you get the $125 back. The next family that comes in then repays that membership to keep the membership on that lot.
Dubb: It’s basically a security deposit.
Jensen: It’s a security deposit to make sure that you are a voting member, you have paid your membership fee, and when you leave, you’re no longer part of the co-op any longer. Your share will go to the next person that owns that lot.
Dubb: Any closing comments that anyone wants to make… Anything you were dying to tell folks but hadn’t had a chance to?
Chiriboga-Flor: Something we’re fighting for in Colorado is for rent control and rent stabilization. I do think that’s a policy that’s critical in order to devalue parks, because right now we have parks going up for sale for $60 million sometimes. That is not based on anything, right? That’s not based on real value, and we have no chance in hell to buy those parks. And so having rent stabilization policies will actually incentivize these investors to not invest in these parks, because that’s why they invest. They want to double, triple their profits. I just want to be real about the fight in Colorado that’s been going on since the ’80s, to have rent control is ongoing and will affect the mobile home parks in Colorado and in other cities and states, and it’s just a piece of the puzzle for this work.
McElroy: My suggestion to those that are looking to become resident-owned communities is that when you’re establishing your board, be intentional about who you think is going to be willing to commit to moving your community forward. Look at your communication styles, the skill sets from people, what people are able to give and what they’re willing to give in order to be a cohesive unit, because it’s the board that moves the community forward. … I’m not saying everybody’s got to agree on everything, but you have to be able to communicate with each other and be able to ask the hard questions. And so my biggest suggestion would be: be very intentional and very strategic when you’re setting your board.
Jensen: I’ve been asked several times, if I had this to do all over again, would I do it? And definitely I would. The benefits of being a cooperative outweigh anything that we had beforehand. We own our land. We own our homes. There’s not a whole lot of people that can say that. We are homeowners and landowners. So that makes me feel good. I can sleep better at night knowing that we did something that helped people save their homes.
Thaden: I would just want to add that in such a divisive climate in our country these days, one of the things that I think my eyes are wide open to by joining ROC USA was something Kelly said at the start, and Doug: you all got to know each other in your community, and you built real relationships. And even if you don’t come from the same walks of life or have the same opinions or views, you built community. And you work together and you collectively do this thing together, and that power building is translating to a movement nationally. And we can mobilize for whether it’s rent control in Colorado or getting the next round of PRICE funding, because you guys are building that community cohesion and connection on the ground. And so I hope we can really harness it and mobilize it, because there is just so much more work to be done in this space.
Thank you.
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I am interested in getting information about trying to help a small RV/Mobile Home park be able to buy the park and transition to your model. The park started as a seasonal park has turned into affordable housing for seniors. The problem is the monthly rent keeps increasing and soon will make the park unaffordable for those seniors who own their park models/RVs. The park is Green Forest Estates located in Show Low Arizona 85901. The area has a large number of these parks that have turned to 55+ communities.