A street in Bowdoin’s Mountain View Estates mobile home park, which was purchased by a New York real estate firm in 2021. Several bills in the Legislature aim to help communities purchase parks before investors can. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald

When John Geary learned that Fox Run Mobile Home Park in Lewiston was for sale, he feared an out-of-state investor would swoop in, raise the lot rents and leave the primarily senior residents of the small community “high and dry.”

Geary, 78, a retired lawyer, has lived in the park for seven years, and last fall helped mobilize his fellow residents to form the Fox Run Community Cooperative in an attempt to buy the park.

The group offered $2.64 million, but after a competitive counteroffer with difficult terms for the co-op to meet under a tight deadline, the sellers ultimately accepted the lower offer of $2.6 million from BoaVida, a California investment firm. They closed March 20.

Now, residents of the park’s 40 lots wait to see what happens.

“Their single mission is to get profits for their investors, so we’ve been very nervous,” Geary said. “We’ve got an investment here and we really have no protections whatsoever.”

While Fox Run ultimately wasn’t successful, Geary and other mobile homeowners are backing a bill that they say gives “teeth” to an existing law and levels the playing field between investors and residents. Opponents, however, argue the bill infringes on private property rights and creates onerous, expensive and potentially impossible barriers for sellers and buyers. The bill had a public hearing Tuesday before the Legislature’s Housing and Economic Development Committee.

A ‘POISON PILL’

Mobile home parks in Maine and across the county are increasingly being purchased by out-of-state investors who raise the monthly lot rents or even turn parks into a condominium communities, displacing residents who can’t afford to then buy the land their house sits on.

Several bills in the Legislature aim to get ahead of the problem and help communities purchase their parks before investors can. So far, two communities have successfully purchased parks, and another is under contract. But more than twice as many, including Fox Run, have tried and failed.

A bill proposed by Sen. Tim Nangle, D-Windham, would give residents the “right of first refusal” to purchase their park when it goes up for sale. It also would require the owner or buyer to notify residents if it intends to make a change of use in the park and to facilitate the relocation of the residents within a 25-mile radius, at the owner’s expense.

Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut all have right-of-first-refusal laws.

In 2023, the Legislature passed a law that requires park owners to give residents at least 60 days’ notice if they plan to sell, giving the community members the chance to purchase it themselves. The park owner isn’t required to accept the offer, but must negotiate “in good faith.” Nangle’s bill would also extend the deadline to 90 days.

For Fox Run, a 90-day notice would have given the group more time to get its financing in order, which could have made the difference, Geary said.

But it’s the relocation stipulation that gives Geary the most comfort. If the park were to change use to a condominium development, for example, he doesn’t think he could afford the roughly $65,000 to buy his lot, nor could he afford $2,000 a month to rent an apartment.

“My wife and I have been collecting Social Security for almost 15 years, we’ve got nowhere to go,” he said. “(The provision) would make the statute real instead of a fig leaf as it is right now … That’s enough of a poison pill so that it would not be viable.”

Nora Gosselin, director of resident acquisitions at the Cooperative Development Institute, said she’s worked with nine different communities that tried to purchase their parks since the “opportunity to purchase” law was passed.

Of the ones that failed, every offer was greater than the offer from the capital equity firm. It’s proof, she said, that the law needs to be strengthened.

“Here you have a mobilized group of residents advocating for themselves, connecting with their electeds to put interest in lenders with support systems like CDI, and under the current (opportunity to purchase) statute, their efforts can still be rejected in favor of a third party out-of-state company,” she said. “The law doesn’t have to be an ‘us vs. them,’ ‘park owners vs. residents.’ It’s simply recognizing that the residents have lived in these communities for 20, 30, 40 years, and they have their biggest asset on this land and they deserve a meaningful shot at a cooperative purchase.”

OTHER AVENUES

Meanwhile, a bill proposed by Sen. Dick Bradstreet, R-Vassalboro, the former executive director of the Manufactured Housing Association of Maine, seeks to tighten the requirements for co-op purchases.

Current law requires that sellers consider an offer from residents as long as at least 51% of homeowners have signed a petition saying they’re on board with buying the park. Bradstreet’s bill, “An Act to Improve the Process for Mobile Home Owners to Purchase their Mobile Home Park,” would increase that to 60% and prohibit residents from contacting other mobile home owners more than three times about purchasing the park. 

He argued that organizing should require more buy-in from the community than a simple majority and said it would protect the many seniors who live in mobile home parks from being “harassed and antagonized” about joining the effort.

Bradstreet is a former manufactured and modular home retailer.

Late last month, lawmakers also heard testimony on a bill by Sen. Cameron Reny, D-Bristol, that would attach a $10,000 per-lot fee to the purchase of a manufactured housing community on top of the purchase price, to be paid to MaineHousing. Resident-owned co-ops or affordable housing groups would be exempt from the fee. 

The money would help replenish the existing program’s coffers and take pressure off the state to fund the program through the budget.

“Structuring the fee in this way encourages the continuation of mobile home park ownership as the purview of small business or residents themselves,” Reny said. “It will also cause large wealthy national corporations to chip in for a beneficial fund if they decide to buy the land underneath our people’s homes for profit.”

Greg Payne, the governor’s senior housing policy adviser, told the committee that many other states are grappling with how to protect people from what he called “predatory behavior” and said the bill “may be the single most effective tool in the country if we choose to pass it.”

But mobile home dealers and park owners railed against the bill, calling it “anti-American” and a restriction of free trade that could ultimately do more harm than good by passing the costs down to residents.

Samantha Beers, who owns three parks in the Midcoast, said the bill would unfairly target residents who do not wish to purchase the park, “while also creating an unfair penalty for Maine families that have worked through generations to build a park that they may now wish to sell.”