Council Rezones 3 Mobile Home Parks for Their Protection

The Los Angeles City Council rezoned three San Fernando Valley mobile home parks Friday, continuing a policy of preserving the parks as cheap housing for the elderly by discouraging the owners from closing the parks to develop the land.

Placed under the mobile home park zone by lawmakers Friday on separate 12-0 votes were the 60-space Laurel Canyon Mobile Home Estates in Sun Valley, the 66-space Sylmar Mobile Manor in Sylmar and the 118-space Sunburst Park Mobile Home Estates in Chatsworth.

Since March, 1990, the city has been systematically rezoning such properties to permit their use only as mobile home parks, a move designed to protect the parks’ tenants, who are disproportionately low-income senior citizens.

The rezoning program has focused on the San Fernando Valley, where 5,246 of the city’s 6,720 trailer park spaces and 48 of 66 parks are located.

To date, eight of nine parks in Councilman Hal Bernson’s northwest Valley district and 10 of 26 parks in Councilman Ernani Bernardi’s north central Valley district have been rezoned, according to city records. Eighty percent of the Valley’s trailer park spaces are in these two districts.

Most parks historically were established on land zoned for manufacturing or single-family homes and operated as trailer parks under special permits.

But as the parks aged and became less profitable, City Council members feared that the owners would close the facilities and redevelop the land in line with the original zoning.

To prevent such a reduction of the trailer park housing supply, the council created a mobile home park zone in May, 1989, and then began the process--which continues--of passing additional ordinances needed to apply the zoning to each park. Leading the fight for the ordinances were Bernson and Bernardi.

“The rezoning not only adds an extra level of legal protection against redevelopment, but also it adds to the peace of mind of the tenants,” said David Mays, Bernardi’s chief deputy. “When you’re a senior citizen and you think you might lose your home, it means a lot.”

Although it originally fought the rezoning plan, the city’s mobile home park industry has grown “resigned to it,” Mays said.

Cathy Connelly, a representative of the Los Angeles Manufactured Housing Educational Trust, the industry’s lobbying arm, said the council action has “significantly devalued” park properties.

But a 1990 state Court of Appeal decision that gave mobile home park owners the right to raise rents to market levels when a tenant voluntarily vacated a space has helped make the City Council’s rezoning actions more tolerable, Connelly said.

Before that ruling, park owners were unable to raise their rents annually except by a fixed percent. The new decision--which has been appealed to the California Supreme Court--makes the parks more profitable and, correspondingly, dampens the owners’ desire to redevelop.