Mobile Home Rents Can Be Too Much

* This is a response to “Mobile Home Rent Initiative Fair to All,” (Letters, Vickie Talley, July 23). Let me first explain that this initiative is fair if you are a park owner. If you’re not, then you might as well say goodby to your home.

If you really read the initiative you would read the one paragraph (798.46.3) that says it all: “The State of California shall enact no statute restricting, or authorizing the restriction, of the maximum amount of rent that the management of a mobile home park may charge for a space in a mobile home park. Any statute having that effect and enacted before or after the effective date of this Measure shall be void and unenforceable.”

Is this what you call fair? I watched seven families lose their home this month because of the high rent that we now pay! What do park owners consider “maximum amount of rent?” Vickie Talley’s organization, Manufactured Housing Educational Trust, was created by park owners when they started raising the rents. They needed somebody to convince the cities that there was help available. Ten people in Huntington Beach applied and nobody was helped. People from my park and every park in Orange have applied and none of these people have been helped. If the Trust really did something for the 25,000 people in mobile homes [it] would have a waiting list a mile long and I wouldn’t be watching seniors walking away from their homes.

People paid for years to own their mobile homes, only to have their rent raised beyond the amount of their Social Security income. Is this what park owners consider fair?

GINGER JORDAN

Stanton Manufactured Housing Assn.

* Who pays Vickie Talley’s salary? The park operators, naturally. Of course she does not want rent stabilized!

Many of us who live in mobile homes are on fixed incomes, some under $1,000 per month. Mobile Home parks could be affordable, as she indicated, if the park operators would stop gouging the people.

When we are charged between $500 to $600 a month just to park our homes, we do not consider that affordable. Some parks charge considerably more than this. Many folks still have payments to make on their homes in addition to the parking fee. We all pay our own utilities.

I hope the voting public does not fall for the park operators and the rhetoric of people like Vickie Talley when voting on this initiative and realizing that it’s just another ploy by greedy people who are getting rich on their victims.

Move, you say? From an apartment that would be feasible, but when moving from a mobile home, you must sell your home first, and who wants to buy when they have to pay a fortune just to park?

How many people realize that a rent credit/subsidy program is accepting a lien against your home or deeding it over to the operators so you no longer own your home--they own you and your home!

ELVIE FLAMINIO and MAE BURGGRAF

El Toro