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Not Mobile is a podcast about people in my hometown (Northfield, Minnesota) and across the state who are fighting to protect their communities and one of the most important forms of affordable housing: manufactured home parks.
Nationally, corporations and private equity firms have bought up manufactured home parks and are squeezing money out of the residents: residents who are often low income, immigrants, working families, or people on fixed income (disability and Social Security).
In April 2022, Lakeshore Management Inc, a company that consistently increases rent while cutting amenities, bought the manufactured home park Viking Terrace in Northfield, Minnesota.
This series highlights the residents, lawyers, community leaders, and local and state officials who are fighting back against Lakeshore and fighting for the right of everyone to have a safe, affordable community to call home.
Episode 3: Park Ownership Matters
Intro:
On the evening of Friday, July 22nd, 2022 it was 90°F and humid in Lakeville, Minnesota. My friend George Zuccolotto and I were knocking on doors in Ardmor Village Mobile Home Park and chatting with residents about their experiences with their park’s owner, Lakeshore Management. I introduced George in earlier episodes; at 27 years old he’s the youngest city councilor in our hometown of Northfield, Minnesota, and he lives in Viking Terrace Mobile Home Park which was bought by Lakeshore last spring. Two weeks before this visit to Ardmor his father was elected president of the brand new Viking Terrace Resident Association.
George and I wanted to see if residents at Ardmor, which Lakeshore bought in 2016, had complaints like the Viking Terrace residents. When Lakeshore bought Viking Terrace in April of 2022, they raised rent $65, or 15%, and tried to get residents, including George’s family, to sign new leases with strict, likely illegal new rules that the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office called “cruel.” Residents in Minnesota never have to sign more than one lease and park owners cannot substantially modify the park rules for existing residents.
As George and I walked through Ardmor Village, a large park of about 340 homes, our clothes stuck to us from the heat and we were nervous and excited. We had no idea if anyone would want to speak to us. Neighborhood kids zipped around on bikes and scooters and we saw several new homes were being installed on empty lots.
Partway through our visit, George and I knocked on a door and a teenage boy and tiny yappy dog answered. He invited us in so we could write a note for his mom, who wasn’t home from work yet. Another resident had told us that she had had particularly negative experiences with Lakeshore. His little brother and sister, the girl must have been around three years old, were watching Netflix on a big tv and sweating. It was hotter inside the house than out.
Just as we were leaving, a van pulled up and both parents stepped out. They had just finished work and were clearly tired, but they invited us to sit in lawn chairs and agreed to talk about Lakeshore. The little girl was anxious to get attention from her parents, so you’ll hear her in the background.
Sofía: "Okay. We bought a house like three years ago and we first bought it. They said that they will fix the parking pad. Well, drive path."
Cait: "Yeah, the driveway, the parking pad."
Sofia: "Yes. To three vehicles because this is a three, three bathroom double mobile home, Uhhuh. So they said, um, they will fix it because it's not even finished as you see. And in winter, this is a nightmare."
Sofía:’s daughter: "Mommy!"
Sofía: "Our car’s being stuck there, right? Okay, mami, dame un segundo.”
Sofía, I’m not using her real name, explained that one winter, one of their vehicles was stuck in the driveway until spring because its wheel got stuck in the huge dirt depression that still makes up the left side of their driveway after it rained and then froze. A pipe also burst outside their home the first year after they bought it and the house sank down. Now the electricity has been unreliable so their AC doesn’t work.
Sofía: "What is going on right now is the meter, it's not working properly, so my lights are dim… So that's why my AC is not working. So I work all day and my kids are inside my house with 80, 80 degrees, maybe. They have to go to the library every day…because… to cool off a little. It's, it's so, it's so bad."
The electricians Sofía had out to her home told her the owner of the park had to fix it. The Ardmor Village Community Manager told Sofía she was responsible for fixing it. Now Sofía feels stuck and her kids can’t even go to the pool in their park to cool off.
Ardmor Village boasts a community pool, but the pool hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, so residents who work during the day cannot bring their children to the pool. The pool is not supervised; there is no lifeguard. The pool is listed as the first amenity on the Ardmor Village website on a page titled “Recreation & Outdoor Fun at Your Doorstep.” Minnesota Department of Health Reports showed a pattern since 2013 of pool closures, unavailability and poor maintenance at the three Minnesota Lakeshore parks with pools, including Ardmor Village.
Cait: “Why did you guys move here? What drew you to the place?”
Sofía: “Honestly, we thought it was a very nice place to live…Like people who used to live here told me it was a very nice kind of place.
Also we wanted to own something because we always was like on our renting. Mm-hmm… But I am very concerned… I don't feel like I wanna live here anymore because they don't care. They don't do anything.”
I can’t tell you whose responsibility it was to fix Sofía’s electricity. But Sofía is not alone in having constant problems with her utilities in Lakeshore parks and feeling abandoned by management. And I can’t forget the sight of her kids dripping with sweat in their house, waiting for their parents to get home.
At the time of our visit in July of 2022, lot rent, the amount homeowners pay to keep their home sitting on a piece of land, was $750 in Ardmor Village and increasing every year. What justifies such high lot rent if residents report that promised amenities are inaccessible and utilities are unreliable?
In this episode we move beyond Viking Terrace and meet residents in Lakeshore communities across Minnesota who have faced tremendous personal and financial challenges exacerbated by Lakeshore’s management. The dozens of residents I have talked to, who I’ve found through resident Facebook groups, random door knocking, court records, and word of mouth connections, universally had negative things to say about Lakeshore.
In this third and final episode of “Not Mobile,” you’ll see that far from being an outlier, Viking Terrace’s story seems to be Lakeshore’s business model. You’ll also come to appreciate how hard it is to form a resident association and the strength of those who have tried anyway. And you’ll meet some residents who have found a better way to run their parks that values quality of life and resident rights over profit.
Episode 3: Park Ownership Matters
Lakeshore Management, led by President Joseph Wolf, operates out of Florida and owns more than 100 manufactured home parks in nine states, including six in Minnesota. Lakeshore is part of a growing trend of large corporations buying out mom and pop owners of manufactured home parks. They convert a traditionally affordable form of housing into a reliable and growing revenue stream for themselves and their shareholders at the expense of homeowners and renters. According to their website, Lakeshore is a private company that bought its first park in 1998 and the company is not in the business of flipping parks. This seems to be true. Lakeshore’s business model relies on buying parks and continually raising rent over time, not buying parks for cheap and selling them for a profit.
The company says, “We create value organically by improving and caring for our communities with a long-term outlook.”
My research has uncovered the opposite. There is something deeply broken about the Lakeshore model. Lakeshore residents report feeling trapped. Mobile homes are not really mobile and often cannot be moved without significant damage. Many mobile homeowners do not have the financial ability to take a loss on their home and start over somewhere else. Homeowners who fall behind on their lot rent may face eviction, and having an eviction on your record can make finding affordable housing nearly impossible.
And former Lakeshore employees have told me they felt overworked and underpaid, and though they wanted to do well by park residents, the Lakeshore model wouldn’t let them.
A former Lakeshore maintenance employee told me “Lakeshore has no advancement and as maintenance tech you’re doing very cold and nasty jobs. One day I plowed all night and got home about 5:00 a.m. and got a call at 8:30 asking to be at work when I couldn’t even keep my eyes open.”
I sent the resident feedback from this podcast directly to President Joseph Wolf and Director of Operations Shawn Halladay inviting them to respond. Shawn Halladay sent me back an email with some sentences copied and pasted from Lakeshore’s website while adding, “We do everything possible to keep rents and fees affordable, while maintaining a quality community experience. We implement community standards around safety and beautification that are reasonable and have the support of many community members.”
He also said, “Everyone’s voice counts and should be heard” and “We are proud of our record. And we are proud to be playing a small part in meeting one of the most critical needs in this country: The availability of quality, affordable housing that enhances quality-of-life for everyone.”
Esther Sullivan, Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Denver and author of the book “Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place,” encountered Lakeshore Management while researching for her book. She lived in a manufactured home park in Florida while it was being shut down and studied the financial, emotional, and sociological effects of the impending mass displacement on the community. As residents scrambled to find a new place to live, she said Lakeshore and other corporate park owners offered to move people’s homes into their parks for free to fill vacant lots…
Esther Sullivan: “But that came with all kinds of other costs that did not fully cover the relocation costs of these, these residents… Their rents doubled and even tripled from what they were paying in, in mom and pop parks where they had lived, you know, for decades.
And I've come to see that Lakeshore's practices are really just standard in the industry, right? They're not, they are egregious, but they're not particularly egregious for the manufactured housing community industry… Corporate owners understand and really actually write into their, their finances that rents can and should be raised three to 6% every single year because residents will bear those costs. Other practices include a lack of maintenance in the community, which can range from everything from just, you know, not filling potholes in roads to really big issues related to, like, the water systems or the flooding mitigation in parks that can really impact these residents' properties.”
Lakeshore residents are finding themselves stuck living in parks with unreliable water and electricity, with inaccessible storm shelters, with dangerously damaged trees, and worst of all, with rising lot rent costs that can be 80% of the monthly income of those on Social Security. And if residents want to leave corporately-owned parks, they often find there isn’t anywhere to go that they can afford.
When George and I canvassed Ardmor Village last July we met Craig. Craig and his wife are retired and have long since paid off their home. They each get a little over $1,000 in Social Security benefits a month which pays for lot rent, utilities, and other living expenses. In a way, they’re lucky. They pool resources as a couple and scrape by in Ardmor. But Craig and his wife both have serious health issues and constantly fighting with management is a big strain. When we met Craig, he was enjoying the hot summer evening by having a beer with his wife and neighbor. Craig gestured at his cracked and buckled cement patio and driveway. Fading red paint highlighted the cracks.
Craig said the previous park owner, Uniprop, said for years that fixing the patio and driveway wasn’t in their budget.
Craig: “When Lakeshore took over: ‘Oh yes. Put your name down, what you need. We’ll have it done.’ That was seven years ago. Mm-hmm. You see the red in here? I had to paint it red so no one would trip over this stuff, break a leg, or whatever the case could be… Neighbors thought I shot somebody. That's what she saw. Red, ‘who got hurt over there?’ I'm going, ‘nobody that I know of.’”
Cait: “Trying to avoid that actually!”
Craig: “Yeah.”
George and I just went back to Ardmor Village, on a sunny Sunday this February, 2023. Craig recognized us right away. He was on his deck, warming up the grill, wearing a baseball cap that featured an American flag and a big bald eagle. Though the park was blanketed in snow and seven months had passed, it felt like we had just been there. But this time, the base of Craig’s driveway was flooded with half a foot of ice and water.
Craig: "You know… the drains are not open… I, I, I, I don't know how many times I've fallen on this driveway cuz the water comes all the way up to the deck… I go out there and I chip, I shovel snow and it's still just backs up in my driveway all the time…
You know, for the last, I think four years, they said they're gonna do the roads, redo the sewers and stuff like that… They lie. They lie. They lie. They don’t want to put money in this park.”
Craig gestured down to where George and I had sat last summer on his cracked patio. He said the Community Manager came over one day and said she’d have his patio fixed. Instead he said, his patio was removed and replaced with sod. This manager did not respond to my requests for comment.
Craig: “And I'm just like, what the hell are you doing? You know how much money I pay for rent. And this is what you do… Well, this year I'm gonna dig up the sod and I'm putting a wood deck down there. Mm-hmm. Gonna cost me money, but what can you do?”
Multiple Ardmor residents said that over the years Lakeshore has removed trees, or damaged lawns when they put in new homes, and then told residents they had to fill in the stump holes and resod with their own money.
Craig said he’s called the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office for help.
Craig: “And they just, ‘well, you know what? Call this number. Call this number. Call that number call,’ right. I just like, what's wrong with this picture?
When I get on the phone I get so frustrated. It's like I just want to hang up because I, I can't deal with shit no more. I, I'm, I'm old, I can't deal with this shit. Yeah. You know, but, you know, like, like the song says Hotel California, you just can't never leave.”
After visiting with Craig again, George and I kept walking down the icy Ardmor roads, jumping over puddles, and met a man literally in the process of moving out of the park. He had an open utility trailer piled high with furniture in his driveway, but the trailer was blocked in by a massive snow bank, at least six feet deep and four feet tall, that Lakeshore’s plows had left behind. In true Minnesota fashion he was shoveling snow in just a short-sleeved T-shirt.
Cait: "How long have you lived here?"
Mike: "Two years."
Cait: "Okay. So Lakeshore's been here the whole time you have."
Mike: "Yes."
Cait: "How's that been for you?"
Mike: "Uh, I mean, very underwhelming… No maintenance people, nobody plowing the roads. This winter we had a heck of a winter, and I mean, it's just ridiculous."
This renter, who I’ll call Mike because he asked me not to use his real name, said he and his girlfriend are moving out without a clear plan of where they’ll go.
Cait: "What was the last straw?"
Mike: "Well, last year they raised our rent like, like a couple hundred dollars… We're not signing another lease for a year. Are you kidding me? No, fricking way. (5:16) If you go month to month, guess what? Then you have to pay $1,900 a month. Are they out of their minds? You know, come on man. I mean, if we have to, we're gonna go live in a hotel. It's cheaper.”
Mike pointed out to us parts of the siding of his home that were peeling off.
Mike: “Whoever put these together just did a piss poor half-assed job. You know, I, I've done building maintenance and construction and plumbing and all that stuff. I've done it my whole life. Right.
Mike: These Clayton houses, they're all brand new, but they are the lowest quality pieces of S that you've ever seen… There's no wood in there. The cabinets are, uh, pressed like cardboard. Okay? All the faucets are plastic… I can see daylight through these brand new windows. None of the doors close right. I have to pay the heat. You know what I mean?”
Mike and his girlfriend are cutting their losses and leaving, but for homeowners it’s not so easy.
Tammy and her husband Darren have been trying to sell their Ardmor Village home. I first found Tammy because Dakota County court documents showed she and Darren sued Lakeshore in 2018 and alleged Lakeshore had sold them a home with a faulty furnace, AC, and outlets without disclosing those issues. Lakeshore eventually had their furnace and AC replaced and fixed the faulty wiring, so they dropped the suit.
Tammy’s house is spacious and beautiful. George told her it was the most beautiful trailer he’d ever been in. Tammy and Darren have lived in Ardmor since about 2015, right before Lakeshore bought the park. Tammy said now she’d advise buying a mobile home and putting it on private land, but not buying one in a corporately-owned park.
Their house has been on and off the market since last summer, but their current plan is to sell their home in Ardmor and buy land and a house in South Dakota close to a tribal hospital where Darren can access healthcare and they won’t have to pay state income taxes.
Tammy: “Um, my husband… His diabetic medicine is $500 a shot a day. Wow. Yeah. So if he didn't have, you know, if he wasn't Native American with IHS Health, I don't know. I don't know how we would be able to survive.
Tammy said they may have to lower their asking price because the bad reviews online of the park have scared many buyers away.
Tammy: “The people that did come out here to look, um… the, the smart ones would actually look up reviews and just hit me with all the questions. And, um, I'm honest, you know, I'm gonna tell the truth.”
When you look up Ardmor Village on Google, the first review that pops up says in all caps “READ THE REVIEWS” and then, in part, “I would rate this trailer park at a 0 but it forced me to give it a star. Winter is here, beware they are the worst at plowing... There's homeowners that have lived there for over 45 years, and management treats those homeowners like complete dirt.”
At one point, Tammy’s daughter considered moving to Mexico and was encouraging Tammy and Darren to as well.
Tammy: “My daughter just came back from Tampico, her and her family. On her dad's side. Um, she's got relatives that live out there, so she said it was absolutely amazing… I said, so tell me, I hear some, you know about the cartel and stuff. She said… she's questioning her cousin, you know, just questioning her, grilling her.
She's like, actually the cartel here is, um, they're really good to the people here because it's their, it's their, it's
Cait: Strategic!
Tammy: Yeah. They said that they… They, they give them gifts at Christmas time.
Cait: Oh my God.
They give them food.
George: Yeah. Yeah.
Tammy: So it is just, she said, you know, and they'll, they even get texts at night that says, you, you know, you may wanna stay home between this time and this time. We have something we're take- we have some business to take care of.
Cait: Holy shit!
Tammy: She's like her, her cousin's telling her this, like, you know, we're just so blessed… because the cartel here takes care of us.
They don't wanna-
George: Wow.
Tammy: Piss off the townspeople.
George: It's better communication than Lakeshore does with us.
Tammy: Right, right. And. My, my daughter started telling her everything going on here, and she goes, that sounds horrible. Oh my God. Oh my God. I don't ever wanna go move to United States. Yeah. That's horrible!”
So, while residents are clearly underwhelmed with Lakeshore’s management and park maintenance, in March Lakeshore requested permission from the City of Lakeville Planning Commission to put in six new homes where resident vehicle storage in Ardmor used to be. Lakeshore bans RVs, boats, and other extra vehicles from people’s driveways, but the storage area at least allowed residents to keep those vehicles in the park for a fee, though it was not secure. The fence was falling apart and residents said kids sometimes messed with the vehicles. Still, Lakeshore’s plan would replace a major amenity with new homes that could put additional strain on old roads and water systems. Three residents including Craig spoke to the commission in March and argued that Lakeshore should redo the roads and driveways as they’ve promised to do for years, update the decades-old playground, and put better extreme weather safety plans and facilities in place before spending money on new homes.
I saw similar trends in resident experiences across the Lakeshore parks I looked at. Now, from the outside, sometimes individual resident concerns may not seem like a big deal. Lots of roads in cities have potholes, sometimes complaints about management really center around neighborly squabbles, and the stereotype of the greedy landlord can obscure a more mundane reality of things not getting done quickly but people doing their best with limited resources. But when year after year Lakeshore residents see lot rent increase by $50 or $60 and they see their parks deteriorating, every slight, big, small, legal, or illegal, can make residents feel more disrespected, exploited, and trapped.
In Lakeshore’s Park of Four Seasons in the city of Blaine, resident discontent has recently come to a head because rent increased again and residents did not receive their Certificates of Rent Paid, or CRPs, on time. Minnesota landlords are required by law to provide this document to renters by January 31st. Renters file their CRP with their taxes to receive a Renter’s Property Tax Refund from the state. The Community Manager at Four Seasons did not mail this document to residents, eventually telling residents to pick it up in person or request a digital copy be emailed to them. Residents suspected this was to avoid having the postage dated after January 31st. Even after the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office told Lakeshore they must mail this document immediately, some residents waited two weeks to receive it and when they did it had been back-dated to January 31st despite being received in March. The Four Seasons Community Manager said she could not comment on this or any other issue I asked her about.
When residents have problems like this, it can be difficult to know who to reach out to for help and difficult to get concrete support because state authorities divide up aspects of manufactured home park regulation.
For example, the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office deals with housing in the context of consumer protections and they have treated each incident with Lakeshore as a separate case. Proof of Lakeshore pushing residents to sign illegal leases in Viking Terrace did not lead to an investigation of other parks because the office operates on a complaint-based basis. And the Minnesota Department of Health oversees licensing and inspections of half the manufactured home parks in the state and again, they view each park as a separate entity and according to MDH staff, do not take into account repeat violations from the same company if they occur in different parks.
For example, Lakeshore owns and operates pools in three out of its six Minnesota parks and all three are under Minnesota Department of Health jurisdiction. Each of the pools have gotten shut down after multiple MDH inspections since 2013 for incorrect chlorine and pH levels, for not having qualified staff in the park who maintain and keep proper daily records for the pools, and for other reasons. But this has not led to any real consequences for Lakeshore and that information is siloed away from other authorities and unknown to residents. Lakeshore is not required to explain to residents why pools are closed.
The parks not overseen by the Minnesota Department of Health are overseen by counties, which further siloes information about park owners like Lakeshore that operate in multiple counties.
And in Lakeville, members of the Planning Commission said they have to consider the request by Lakeshore to build six more homes in Ardmor Village solely on the basis of the project and cannot take into account greater context about how Lakeshore treats its residents or maintains its property in general, even if they wanted to. All of these separate jurisdictions exist for a variety of complicated historical, legal, and practical reasons. But they ensure that residents, who experience every concern with Lakeshore cumulatively, have an uphill battle when they try to get help from authorities who view each aspect of the manufactured home park as a separate issue.
It’s difficult for mobile home park residents to stand up for their rights in every state, though some states have more legal protections than others. Though I mostly restricted my research to Lakeshore’s parks in Minnesota, I did search for resident associations at their other parks across the country.
I’m going to take a brief detour to Newburgh, New York to introduce you to the president of the Candlestick Mobile Home Park Resident Association, Anthony Silverence. His story is important because it’s the only example beyond Viking Terrace that I could find of a recently functioning resident association in a Lakeshore park.
I interviewed Anthony in October 2022 over Zoom and he was open and warm and chain smoked for the entire hour and a half interview. His wife sat off camera and made comments to him, but didn’t wish to be directly interviewed.
Anthony Silverence: “We have 100 homes in this community… Uh, it's, it's on a, a rural road across the street from an apple orchard… It's a pretty nice place…
Just after I moved here… a knock on the door came… A woman was standing at the door. She handed me a paper and told me, ‘Hi, where from Lakeshore Management. From now on you'll be paying us the rent…’ I was like, okay. I looked at my wife after closing the door, and I said two words to her, ‘we're screwed.’ So the reason why I say that is because corporations in general are not conducive to the needs of the people that they service…
When they came to us in September of 2018… they came into the park basically uh, like a tornado. They started cutting down trees and doing things of this nature.
Anthony said Lakeshore also installed a playground that residents didn’t ask for.
What we quickly realized was that these improvements that were being made were not for the sole benefit of the residents who were already living here. It was for the benefit of them selling houses.
But they were increasing the rent every year and they made sure that they got their rent increase, which I have to say was above New York State… regulation.
In New York State, owners of manufactured home parks are limited to raising rent by a maximum of 3% a year, or 6% for a justifiable reason. If owners don’t comply, residents can challenge the rent increase in court. This still puts the onus of enforcement on the residents themselves, but it's much greater rent protection than residents have in Minnesota.
Anthony said Lakeshore has consistently pushed the boundary of what’s a legal rent increase in New York.
But the problem with that is you only get 90 days from the day they hand you the lease to challenge the increase…
If you could actually get an attorney to do this, cuz most of the attorneys here, they, they're strictly involved with evictions.”
Despite differences in New York state law, Anthony’s story echoed the experiences of Lakeshore residents in Minnesota. He said Lakeshore sent everyone new leases with a long list of rules.
Anthony: “They put these things in the rules, not so much to enforce them now. When they have a problem with you or they might need your property okay to expand or whatever it might be, then they're going to use the rules to get rid of you…”
For Anthony, the bottom line is people deserve respect and a safe and affordable home.
Anthony: “We're, we're dealing with people who are retired, on fixed income… working, struggling people with families, you know what I mean? And they deserve some sort of leeway to keep a roof over their head, feed their children, feed themselves… You understand what I'm saying? And, and that's all really we're asking for here…
And, and let's be honest… What, what happens to the people that, that get caught up in all this?.. There's no place really for them to go anymore-”
Anthony’s wife: “Homeless!”
Anthony: “My wife just said, you wind up on the street… Don't you think we have enough of that? Don’t you think that that’s an atrocity?
I wanna be able to stay in my house until either I decide to leave, or my kids put me in a nursing home or, or I die… I'm not asking for much more than that. And I don't think anybody else is.”
Anthony said to organize successfully you have to make noise and engage the media. I only found the Candlestick Tenants’ Association because of an article in the Times Herald-Record about their organizing.
Anthony: “You, you as a, a manufactured home park tenant living under a corporate ownership, have to be able to go out, think outside the box. You are absolutely not always going to get what you want from the corporation…
You have a better chance if you stamp your feet, get the media involved, get the politicians involved, get the agencies involved and, and, and make noise, make a lot of noise!”
Anthony said the association got Lakeshore to replace their Community Manager, put in speed bumps, trim and remove damaged trees and provide some visitor parking. But Lakeshore refuses to replace the old and dysfunctional septic system that’s been a problem in the community since long before Lakeshore bought Candlestick. Instead they bought three more parks in the area.
Anthony: “We have a list of what we want… The biggest problem right now is getting them to put up the cash to fix what they need to fix…
You bought the park, nobody told you to buy it. You bought it.”
This spring I spoke with Anthony again and he said that the Candlestick Tenants’ Association disbanded in February. He said he and three other board members worked really hard to fight for their community and they got a lot done, but in the end they didn’t have enough participation from other residents. He said individuals wouldn’t do the work to advocate for themselves when they had issues that only affected their own homes and lots. He said the purpose of an association is to address issues that affect the whole community.
And then, in April, Lakeshore raised rent 6% without, in Anthony’s opinion, providing proper justification under New York State law. He said other park owners in the area did the same.
It’s difficult to organize parks, especially larger ones. But in 2021, one other Minnesota Lakeshore park besides Viking Terrace got enough signatures to form a resident association. The Meadows in Monticello, which has more than 300 lots, was bought by Lakeshore in January of 2021. Since then, a series of women have led efforts to organize the park and protect the residents’ rights. Successful park organizing requires several ingredients to succeed. One of the first and most important is there must be individuals within the community who are willing to step up and lead the organizing efforts.
Kiki Rogers, with some support from All Parks Alliance for Change, originally spearheaded the push to get signatures to form an association.
Kiki already had organizing experience because she had fought to make a highway that splits the park in half safer to cross. In 2019, her son tried to cross between the two halves of the park on his bike at night and he was hit and killed by a car.
Kiki said local authorities were supportive of her efforts, but the state stonewalled her.
When Lakeshore took over, Kiki got a job in their park office because she wanted to work close to home and she wanted to keep working to help her community.
Kiki: “I was employed there but I was only employed with them for a total of 14 days because of, um, the stress and conflict I experienced immediately.”
To Kiki, it was clear Lakeshore did not invest in enough staff to take care of The Meadows. She said when she worked in the office, there was only one maintenance person while the previous owners employed more like ten. And the staff who were there were more interested in writing violation letters than taking care of the park.
Kiki: “Um, and one of the roles that the manager I worked under took a lot of pride in was driving around looking for violations each day. That was her number one goal. She is the exact reason why I left and because… I did not wanna be part of that.”
“It's about creating evidence in a file and a paper trail, so that way if you did need to evict somebody for non-payment or whatever reasons, you have more to back you up to do so.”
Kiki’s boss for the two weeks she worked for Lakeshore also trained the Community Manager who Viking Terrace residents had such trouble with last spring.
Kiki was also shocked by how systematically rent was raised. When she worked for Lakeshore in early 2021, lot rent was just under $500 a month.
Kiki: “According to Lakeshore's management software that had all the customer information, they have what your lot rent is, and then in a field next to it, it said "estimated lot value amount." And they estimated the value of our allotment at $720 a month, and I was told that rent will start going up to that $720 as soon as possible for maximum profits.”
Kiki and her family moved out of The Meadows because they knew rent would keep increasing and they needed some distance from the place where they lost their son.
Amanda Hendrickson also helped get the necessary signatures to form an association and she became the default president. On behalf of the association, Amanda requested water testing results from the park wells because some residents were concerned about frequent water shut offs, water discoloration and elevated levels of nitrates.
Amanda Hendrickson: “Um, so, and it was after I put in that request that they said, no, you don't have a resident association and you can't call yourself the president of it, and we're not gonna give you that information until you give us every single name that's on that list. Everyone who signed and that came from the lawyer and he also sent me a cease and desist, um, saying that I was harassing the staff and I was doing all this stuff that I wasn't doing, and yeah, it got pretty bad.”
The cease and desist letter said in part, “Demand is hereby made that you cease and desist from further harassing behavior, intimidation of Community Staff, and promulgating false and misleading statements to other residents of The Meadows. Your conduct constitutes a substantial annoyance to other residents, a serious rule violation, and you have created a hostile environment for The Meadows staff.”
The letter included quotes apparently from other residents who had complained about Amanda and said they didn’t support fearmongering.
No resident association is required to share the list of their members with park owners. But Amanda felt such pressure from Lakeshore that she did eventually send them the list. After that Lakeshore gave her the well water testing results which showed nitrate levels in some wells were elevated enough to require extra testing, though they didn’t exceed state health standards.
Kelly Dalager also helped with the association and served as the vice president until she was evicted in March 2022. To Kelly, Amanda, and other organizers, the cease and desist letter and then Kelly’s eviction felt like retaliation for their organizing efforts.
Kelly is a headstrong person with a colorful vocabulary who had raised her kids in The Meadows and had paid off her home. She made her yard into her sanctuary with rose bushes, raised beds, a picnic table, a privacy hedge, a water bath for the birds, and big planters full of flowers.
Kelly clashed with Lakeshore’s Community Manager over her hedge and some disputes with her neighbors.
And in the winter of 2021, Kelly got a notice of eviction for being behind on rent. She avoided eviction because she had applied for state Covid rental assistance.
Then Lakeshore tried to evict Kelly again for having, according to Wright County court documents, “personal property and trash” in her yard that violated park rules. Kelly believes the instigating issue was her privacy hedge.
In February of 2022 Kelly attended a hearing over Zoom without an attorney and agreed to remove everything from her yard, like iron patio furniture and a picnic bench, by April 1st.
Kelly: “I mean, it didn't just, you know, I'm pretty worked up. You're in court again and you know it's not right and yet there you are. So I agreed. And then I spent two weekends with my son, my older boy. We got an enclosed trailer, all kinds of expense, all kinds of time, lost work, all this stuff. Go out and get my kid two different weekends…
We did this in the cold and in the snow and in ice and whatever.”
I’ll note here that I got the Minnesota Department of Health yearly inspection reports of The Meadows since 2013. Inspectors specifically look for what they call “rodent harborage” like piled up boards, broken down vehicles, and trash. Kelly’s house was never listed as having trash and the inspection in 2022 happened in March, one month before she was ultimately evicted.
Kelly said she called Lakeshore’s lawyer, Attorney Mick Conlan, and asked if she could remove the remaining items in her yard, her large barrel planters, once the ground thawed. According to her, he said yes.
But on April 8th, Mick Conlan filed an Affidavit of Noncompliance with the judge saying Kelly had not complied with the terms of the settlement agreement.
I emailed with Mick Conlan and he said his client, Lakeshore, was lenient and allowed Kelly several months to remove all of the “debris” and “personal property” from her yard.
He said, “I never agree to modify settlement terms verbally with defendants… My recollection of our discussions pertained to Ms. Dalager’s attempts to clean-up her home site, her absence from the home site due to her job as a long-haul trucker, her dispute with the property manager (at which point I nearly terminated our call due to her continued profanity), her apology to me for her language and tone, and finally her intention to ‘move on and put the incident behind her.’”
The perspective of Mick Conlan and Lakeshore seems to hinge on what they legally have a right to do with their parks. But for many residents, it’s not about what’s technically legal or illegal. They want to be able to feel at home in their home. And even more basic than that, they want to be able to survive.
I repeatedly asked Mick Conlan what specific trash and personal property were at issue and he simply said, “Ms. Dalager did not contest that her yard was out of compliance with park standards. She had the option to request a trial on this question, but instead agreed to clean up her yard.”
Mick Conlan also sent the cease and desist letter to Amanda Hendrickson and pressured her to give up the list of residents who signed to form an association.
Kelly came home from a trip out of town to the Sheriff putting locks on her door.
Kelly: “I was literally just parking the truck… And I get there and the sheriff's there. ‘You can't come here…’ What? I'm like, ‘what? I didn't even get any notice. What are you talking about?’ ‘Well, your notice was on the door for 24 hours. You had 24 hours to get your stuff…’
I had 24 hours, but nobody told me. So now that window is over. So everything and anything, family, pictures, birth certificates, what do I, how do I get this?”
Kelly’s eviction has cost her tens of thousands of dollars. She’s had to pay for storage units, she’s paid high rent for a place that would allow her to rent with an eviction on her record, she’s paid for the cost of transporting herself and all her belongings and she’s lost her home and all the money she invested in it.
Kelly: “These guys have taken me down to a level that I wouldn't wish on anyone where you're, you, you startle awake in the middle of the night.
Um, I look around me and wonder if people are following me. Um, I have wondered if I was maybe going to be hurt because I have the nerve to stand up to these people. So this has reduced me and I am tough. And I've talked with other people and they're scared too.”
Assistant Attorney General Katherine Kelly wrote a letter demanding Lakeshore compensate Kelly for “improperly evicting her” and return her home to her. The letter also said Lakeshore must void its lease and rules in The Meadows.
In the end, Lakeshore provided limited time for Kelly to recover the rest of her belongings from her home and a narrow opportunity to try to sell her home, which she wasn’t able to do. But Lakeshore did void the illegal leases and rules in The Meadows, which was the second major win that summer for residents of Lakeshore parks in Minnesota.
Other residents took up the organizing mantle after Kelly and Amanda Hendrickson, but organizers inspired by acute crisis can’t sustain momentum for long without concrete support from the wider park and city community.
I can’t say that Kelly’s eviction was illegal or retaliation for her organizing efforts, though that is what she firmly believes. But I can say she didn’t deserve what happened to her.
Cait: “um, I know we've talked a lot about your garden, but I, I'm not sure if we've talked about it recorded. Do you mind just describing what your garden was like and why it was so important to you?”
Kelly: “Oh, you're cool. Oh, yeah.
Hadn't even thought about it in that sense in a while...
It was my personal park. Well it wasn't the super manicured, you know, something you'd find at a mansion. It was definitely wilder and more rustic type. I had the, the type of roses that aren't the finely formed long stem, you know, they're those dusty, pink, wild looking things, you know?..
But yeah, they had taken down my hedge and, uh, did it in a way that was definitely like a scorched earth, you know, left hideous stumps. Made it one of the ugliest things I've seen.
And I know that that's purposeful. You know, to show me that you have more power than me…
They wrote me up for having a clothes line in my yard, and it was my hammock, which I used to sit in every day. I had bunnies, I had birds, I had hummingbirds… Um, and I, I will miss it.”
{pause}
Though they are hard to organize and maintain, once a park is bought by a corporate owner, the most effective way for residents to protect their rights is to work collectively through a resident association.
But once a park is corporately owned, resident organizers will always be at a disadvantage, forced to react to management decisions, motivated by profit, in real time.
Some residents across the country have found a solution: buying their parks collectively and running them as cooperatives. This is rare in Minnesota, because residents often don’t know their parks are up for sale until it’s too late to organize the community and put together a bid. But there is a national organization called Resident Owned Communities USA, or ROC USA, that has chapters and nonprofit partners across the country. They help residents organize to buy their parks and then offer trainings and support to teach residents how to run their parks effectively.
In Minnesota, Northcountry Cooperative Foundation, or NCF, is the local nonprofit partner of ROC USA. Over more than 20 years, they helped form the ten manufactured home park cooperatives that exist in the state. NCF sent information to both the previous owners of Viking Terrace and now Lakeshore about selling Viking Terrace to the residents with no response.
NCF does systematic outreach to owners of manufactured home parks to educate them about the option of selling parks to the residents. If the owner is interested, NCF goes to the residents to see if they want to organize themselves and buy the park. If both the owner and the residents agree and NCF has determined it’s financially feasible to form a cooperative, NCF coordinates the sale and helps the residents take out a loan that their lot rent will slowly pay back over time. NCF also helps the cooperative leadership over the lifetime of the loan by providing yearly budget assistance and finance and leadership training.
I interviewed Victoria Clark, Executive Director of NCF, about the work of her organization and the importance of cooperatives.
I asked Victoria what the concrete benefits for residents are when they form a cooperative.
Victoria: “Our cooperatives are raising the rent on average between… about two to two and a half percent a year increases. And in the private market, you know, anywhere between five. You name it…
So that's the main value proposition, right?.. You're taking the profit motivation out of owning the commercial real estate…
The other value proposition is around control… The community is setting the rules, right… We've done some anecdotal studies where the instances of police calls actually drops and crime rates drop in our cooperatives, because obviously if… you own the community, there's a new incentive around like keeping the community safe, right?..
Um, and then the third primary driver is that they're reinvesting. So any equity that they build in the property over the life of owning it… they can reinvest that in the community…
And they can… be competitive for state grant programs to reinvest in their infrastructure. So it's housing cost stability, control over governance and improvements.”
Victoria said park owners can benefit from selling their park to the residents.
Victoria: “There's no additional work that needs to be done on the seller side… We’re not a broker. They’re not paying us a fee... And we pay market prices, right? This isn't a, you sell it at a discount… Um, so there's no downside to selling… The upside is, is one of legacy, right?.. A lot of the park owners that we’ve worked with, they're like, ‘I know these people. They've paid rent… they've been diligent… and I wanna see this community thrive.’”
I interviewed the presidents of three of the ten manufactured home park cooperatives in the state: Natividad Seefeld, Marjory Gilsrud, and Bev Adrian.
Natividad and her community, Park Plaza Cooperative in Fridley Minnesota, are often referenced by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison as a prime example of a thriving and equitable manufactured home park.
Park Plaza even built a brand new storm shelter that doubles as a community center and library. This is revolutionary, most parks in Minnesota have storm shelters that were built in the 1970s that are not handicap accessible, clean, or big enough for all park residents. Park Plaza Cooperative was able to fund the project through a state grant and a small loan that only required raising rent $6 a month.
Natividad has lived in Park Plaza for more than two decades and helped turn it into a cooperative in 2011. Since 2018, Natividad has also served as the Vice President of All Parks Alliance for Change, or APAC, the main Minnesota organization that helps residents organize to protect their rights.
Natividad stressed that a cooperative means so much more than just control over rent.
Natividad: “It's, it's so different… I've been here 24 years, and when it was owned by somebody else, I didn't know a single person. And now everybody knows everybody…
And that's a huge benefit because if… you needed help, somebody can help you. When we were going through Covid, it was devastating for us and we… lost two of our elders during that time. But making sure people had food, medication or you know, just, ‘do you need somebody to go to the store for you?’
You don't get that anywhere else.”
Bev Adrian is president of Woodlawn Terrace Cooperative in the city of Richfield. Residents there organized during the peak of the pandemic to form their small cooperative of 30 homes. They’ve also had success building relationships with their city government and getting support to update their utilities.
Bev: “We have the support of the City of Richfield, a tremendous amount of support. They are granting us $350,000 to, um, hook up to the water and sewer system for the city and to remove the five, five of the abandoned homes. They have also granted us money for rehabbing…
So the city has been absolutely outstandingly supportive of our initiative and supportive because it's affordable housing and that is in critical condition in the state.”
Woodlawn Terrace Cooperative has been improving the park by maintaining the trees and by bringing in brand new high quality homes for sale to fill empty lots.
Bev: “There's the stigma of the trailer park and the trailer trash, and the people that live here, they are policemen, they're teachers, they're dental hygienists…
They're just regular people, you know?.. We don't have any crime here… The middle of our park, we have an area called Park Square, and it's four lots that are empty… We have a picnic table. We have a fire pit that I just bought on sale. And, um, we're trying to create a sense of community. From the ground up, you know, from scratch.”
And Marjory Gilsrud serves as both the Madelia Mobile Village Cooperative President and ROC USA Association Board President and I asked her what can be done in Minnesota to protect the rights of park residents and preserve affordable housing.
Marjory: “Well for one would be the opportunity to purchase. Some people say, well… you have the right of first refusal. Well, yeah, but that's only if they happen to tell us about it.”
All Parks Alliance for Change fought for an Opportunity to Purchase bill in the ‘90s, but it was whittled down to only require park owners to notify residents of a park sale if the park was put on the real estate market. House File 817 is the current Opportunity to Purchase bill and it would require park owners to provide 60-days’ notice of any intended sale and consider a resident offer. HF 817 was not passed during this legislative session, but it can be brought up again next year.
Conclusion
I began this podcast with the story of the residents and organizers of Viking Terrace Manufactured Home Park in my hometown of Northfield, Minnesota. When this third and final episode comes out, it will have been just over a year since Lakeshore Management bought Viking Terrace from a Northfield family in April of 2022. Viking Terrace has the only fully functioning Resident Association and Board at a Lakeshore park in Minnesota, though residents in two other parks, The Meadows in Monticello and Park of Four Seasons in Blaine, have recently taken tremendous steps to organize their communities as well. It’s hard to organize a community, especially a large one of more than 200 homes, and it’s hard to sustain the energy to keep a resident association going. But Viking Terrace has already seen the benefits of having an association.
For example, there were strong snow and ice storms in Minnesota this year and plowing was a difficult but incredibly important job. Resident Association President Jorge Zuccolotto described five inch thick ice on the roads in January that made walking and driving dangerous.
Eventually, the association board and advocates Mar Valdecantos and Gina Washburn got results by emailing Lakeshore authorities and CC’ing on the email key City of Northfield officials like the building inspector and Community Development Coordinator Jake Reilly. The email listed several concerns including that snow and ice was blocking fire hydrants and fire lanes and was making driveways and sidewalks unsafe, especially for children, the elderly and residents with disabilities.
After that email, Lakeshore did have the plowing company return and properly clear the roads, but Jorge said that Lakeshore’s Regional Manager in Minnesota, Teresa Compton, complained to him about the cost of the additional plowing. Teresa Compton did not respond to a request for comment on this issue or others.
In December, Lakeshore Director of Operations Shawn Halladay also presented a new set of rules for Viking Terrace that was much shorter and simpler than the 35 pages sent out last spring. However, he just showed the rules to Jorge in person instead of formally sending them to the board in writing and allowing time for feedback.
When Mar and Gina got ahold of the proposed new rules, they and the board sent a three page, 25 point list of objections to Shawn Halladay. To them, some rules were still unjust and substantial modifications of the park rules before Lakeshore. For example, Lakeshore still wanted to limit guest visits to 10 consecutive days and 30 total days a year, though they would no longer require residents to formally register guests during business hours. Lakeshore also still said residents would be responsible for park trees and they refused to formally grandfather in pets or additions to homes that had been approved by the previous park owners, like ramps, decks, or sheds. And toys or other “personal property” left outside the home while not in use would still be considered a rule violation.
Another huge concern for the board was that Lakeshore stated they only accept rent in three ways: through automatic direct deposit, through an online portal that charges a fee, or at off site participating retailers for a fee. Some residents don’t have access to traditional banking and many residents in Viking Terrace and other parks don’t trust Lakeshore with their bank information. Residents used to be able to pay rent with cash or a check.
After sending feedback, Lakeshore revised the rules again, but only slightly. They removed a reference to a community clubhouse because no such clubhouse currently exists, and specified that residents don’t have to remove fallen tree limbs if they are greater than 3 inches in diameter, but all limbs smaller than that are the resident’s responsibility.
However, the Viking Terrace Resident Association Board wants written assurance that residents’ pets, property, and habits that were permitted under the old owners will be grandfathered in and so far Lakeshore has not provided that.
And then, at the end of March 2023, Viking Terrace residents received new letters from Lakeshore saying their leases had “expired,” which according to Margaret Kaplan they had not, and announcing another $65 lot rent increase, raising lot rent to $550. In Minnesota, the law allows park owners a lot of leeway to raise rent and they can raise it twice per year. The Viking Terrace rent increase does not coincide with concrete plans to improve the park. And a request by the board to buy an empty home and run it as a community center themselves was denied by Shawn Halladay.
Board President Jorge Zuccolotto said ultimately fights over rules are a distraction compared to the problem of rent increases.
Jorge: “At the end of the day, Lakeshore only wants to increase rents over and over and over until they get to a point when some people cannot live there anymore. Uh, we feel kinda, kinda left out a little bit, little bit alone in this fight and so far we have no answers from the city. We have no answers from the county. Um, so we, we kind of, we kind of down on this moment.”
The board, Mar and Gina would like to see the City of Northfield or the county pass rent control legislation that would either target all rent or just park rent. However, rent control of either form is not common in Minnesota and city officials are extremely wary of being sued by anti-rent control groups or Lakeshore itself. In 2021, voters in Minnesota’s capital, St. Paul, passed historic rent control legislation that limited yearly rent increases to 3% with some exceptions, making St. Paul the only city in the Midwest with rent control. But a federal judge is hearing a case challenging the constitutionality of the policy.
Ultimately, the entity that has the greatest power to protect the quality of life and affordability of Minnesota manufactured home parks isn’t the Minnesota Department of Health, individual city governments, or the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office; it’s the Minnesota Congress.
Until Congress acts, residents are left in limbo with limited protections. But Jorge still recommends that park residents organize and organize early to form a resident association or to make their park a cooperative.
Jorge: “I mean, take us as a example of what not to do… Don't wait until the last second to work in an association… Uh, having an association can, can be a difficult to deal with, but the benefits are great.”
The Viking Terrace board, Mar and Gina have accomplished a lot since last summer. But the rent increases are ultimately the biggest concern and the hardest to resist. They told me they’ll continue to push for local legislation, but in the meantime will be planning protests with the support of local faith leaders and will see if they have legal standing to fight Lakeshore in the courts.
In that way, this story is back where it was in the summer of 2022. Viking Terrace residents originally formed an association because the Housing Justice Center could only legally represent groups. When I first interviewed Jorge last July, he spoke openly about how he thought the problems with Lakeshore might become a legal battle. I’m going to leave you with part of my first interview with Jorge that you haven’t heard yet. He anticipated that no matter how many rules Lakeshore rewrote, the ultimate issue of lot rent increases couldn’t be resolved with complaints or negotiation. But from the beginning Jorge has channeled the sentiment of the Viking Terrace residents and advocates: their community matters and they will fight for it.
Jorge: “We are not gonna just gonna lay down and, and, and give up to them, you know?”
“I don't know if they knew who they're dealing with… I mean, with the help of the community and, you know, we, we gonna fight until the last date. I guarantee you that.”
{credits}