‘Rent-leveling’ on Minds of Mobile Home Residents

PETERSBURG – Residents of the Pine Hill Mobile Home Court community, in Marmora, are expected to show up to the Feb. 13 Upper Township Committee meeting to ask for help leveling out lot rent increases.
The meeting comes about a month after roughly 30 people showed up at the Jan. 18 Lower Township Council meeting, asking the municipality to consider rent control. 
According to Joseph Sullivan, president of the Manufactured Home Owners Association of New Jersey (MHOA), his organization prefers to use the term “rent-leveling.”
“Rent-leveling is the same as rent control,” Sullivan said, adding that the term “control” has too much of a negative stigma attached to it.
He said the MHOA promotes rent-leveling for people who live in manufactured or mobile home communities who he believes are being targeted by predatory investors. 
He said the situation at the Shawcrest Mobile Home Community, in Lower Township, is a classic example of what is happening. Up until 2020, the Shawcrest community was family-owned before it was sold to a corporation. 
“You had a lot of these mom-and-pop-owned properties, and there are seminars that tell investors to find a park where the owners want to leave, you offer them a large sum, and many times they will take it. Then you pay yourself back on the backs of residents,” Sullivan said. 
He said investors are told in seminars that when people live in mobile home communities, they are a captive audience who will pay what they must in order to stay; however, some will be forced to leave. Those who stay are seeing double-digit percentage increases. 
The spokesman for the Shawcrest group said that this year, Legacy Communities LLC, which bought the Shawcrest property in 2020, imposed an average 14.1% lot rent increase. Sullivan said a 7% increase in Upper Township was excessive.
Sullivan said MHOA promotes rent-leveling ordinances that restrict mobile home community rent increases to consumer price index (CPI), plus real estate pass-through, where municipal property tax increases are divided by the number of residents. With that amount of increase, he said, the residents incur more reasonable rent increases, and the mobile home park owners still make a good profit.
“With a cap in place, no park owner ever left due to rent-leveling,” Sullivan said. “Rent-leveling is balancing what is fair to the mobile homeowner and the park owner.”
What he said doesn’t work is when out-of-state corporations buy mobile home parks and immediately begin raising rents well beyond CPI. 
When asked for a response to the concerns expressed at the Jan. 18 Lower Township meeting, a Legacy Communities spokesperson said their expenses have far exceeded CPI, and they have attempted to apply most rent increases to new renters, as opposed to existing renters. Sullivan said the new model is more aggressive. 
“The new nature of the beast is going to jack rents up as high as I can,” he said. “They raise rents and get the lower-paying people out.”
However, he said, most people pay the higher rents because they can’t afford to pack up and leave. 
Sullivan said that where he lives, the rent increases are capped at 4.25%, which he believes is more reasonable. At Shawcrest, the 2023 increases ranged from 8.3% to 18.6%, according to their spokesman at the Jan. 18 meeting. 
Sullivan said where mobile homeowners are seeing what he called “unconscionable rent increases,” as has been happening in New Jersey, he would suggest some of those people go to legal services. The downside is they will probably end up in a contentious relationship with management. 
That is why they are trying to get towns to cap rents at CPI or establish a hard cap in the event CPI exceeds what is reasonable. 
Sullivan said he represents mobile home communities in Republican and Democratic towns where rent-leveling ordinances have been enacted. He said whether a town enacts rent-leveling has to do with whether someone on the governing body has an interest in helping people and initiates the work that has to be done. 
He said that with home rule in New Jersey, any town can enact such an ordinance if it wants to. He said it might take some urging from residents. 
“If you fill a room enough times, officials will pay attention,” Sullivan said. “First, you try to reach out privately to see if they are interested. If you see they are not interested or don’t respond, try to get as many residents as possible to show up.” 
The Upper Township residents plan to bring up their concerns at the Upper Township Committee meeting Feb. 13, at 6:30 p.m., at Upper Township Hall. The committee is holding a budget workshop in the same location beginning at 5:30 p.m. 
Thoughts? Questions? Contact the author, Christopher South, at csouth@cmcherald.com or 609-886-8600, ext. 128.