Olympian achievement

The Associated Press reports on a success story from Washington state, "Olympia [Wash.] mobile home park residents become owners":

Ten months after being told to pay $95,000 each for their lots or leave, the 30 residents of the College Street Mobile Home Park formed a cooperative and raised $1.7 million to buy the property with the help of federal, state and county grants and low-interest loans.

Participants are expected to sign off on the deal Sept. 12.

Without the deal, "they would have had to move out and move their homes, probably to the dump," said Ishbel Dickens, a public-interest lawyer with Columbia Legal Services of Seattle. "It's a win-win for everyone. The majority still have mortgages on their homes. They would have lost all their investments and still have had to find a place to live." ...

... Now renamed Hidden Village, it's the first in the state to benefit from a new manufactured-home program established by the state's Housing Trust Fund. The former owners are also the first to receive a tax waiver that was approved by the Legislature this year to provide more incentives for park owners to sell to residents rather than to developers.

The legislation follows exploding land values that led to the closure of hundreds of trailer and manufactured-home parks nationwide as landowners cashed in by selling to developers. In Washington, 89 mobile home parks were closed between 2002 and 2006, The Olympian newspaper reported.

This is smart policy and a smart investment by Washington state officials.

Thirty residents are spared from homelessness and financial ruin, becoming instead property owners with a stake in their community, now building equity for their financial security. The landowners who were looking to sell the land and get out of the business were able to sell the property for a tidy sum, with a tax waiver tossed in to sweeten the deal.

Everybody's happy and the city now has a community full of homeowners contributing to its budget rather than 30 desperate, homeless residents in need of public support.

Everybody wins. So again, why not do this everywhere?

Comments

[rizzo]

This is great! A perfect example of how government can help subsidize housing without(hopefully) creating ghettos and projects.

[Technomad]

To be honest, I don't know. However, I still suspect that a lot of the reason why this isn't done more frequently is that mobile home parks aren't always popular things to have around. For better or for worse, they have a rep for attracting dodgy residents---not always without good reasons. My local police have told me that the big MHP out east of town does a lot all by itself to make sure that their lives are never dull.

So you have towns trying to come up with ways to put MHPs out of business, often pressured by people who've bought property nearby and want their property values to go up. (And before anybody gets in a lather about nasty people who want their property values to go or stay high, may I remind y'all that for most people, their home is the biggest single investment they'll ever make and a big part of their net worth?)

This is unfair to the people who just live there because they're poor---but I don't know what can be done about it.

[Robb]

This is smart policy and a smart investment by Washington state officials.

[insert smug comment about how smart people in Washington are here]

Thirty residents are spared from homelessness and financial ruin, becoming instead property owners with a stake in their community, now building equity for their financial security.

And everyone lives happily after.

(sigh) O the Envy.

The nice thing, though, is that this becomes a precedent, to some extent around the country, but especially in Washington - there's a number of trailer parks I know of that are in similarly tenuous financial states.

This kind of good news is enough to offset the trauma of no LB Friday.

[Robb]

...how smart people in Washington are here]

Are here? Disregard my inability to phrase properly the sentence to articulate meaning imbued in what I may or may not have said.

[brista]

Everybody wins. So again, why not do this everywhere?

It's socialism, that's why. Now, I'm not sure how, exactly, but I guess it must be because all common-sense-DUH ideas for changes in policy that result in a win-win-win situation must be somehow related to socialism and/or Armageddon. There has to be a winner and there has to be a loser -- otherwise, we're all just a pack of Commies and beatniks, heathens and liars, trying to get free rides even though that other guy had to work his tail off for the same thing.

[Jenny Islander]

So there is a basis for the "trailer trash" stereotype? I ask because I lived in a trailer park for years, I have lived around trailer parks for my entire life, and I've never seen one I wouldn't want to live in. I've seen the occasional scroungy _trailer,_ but there's always some guy in any neighborhood who won't take care of his house. I know of an Airstream that's gone past vintage to just plain old, but it's attached to an immaculately kept Arctic entry that's almost as big as it is and it's polished to a shine twice a year. People don't say, "Ugh, trailer." They say, "What a cute little place!"

[Praline]

Good for them!

I don't live around trailer parks - they're not really a thing in the UK - but I agree with Jenny: scruffy and antisocial people are not specific to trailers. They can live in houses too. What we're basically talking about is poorly-socialised and poor: people who feel they have no stake in their society because their society has given very little comfort to them. Such people are always going to live in cheap housing - if they had more money, they'd be better integrated into society - and trailer houses being cheap, I'd guess at least some parks draw angry, disaffected people whose experience leads more to a law-of-the-jungle attitude than community spirit. But then again, a program that gets people invested in their own living space can only contribute to community spirit and a place in society, so it sounds well worth a try.

[spencer]

I ask because I lived in a trailer park for years, I have lived around trailer parks for my entire life, and I've never seen one I wouldn't want to live in.

I have. In fact, I've seen way more than just one. I could drive you to a park a few miles from my home that I imagine you would find unlivable, or at the very least, not at all cute. And there are a lot of those around here.

That said, everyone needs a place to live. Just because a particular trailer park is not aesthetically pleasing does not in any way reduce the necessity of it for people who can't afford to live anywhere else. I really hope that what's going on in Olympia catches on - and I don't give a shit who thinks it's socialist.

[Niner]

I think it's great that this worked, and the more places that set prescident by doing this, the faster we'll get out of the bad system of owned-property-on-leased-land. However, I can still see situations where this doesn't work.

1) What happens when the reason the owner is selling is that a developer is looking at the property as something that can be made into something much more expensive, and offers 2 or 3 times the value of the land as mobile home lots? Even if the owners are offered a buyout option, they may be better able to afford a new, owned plot plus the moving cost (or the moving cost and another rental plot, and land in the same situation later down the road).

2) What about when the buy-out is incomplete? The article doesn't mention whether they *had* to band together to buy the property as a single unit, or if they could buy their own lots. The latter means that a single landowner has veto power over any development offer that requires the whole property - not necessarily a bad thing to society. On the other hand, if the buy-out requires the whole community, the end result seems to work out better. Even if some people don't want to buy in, you sell their shares into the coop and they pay rent to the coop owners. Of course, then if less than half of the people band together, the cost for them is going to be that much higher.

[KnightHawk]

The problem with not giving a shit about them, spencer man, is that those are EXACTLY the kind of jerkasses who do their damnedest to block every socially responsible program us hippies introduce out of the fear that the governement is going to take away all their stuff and give it to us poor people.

As for trailer parks, there's roughly twenty of the things that I know of in less than an hours drive in any direction from where I live, and I gotta say, far more of them are holes populated by white trash who've given up on life than neighborhoods you'd like to live in. Not that my apartment complex is any better (gunfire in the parking lot is a weekly occurance, and the cops are there every night), but I'm just saying.

Love. Peace. Metallica.

[Tonio]

I've heard a few conservatives dismiss cooperatives as socialistic, as if they are simply proxies for government control. I see cooperatives as excellent ways of limiting the excesses of unregulated capitalism. I would like to see companies focus less on stock prices and dividends, but I'm not sure how to accomplish that.

[Robb]

So is there a basis for the "trailer trash" stereotype?

To be fair, yes - to back up what others have said, there are most certainly trailer parks where one will find unlivable conditions all around, whether due to lower economic brackets (where people are statistically more likely to be involved in crime, as either perpetrator or - more likely - victim), cheap building materials (can anyone say FEMA trailers? Granted, these are the bottom rung of the Manufactured home ladder, but where there's a need for cheap housing, there's going to be shysters selling cheap "houses"), or less than desirable land (several parks in the Snohomish river valley - including one not 3 miles from my house - are just above the floodplain, and regularly receive the watery wrath of God).

I'll certainly back up what Jenny Is. said: I've seen "trailer parks" that are lovely in most respects (the communities can be quite tightly & beautifully knit), and I'm sure one can readily find paradises in such places, and hellholes among hellmouths in more upscale suburbia.

But with manufactured homes, the economics dictate a lot: these people have far less power against town councils, county regulators, building inspectors, and greedy developers. An accomplishment like what's been done in Olympia is more than a achievement - it's a hard fought victory. If I were these people, I'd be dancing around a fire singing an jubilant Ewok song while X-wings shoot off fireworks overhead celebrating soberly while some choral music plays in the background.

[Brad]

Everybody wins.

Really? I'll take the bait. I live in Washington State. This deal was paid for with my tax dollars (both directly, via the Housing Trust Fund and the grants given, and indirectly via the lost tax revenue that was waived by the state). It probably didn't cost me much, and it probably benefits me some - it's better for me as a resident of the state to have 30 landowners than 30 new homeless. Maybe it was even a net win for me. But in the aggregate, the hundreds and thousands of these quasi-socialist programs have to be funded by tax dollars or by printing new money (our current government excels at both) and a very large percentage of the income that I work hard for is confiscated by the state, who apparently knows how to spend it better than I do.

[Bruce Baugh]

Brad: This is a measure that promotes social stability. People with a stake in social order are much less vulnerable to a lot of kinds of rabble-rousing, and motivated to deal with crime, education, and other issues. If your taxes (and mine, since I live in Ballard) weren't paying for this sort of ownership help, they'd be paying later - and a lot more - for prisons, emergency medical relief, and the like,f or people who've lost their moorings and drifted into trouble.

This was actually a big part of Bismarck's rationale for the first expansive social safety net, and he was exactly right. People who feel secure are much less prone to revolution, along with lesser ills.

Note that the entire deal here, including the residents' own money and loans (not grants), is 1% or less of what gets routinely thrown around for sports subsidies; it's about 0.3% of what some folks in the state government want to pay for renovating Husky Stadium. And this one will actually generate revenue, and keep doing so.

[Jeff]

it's better for me as a resident of the state to have 30 landowners than 30 new homeless.

"This time it benefits me, but if they do the same thing over and over, it's socialism!"

[Nenya]

Very, very cool.

As for taxpayer money: if it were happening in my state, I would much rather have my taxes go to support housing measures like this than for, say, bombing out other people's houses in other countries. But that's my view on a lot of domestic issues that involve government funding.

It is wonderful to see things being built and made stable and lives improved, in amongst all the bad news and destruction and anger in the world. Woohoo! Thanks for letting us know, Fred.

[the opoponax]

You know what I don't understand?

How this is any different from an apartment co-op. Which are nothing new, and I don't think anybody with more than a third of a brain in their head would consider that "socialism".

The only connection to "socialism" is the fact that Trailer Park = Poor People, and under certain strains of ultra-capitalism, anything that helps poor people is bad, and thus "socialist".

I also don't understand how it's possible to pull the "but I'm a taxpayer!!!11!!!!!1!" thing to argue against a situation that would turn renters into homeowners who will now have to pay property taxes. Isn't it better that a very tiny amount of your tax dollars go to schemes like this, which bail out renters by helping to make them taxpaying homeowners just like you, rather than increasing social services for the homeless (not that both shouldn't happen, but you get my drift)? It's kind of along the lines of that old proverb about giving a man a fish vs. teaching him to fish.

[cjmr's husband]

homeowners who will now have to pay property taxes

The state's tax income shouldn't change; landlords have to pay property taxes too.

Unless they've got a stupid law giving landlords an exemption, which wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.

[the opoponax]

The state's tax income shouldn't change; landlords have to pay property taxes too.

My main point was that someone who takes this whole Taxpaying Members Of Society Good, Welfare Leeches Bad idea seriously should think it's a good thing that state money was used to bring people more directly into the fold of Taxpayers and kept away from the Leech side. Not to much that overall revenue would go up.

[Caravelle]

Yay, the Opoponax is back ! Now who are we still missing, bulbul maybe ?
But, no LB Friday ! *makes sad face*

[cjmr's husband]

Bulbul did stick his congrats in to the Q&A thread, but hasn't said much since.

[Jennie]

PSA: You've been nominated by another blogger for an award. The actual voting will begin soon, but until that point, if you'd like to check out what you have been nominated for, and maybe even snag a banner to tell everybody, click the links!

If you're not interested in awards then just ignore it, or if you're utterly against them, let me know and I'll remove you from the longlist.

Thanks!

[Victor Savard]

>Thanks for letting us know, Fred.

I agree Fred, it’s a good start but then again you’ve probably been doing it for a long time and God only knows how long that is.

My imaginary spiritual friends think that they’ve got an answer to everything that ales me but “Me”, “Myself” and “I” “My Trinity” are not so sure of that.

I’m really getting tired of writing their little skits and they’re saying that I’m way behind now. I keep telling them that I’ve got my own Identity and they have no right to try and take “IT” from me.

How can I write the kind of stuff that they want me to write? For example they want me to talk about the man who listened to one of Jesus’ Sermon over two thousand years ago telling humans how they should behave. Ok I said I can agree with them that Jesus told this man that he was close to His Father’s Kingdom and all that he had to do was sell everything he owned and then follow Jesus. As a normal human being, I can also tell people that this man just walked away because he was way too rich but how can I tell people how rich they think this so called human was and where he really came from. My imaginary spiritual so called friends want me to write that this man was really an alien from a far off galaxy who owned all kinds of stars with countless support from others galaxies who gave him their blessing to visit our earth.

I’m sorry but I won’t do it cause I’m not that crazy and besides I agree with Marge from the Simpson’s, when she says that she’s too crazy to go outside but she’s not crazy enough to have imaginary friends.

I’m glad that I still believe that God's Angels are really watching over me but I don’t have a clue as to what will really happen to me!

I better stop now Fred cause I don’t want them trying to take over your post. :(

Keep UP The Good Words!

[cjmr]

NOW we've heard from everyone...