Parris burning to see mobil home parks owned by the residents

Lois Parris is proud of her home, evident by the care she takes in her garden and the spotless condition of her home's interior.

Call her home nice, call it well cared-for, just don't call it a trailer. "There's nothing trailable about my home," she said. Parris is a resident of the Lakes Region Cooperative Mobile Home Community in Belmont. Even "mobile home" is inaccurate, as it implies that the homes could be easily moved, which is often not the case. Parris prefers the term "manufactured home — that's exactly what it is."

It may sound like semantics, but for Parris, fighting for respect for residents of manufactured home communities is no trivial matter. She's been struggling to protect the rights of people like her for more than a decade. She was one of her cooperative's founding members, and since 1999 she has served as president of the Manufactured Home Owners' and Tenants' Association of New Hampshire (MOTA-NH).

This past weekend Parris flew to Minneapolis, Minn. to be part of a speaker's panel at the Manufactured Home Owners' Association of America gathering.

Residents of manufactured home parks often find themselves in a peculiar situation: they might own their home, but they rent the land that it sits on. This means that the residents live in fear that the park owner will raise the rent, with little notice and without clear reason.

This is precisely what got Parris interested in organizing her neighbors. One year, the park owner decided to expand the park to create more spaces. Rather than waiting for the new rents to start coming in to recoup his investment, the owner simply raised the monthly rent for the rest of the park's residents. "The rent went up $25 (per month) that year... These parks are cash cows."

Organizing a park is not easy, because state laws currently do not prohibit park owners from raising the rent for no apparent reason. Residents, who were pushed to the limit of what they could afford to pay for rent, were terrified that if they formed a cooperative, the park owner would retaliate by raising the rent. And forget about bringing any matter to court — residents of manufactured housing parks tend to live there because of their affordability, and therefore most residents can't afford extensive legal entanglements, as the park owners can.

"Guess who has more money than God — and it's not the tenants," Parris said. "Everything comes down to the park owner being able to retaliate."

Eventually, Parris and other residents formed a cooperative in 1990 to try and buy the park from its owner, but were initially unable to get funding. Ten more years went by before they were finally successful, and on June 19 of 2000 the residents of the park became their own landlords, and they realized the security of knowing that if the rents went up, they would be the ones to raise them.

At the time of the purchase, the park's owner was entertaining an offer from another buyer, an offer which the residents were able to match. Part of the deal from the prospective buyer was a guarantee that residents would see no more than a 6-percent yearly increase in rent for the first eight years. In 2000, rent at Lakes Region Mobile Home Park was $280 per month, and if it had increased by the guaranteed margin, residents would be paying about $420 per month this year. Instead, the rental fee stayed at $280 until this year, when rent was raised to $300. There are 111 lots at the park, and that difference in rent represents a savings this year alone of a cumulative $159,000 for the residents, or about $1,400 per lot.

This is why Parris thinks that every manufactured home park should be cooperatively owned.

Although Parris has improved her personal living situation, she hasn't given up the struggle. Through MOTA-NH, she and the other members are working to enact legislation to protect tenants from the tyranny of unscrupulous park owners. However, she is careful not to characterize every park owner as evil. "Not every park owner is bad — for those that are, there needs to be laws, a way to protect the people."

And this is no small population whose welfare is at stake, either. According to MOTA-NH's figures, from research conducted in 2005, there are a total of 25,583 manufactured homes in parks in New Hampshire. Belmont has a total of 745 in parks, roughly equivalent to Laconia's number. The leader by far is Rochester, which has more than 2,000 manufactured homes in parks.

Parris said that manufactured housing is often the only affordable housing available for people who want to get out of unhealthy or unsafe apartment conditions. However, it might not remain an affordable option if laws are not enacted to prevent unchecked profiteering by park owners, she said.

"I'm just an ordinary, everyday person who has some strong beliefs and the desire to see that things can get better," she said. Her ultimate goal is "To have safe, affordable housing and to be respected in the community and by park owners. Decent humanity, just laws, these are all tangible things that every American dreams of."

Parris works as a bookkeeper for the Laconia law firm of Wescott, Millham and Dyer.