Jim Hightower: Let mobile-home residents buy their parks, as in Maine

Via OtherWord.org

Even in a barrelful of rotten apples, you might think there’d still be a few good ones. But don’t get your hopes up looking into barrels labeled “private-equity investors.”

These esoteric, multibillion-dollar Wall Street schemes rig the marketplace so “high-net-worth individuals” can grab fat profits and special tax breaks to buy up doctors’ offices, hometown newspapers, child care centers, etc.

Consider America’s humble but beneficial mobile home parks. Homeownership has become so pricey that these affordable manufactured units now make up 10 percent of all single-family home sales.

But while the buyers own the houses, they must rent lots from mobile park owners. This has generally been a square deal — at least when park owners live among the renters, providing decent services at reasonable rates. One such park is Linnhaven Center with some 300 mobile home residents in Brunswick, Maine.

But these homes for millions of people have become a quick-buck target for Wall Street’s equity profiteers.

Waving cash at longtime trailer-park owners, private-equity investors have been snatching up thousands of these lots. Without warning, people’s homes are literally being bought out from under them. The absentee predators then raise rents to drive out residents, clearing the spaces for high-dollar renters or buyers.

But there’s good news for a change.

A new law in Maine gives mobile home residents a chance to buy their park — and community cooperatives exist to help arrange financing. That’s what the modest-income people of Linnhaven have now done.

Such a big leap isn’t easy, but give people a fair chance and they can make it work. As one Linnhaven woman put it, the community effort was much more than a property deal: It felt like “a chance to control your own destiny.”

Jim Hightower is a long-time columnist.