From the SONOMA INDEX-TRIBUNE 6/7/07
By David Bolling
Gray power prevailed at the Sonoma City Council Wednesday night as a crowd estimated at 150 people, many of them very senior citizens, demanded a city moratorium that would block conversion of their mobile-home park to an owner-occupied subdivision.
The proposed conversion of Rancho de Sonoma spun a growing statewide controversy into local focus and drew a crowd of placard-waving seniors to the council meeting.
Signs proclaimed "We're here to die, not to buy," "I'm 95, I don't want a 30-year mortgage," and "Please protect us from speculators."
At issue is the question of whether converting mobile-home park rental spaces to subdivided, owner-occupied parcels, is good for low- and middle-income residents or just an excuse for park owners to escape rent control and dramatically increase profits. Ironically, state legislation was originally passed to allow mobile-home parks to be subdivided into residential ownership. The rationale was to give mobile-home residents the chance to buy their own space, and many parks were subsequently converted by the residents into nonprofit or co-op associations that provided both ownership and resident control.
But existing law doesn't provide adequate safeguards to ensure that park conversion initiated by owners won't drive out low- and even moderate-income renters. And when parks are converted to subdivisions, rent control for all but low-income residents is phased out over four years, which can result in rent increases of as much as 200 percent.
There are three mobile-home parks inside Sonoma city limits, containing 498 mobile-home spaces and an estimated 655 residents. Current space rents range from as low as $350 a month to at least $800 a month, but remain dramatically below city-wide market-rate rents.
At Rancho de Sonoma, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that a subdivision conversion would only benefit the park's owners, since even the residents who could afford to buy their spaces have little interest in assuming 30-year mortgages in their twilight years. It's not clear how much the park's spaces would be sold for if conversion were approved because a real estate appraisal would first have to place a market value on the property. Similar spaces in comparable communities have sold for as much as $100,000 - and more. Given the high price of Sonoma real estate, Rancho de Sonoma residents assume their spaces would sell in that range or higher.
To address the issue, and to buy time while an equitable and legally defensible solution is worked out, the city had been asked by park residents to adopt an interim ordinance imposing an emergency moratorium that would block conversions. State law allows such moratoriums to be adopted when there is an immediate threat to the public health, safety or welfare, and both Santa Rosa and Sonoma County followed that path earlier. The county now has a much stricter
set of conditions in place required for use permits to convert mobile-home parks.
As a parade of seniors trooped to the podium at Wednesday night's meeting, people stood along the walls, spilled into the halls and congregated outside, listening through back windows. The council meeting marked the inaugural Sonoma broadcast by the new public access television channel carried by Comcast. The broadcast allowed the overflow crowd to view the proceedings inside the council room on a closed-circuit feed in the adjoining hallway.
One by one the voices of park residents echoed the same refrain: "Do you see any of us who need 30-year mortgages?" asked one resident. "We are not generic, doddering seniors," said another. "We are smart enough to decipher what" the owners are proposing.
The owners' representative, a Carlsbad attorney named Sue Loftin, gave the lone argument against a moratorium and told the council the conversion plan was designed to protect low-and moderate-income residents. She labeled a myth the widespread belief that park conversion is simply an excuse "to get out from under rent control."
And she reported that the owners are planning to invest $2.5 million to upgrade the park.
Loftin, who claims she has engineered the conversion of 83 mobile-home parks, was held to the standard three-minutes of public comment time and was not able to finish her presentation. But in a prepared statement she said the Rancho de Sonoma park conversion would provide
increased rental protections, lifetime leases for all residents, infrastructure repairs and replacements, and the opportunity for each resident to choose whether or not to purchase their space.
Lofton's presentation concluded, however, with a verbal miscue that prompted guffaws from the crowd. Twice she referred to Rancho de Sonoma as Eden Gardens, possibly confusing the local park with another site in Hayward.
When it came time for council debate the decision came quickly. Councilmember Steve Barbose summed up the group's sentiment when he observed, "We have an affordable housing crisis. The people who live in this mobile-home park have affordable housing."
August Sebastiani called the assembled seniors "the spice of Sonoma," adding he was "a little disappointed Ms. Loftin couldn't even remember the name of the mobile-home park in question."
Councilmember Joanne Sanders said she wanted to "get right to the point" and quickly moved adoption of the ordinance to impose a 45-day moratorium, which can be legally extended up to a maximum time of two years. The vote was 5-0.
To see a photo go to:
http://www.sonomanews.com/articles/2007/06/07/news/doc4668a7d51dc5a720451103.txt
