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Developers find another way to build market rate housing - ridding trailor parks 'Move is just another useless tool' News Article by News Barometer Reporter Steve Estes 12-21-07 |
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| Our Board of County Commissioners Wednesday took the first step toward allowing mobile home sites to be transferred to other areas for market-rate housing development. They tentatively approved an ordinance that has been working its way through the system for months, has undergone several name changes, and has changed the focus from mobile home protection to mobile home park owner incentives. The measure still allows owners of mobile home parks to take the mobile homes off and send the building allocations elsewhere for use as market rate units. It still allows a one-for-one exchange in single-family neighborhoods. It still allows a two-for-one exchange to multi-family complexes. It still requires that only as many market rates as units are available can be transferred and that as many affordable units remain as were taken. The ordinance allows the owner to move all the mobile home allocations to another location, evict all the residents, and rebuild the same number of unaffordable affordable housing units. The only thing the ordinance doesn’t do is guarantee enough building allocations for all of that to happen. And because there aren’t enough allocations in the county’s pool to allow all of this, the incentive becomes near useless. Without affordable allocations to give back to the mobile home parks, none of this proposal works. We don’t have them. And the state Department of Community Affairs isn’t likely to give them to us since each project of this type doubles the number of potential residents and units, and will in short order decimate our hurricane evacuation clearance times. What we do see happening, however, is a developer buys a park, moves half the units to a premier waterfront parcel, evicts everybody and builds $260,000 affordable units on the site of the park. What we get is a luxury waterfront development, and an upper-middle-class neighborhood that few can afford that actually need affordable housing. The other scenario is that the developer simply buys the park and uses the units as market-rate housing, and still the residents who actually need the affordability offered by mobile homes are still out on their ears. Developers have said the incentive is little. Park residents have said it will not protect them. Park owners have said it is of little use to them without a promise of available allocations. And we continue to chase our tails. This ordinance is little more than lip service to those who demand that our county leadership address the protection of mobile home parks. They can now point to the county code and say, “There it is.” It’s not near enough, and we hope, no we are sure, that those who are aware of the issue will see this ordinance as simply a ploy to allow big-money developers to do something with their properties that they can’t now do. We need the workforce supplied by the mobile home parks. We need the diversity in our economy supplied by mobile home parks. We need much our mobile home parks have to offer. What we don’t need is more vacant market-rate housing clogging an already saturated home market. What we don’t need is a doubling of units, and potentially of residents every time one of these deals gets approved. What we don’t need is the hit on our infrastructure this will certainly create without some caveats that the developer pick up the tab. We get none of the former. And that makes it a bad idea, one which the BOCC should routinely toss out. |
