Transcription
I worked my whole life and this is what it comes down to. Some greedy person wanting his big chunk out of what little bit I had. One of the most important forms of affordable housing is under threat. You might know them as mobile home parks or trailer parks. And they often get a bad rap, but 22 million Americans call them home for a reason.
We're pretty much the last oasis of affordable housing in this country. These parks are at the foundation of America's housing market, often the last line of defense against homelessness. But over the last decade, these communities have become the target of a new kind of landlord, private equity.
Some of the biggest investors in America have moved into this industry. People living in a local mobile home park outraged over the sharp increase in lot rent. Rents were raised by nearly 60%.
Maline Beckett lives in a park outside of Lancing, Michigan. This park was run the way a good park should be run by the same couple for years and years and years. Like most people in manufactured housing, Meline owns her home but pays monthly rent to the park owner for the land it sits on.
When I retired, I looked at my money and my situation. I'm like, "Okay, great." I knew what the rent was. It was a third of my income. And then the conglomerate came in and offered apparently the owner money that he couldn't resist.
Three years ago, a private equity firm bought Meline's community and later sold to another firm. Today, 12 private equity firms own at least 1,200 parks nationwide. According to the private equity stakeholder project, there is an overall trend in our economy to identify who has the fewest choices and then squeeze them.
While folks often call them mobile homes, they're not really particularly mobile. Wall Street investors, private equity firms, hedge funds kind of figured out that folks living in manufactured housing communities are trapped. They can't move.
It costs $10 to $20,000 to move one of these homes. And most people who live in them can't afford that. Because they can't move, they're uniquely vulnerable to predatory landlords who can charge the highest rent residents can bear. That business model, a reliable stream of payments from captive tenants, is a big reason why these parks are so lucrative, providing investors with one of the highest annual returns of any asset in real estate.
This is a financial play to them. They don't care about us. They just assume evict us, take our homes, and then rent them out to somebody else for $200 more. This is the plunder of private equity. This is what they do.
I have nowhere to go. Just the other day, my daughter went with me to the food bank, and I had hadn't done that before. I haven't been poor. I worked for 45 years. There is no American dream anymore. All it is is survival.