The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar “Remaking the Economy: Co-op Ownership of Mobile Home Communities.” View the full webinar here.

Emily Thaden: What’s happening in manufactured housing communities, across the country, is that increasingly there are private equity investors moving into the space. And so, this is putting pressure on communities, because owners are putting manufactured housing communities up for sale. And the owners own the land underneath the homes that Kelly [Jensen] and Doug [McElroy] previously owned. They owned their homes, but they didn’t own the land.

“What the resident ownership model is about is…giving residents the choice to be able to collectively organize and purchase [the land].”

And then, literally, if you hear some of these private equity actors in the marketplace, they gleefully communicate that you effectively have homeowners held hostage, and so you can increase the lot rent to exorbitant degrees. And to Dre’s [Andrea Chiriboga-Flor’s] point, these homes are not mobile. These homes, for all intents and purposes are not mobile.

So, residents end up being stuck with the option of either having an extremely unaffordable homeownership scenario or potentially being displaced. And oftentimes, when the residents are displaced, the owner of the manufactured housing community will turn around and resell their home because it’s considered an abandoned property. This is a huge problem.

These are untenable scenarios for some of our lowest-income homeowners in America. And really, what the resident ownership model is about is saying, if it is doable and feasible financially, it’s giving residents the choice to be able to collectively organize and purchase, and then to Kelly’s point, collectively govern and manage this park moving forward, so that they end up actually controlling the fate of their neighborhood.

They get to control the fate of their home and their community going forward. So, the benefits are really, really amazing, because the lot rents end up being stabilized. The homeowners are deciding if they need to do increases.

And when residents are in control of the fate of their communities, just like Kelly mentioned, you’re also controlling the improvements that you make to your community within your budget. And so, it’s just a really, really impressive model. And the resident leadership is really astounding.