Escaping ‘the game of business’ in Laramie’s mobile home parks
Advocates say resident ownership could eliminate the profit motive and keep rents in check. A local lawmaker adds Wyoming needs protections for those who speak out.
In mobile home parks across Laramie, residents have found themselves under the thumb of a notorious new addition to the local housing market.
Impact Communities claims to be the fifth largest owner-operator of mobile home parks in the nation. It’s the creation of Frank Rolfe and Dave Reynolds, a pair of multimillionaire investors who actively promote an investment strategy of buying parks, raising rents and squeezing the residents for all they’re worth.
“One of the big drivers to making money is the ability to increase the rent,” Rolfe says in a video training meant for aspiring mobile home investors. “If we didn’t have them hostage, if they weren’t stuck in those homes, in those mobile home lots, it’d be a whole different picture.”
In less than four years, Impact and its subsidiaries have bought four Laramie parks, raising rents 60-70% and filing at least 28 evictions, forcing an untold number of other residents to flee what was once the most affordable housing in town.
The residents who remain are making tough choices about taking a second job, selling their blood or delaying plans to start a family. Many of the residents interviewed for this story feared retaliation for speaking out and expressed a degree of hopelessness about their situation.
Residents say Impact has given no indication of when the rent hikes — which occur every few months — might end. And in a country and state short on affordable housing, finding somewhere cheaper to live, and relocating there, is seldom a realistic alternative.
“We don’t have any place else to go,” said one resident, a mother of two who has lived in Mountain View Estates longer than Impact has owned it. “We’re just at their mercy.”
But Wyoming isn’t the first or only state to see private equity-backed firms snatching up its trailer parks. There are a number of community-based, financial and legislative actions that have been attempted elsewhere — to varying degrees of success — that Impact residents and their allies could replicate in the Equality State.
“This county has a history of seeing what look like insurmountable problems that have been solved — because the political will is there — on behalf of the people,” said Rep. Karlee Provenza (HD-45), a longtime community organizer who has been lending her talents to a nascent coalition of Impact residents in Laramie. “So maybe I’m naïve or out of my mind but I have hope.”
In this three-part series, the Laramie Reporter has examined Impact Communities’ presence in Laramie and the philosophy driving its rent hikes. Now, the Reporter turns its attention to the solutions being explored by residents and lawmakers in Wyoming and beyond.
Corporate landlords and ‘predatory practices’
In June, Laramie City Councilors gathered for a work session regarding the local government’s affordable housing efforts. For more than an hour, city staff reviewed zoning changes, fee reductions, partnerships and a host of other ideas aimed at encouraging or enabling housing development.
But city staff were short on ideas when it came to mobile homes, and to addressing what Community and Economic Development Director Derek Teini labeled the “alleged increase of predatory practices” in Laramie’s mobile home parks.
“This is a tough subject in a tough area,” Teini said. “I really have to say I struggled in trying to provide some information to the council related to this.”
Some of the most frequently pitched reforms address the wrong problems. For example, the city could institute aesthetic requirements or increase inspections. While these proposals might look good on paper, they don’t touch on the core complaints mobile home residents have about their own neighborhoods.
“There’s a wide variety of things that communities regulate — but remember, we’re talking about quality standards usually,” Teini said. “It’s not ever related to things like: when the payment’s due, how much they charge, whether they allow a dog or not — things like that. It’s not really what cities and communities are regulating.”
Instituting aesthetic requirements can also be counterproductive if the city’s goal is housing affordability.
The owners of Wade’s Mobile Manor, a Laramie mobile home park not owned by Impact, launched their own “beautification project” in 2022, mandating residents make aesthetic renovations. But removing fences, repainting trailers, and evicting all dogs over 25 pounds — to cite a few of the demands made — benefits mainly the investor-owners, who see the property value increase and can charge higher rents in turn.
“I have no appetite for trying to shut down mobile home parks [or] putting even more regulations on those folks,” Councilor Erin O’Doherty said. “I don’t have any appetite for being another entity trying to make them look pretty just because those of us who live in our nice, single-family homes don’t want to look at them. It’s hard enough for those folks and it’s the only thing they have, and to put more regulation would not be good for them.”
Residents say the most dire problems they face are not parks “looking junky” or lacking amenities.
The most pressing problems are much more immediate. It’s the skyrocketing rent and the lack of stability. It’s the uncertainty about what the rent will be next month and what personal sacrifices it might take to pay in full and on time. It’s the fear of receiving a three-day ultimatum hand delivered by the sheriff’s office, and the knowledge that Impact could sell the land beneath their homes at any time to the highest bidder.
“The ownership structure allows for [the] predatory practices we have heard about recently,” states a slide from Teini’s council presentation.
But therein might lie the solution. If the ownership structure is the heart of the problem, why not change that structure?
What if the residents of Blake’s, or Country Meadows, owned their park, and ran it, not as an investment vehicle, but as a community for the sole benefit of its members?
How realistic is resident ownership?
The idea is not far-fetched. Neither is it new.
The first “resident-owned community,” or ROC, was established in New Hampshire in the 1980s, amid that decade’s “condo craze,” and was formed by park residents looking to stave off the sale of their park to would-be redevelopers.
A brand-new and first-of-its-kind community fund helped the residents — now organized under the banner of the Meredith Center Cooperative — to acquire a loan from the Sisters of Mercy and buy their park, ensuring its preservation well into the future.
Since 1984, the idea has expanded beyond New Hampshire and, in recent years, its popularity has grown. Today, between 1,000-1,200 of the nation’s estimated 43,000 mobile home parks are owned by the residents who live there rather than “mom and pop” landlords or national firms like Impact.
More than 300 of those resident-owned communities were aided by ROC USA, an organization that exists to help mobile home residents organize to buy their parks.
“There are many, many benefits [to resident ownership], but the two big ones are stability and affordability,” said Mike Bullard, a spokesperson for ROC USA. “Once the resident group forms a co-op and purchases the community, that removes the nagging fear that people have from owning this house on someone else’s land — that someday they come home and there’s a note on the door that says the community’s been sold, it’s going to be redeveloped.”
But residents of ROCs enjoy more than just peace of mind. As members of a democratically structured cooperative, they vote for a board of directors and have more of a say in the community’s upkeep, rules and fees. Those fees, meanwhile, stay with the park.
“With a resident-owned community, the profit margin is removed from their monthly site fee,” Bullard said. “So they continue to pay a monthly fee. It goes to the co-op instead of an outside or commercial landlord, and the co-op uses that fee to pay off the acquisition loan, pay operating expenses for the community, property taxes [and] set some aside for improvement work down the road — but that’s it.”
In other words, the lot rent paid by ROC members is doing more than lining the pockets of an out-of-state investor.
“Rents stay remarkably stable,” Bullard said.
According to the most recent industry research, commercially-owned mobile home parks averaged an annual rent increase of 7.1% last year. But members of resident-owned communities affiliated with ROC USA see an average annual rent increase of 0.9%, according to the organization itself.
ROC USA’s website touts other benefits of resident-ownership — including “lifetime security against unfair eviction” and a strengthened “sense of community.”
But an obvious question remains: If residents are struggling to keep up with rent increases of $50 and $100, how can they ever hope to purchase an entire park, even acting collectively?
“It’s the question that we hear from homeowners most often, right at the outset,” Bullard said. “The natural inclination is to say, ‘Okay, there’s 100 homes in this community that’s for sale for $10 million — so you do the math, that just doesn’t track.’”
But this is where ROC USA comes in, offering — through its lending subsidiary ROC USA Capital — a 10-year loan with a 30-year amortization schedule for up to 110% of the value of the community.
What this boils down to is that the co-op can purchase the park with the acquisition loan from ROC USA Capital and pay it down gradually in the years to come. Local governments can, and have, assisted in this process, with the aim of preserving existing affordable housing.
ROC USA gets involved when there is a sale on the table; they won’t engage residents until after they’ve talked to the owner. But once they do, their involvement is far more than just lending.
“We help the homeowners form a cooperative, which is the entity that negotiates the purchase and ultimately purchases the community,” Bullard said. “We actually have a forgivable loan that they can take out to hire experts to work for them. So that’s an engineer to look at the infrastructure of the community. They’ll hire an attorney. They’ll have an appraisal done so they make sure that they know what it is they’re buying … If they move ahead with the purchase, then that loan just gets folded right into their acquisition loan.”
If the residents decide not to purchase the park after using the ROC USA loan for these due diligence activities, “they do not have to pay it back,” Bullard said.
“We want them to make an informed, educated decision without feeling the pressure of this loan,” he said.
Additionally, ROC USA provides community leadership coaching so that residents can effectively serve on the co-op’s board of directors.
“We don’t just shake hands once the deal is done,” Bullard said. “We stay with the community for at least the life of their mortgage to continue what we call technical assistance — organizational coaching and leadership development, access to ongoing training and education and other resources to really ensure the success of the community.”
On the Mobile Home Mastery podcast, Impact Communities co-owner Frank Rolfe has interviewed ROC USA leaders and — ever the capitalist — has said he is not opposed to selling parks when the money’s right.
That doesn’t surprise Bullard, who said resident-owned communities can be a “triple win situation” where everyone, including the landlord, benefits.
“We’re working at fair market prices … so the seller wins in that they get a good price,” Bullard said. “The residents win in that they get control and security of the community, and the city or the town or the county, they get a win, because now there’s a pocket of affordable housing that’s permanently affordable.”
Creating the environment, empowering the residents
Wresting control of Blake’s, County Meadows, Mountain View and Shadow Ridge from Impact to place those parks in the hands of their residents would take more than Frank Rolfe’s willingness to sell and ROC USA’s willingness to loan.
It would also take popular support in the parks themselves and the right legal and political environment.
When it comes to fostering the right environment, the Equality State’s congressional delegation could support the Manufactured Housing Community Sustainability Act, which rewards mobile home park owners for selling to residents rather than other landlords or developers.
At the state level, Wyoming could follow in the footsteps of other states, including Montana and Colorado, by giving mobile home residents the right of first refusal when their park is being sold.
Provenza would like to see something even more basic: protections for mobile home residents who speak out about the conditions, fees or other issues in their communities.
“At the moment, as the law stands, there’s just not a lot of power for these folks,” she said.
Provenza has been working to organize residents of mobile home parks across Laramie — not necessarily into a cooperative, but rather into a united, coherent group that can decide for itself whether a co-op, or a new law, or some other solution is best, and then to fight for it.
“The goal for me as a representative, and then the goal for me as an organizer, is to build power collectively to change those laws,” Provenza said. “So that [Wyoming] isn’t a breeding ground for companies from out-of-state to come in and throw our people out on the street.”
Housing issues — from rentals to zoning to mobile homes — are getting more attention from state lawmakers. But Provenza said the conversations lawmakers typically have are disconnected from the reality on the ground.
“We have these interim meetings where we invite department heads, we invite stakeholders, we invite the people that have all the power to come talk to us — and we don’t hear from tenants,” she said. “In part because it’s sticking your neck out there to get your head cut off.”
Provenza has been hosting meetings through a new, informal organization called the Impact Community Action Network.
ICAN first met last November. The top order of business was listening to the residents themselves, all of whom shared that their lot rents were rising at an unprecedented rate.
“That established [that] this is a big issue across parks,” Provenza said, recounting the meeting. “But the main culprit in this case was Impact Mobile Home Communities.”
Soon after, Provenza took to the microphone during a Laramie City Council meeting, imploring the city to do what legislators haven’t: listen to mobile home park residents.
“I would urge you to, in moving forward, work with the people that live in these communities,” she said. “The people that are closest to the problem are the people that are closest to the solutions.”
But the representative is aware that this is easier said than done — in part because of her own experience as an organizer.
In establishing and promoting ICAN, Provenza has repeatedly run into the same hurdle the Reporter has in its own investigation of the matter: Mobile home park residents — living under month-to-month leases, already making difficult decisions just to stay afloat — don’t want to be the face of resident rebellion.
The Reporter granted some of these individuals and families anonymity — a journalistic practice that is best used sparingly, and only for “sources who may face danger, retribution or other harm, and have information that cannot be obtained elsewhere.”
But organizing one’s community, advocating for new laws and lobbying local electeds will require a heightened visibility.
“There’s definitely the will to say, ‘We’ve had enough, we’re not going to stand for dishonest out-of-state corporations who are going to come into Wyoming and force us out of our homes,’” Provenza said. “But we all understand that there aren’t enough protections for people to put their name out there and say, publicly, ‘This is what I’m doing.’”
Courtney Walker, a resident who agreed to be named in this story, is skeptical that speaking out will do much on its own.
“Within the next five years, I can see our lot rent being well over $800,” she said. “I think if we as a community were to bond together and say, ‘We don’t agree with this’ — would anything be done about it? Probably not. Because big corporations have big money to throw at the town.”
And yet, as Walker has watched the corporate takeover of her own and other parks, she knows something has to give.
Most residents had complaints about the park owners who came before Impact — there’s bound to be friction anytime one human controls the shelter of another — but under the new regime, residents like Walker yearn for the bygone era of local ownership.
“If Blake’s was here, Blake’s would have helped because it was a little mom-and-pop,” she said. “But you get these big corporations that come in, and they don’t care. They just do not care. And it’s heartbreaking because they have this ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude.”
In Laramie, as elsewhere, the age of the mom-and-pop-owned mobile home park is coming to an end. Taking its place are corporate out-of-state investors seeking the highest return possible and willing to force long-time residents out of their homes to secure that desired return.
The options remaining to residents appear to be accepting this corporate ownership and doing whatever needs doing to make rent; fighting for resident ownership and lobbying for the support that would make it possible; or — as so many have — moving out of their park and possibly out of the city.
“I’ve thought about it,” Walker said. “But then again, part of me is like, ‘If you move, they’re winning.’ And yeah, I’m sorry, but no — you’re not going to defeat me.”
It seems the root problem ROC and ICAN have is there is no incentive for Impact to sell. Between the money to be made exploiting people and the value of the land in general to our limited market, there is money to be made through multiple mechanisms. So long as our supply is exceedingly short of the demand, the problem will continue. Even if Impact sells, the average property value in Laramie (or house sale) seems to go beyond +10% asking lately. Impact can sell to another REIT with the same practices.
If money and market value is the incentive to take advantage of these folks, remove the incentive. Cap earnings.
Not an easy task and not something to be taken lightly, but we are not the first community to experience this. Rent control and stabilization has a long history in America. Talking about this in Wyoming's political climate is akin to self-immolation, but Laramie is not the only community in Wyoming facing predatory landlords and mobile home parks, and limited housing stock, limited land development, and demands that well exceed supply.
We need to have real conversations about alternatives and options that involve political action but are taken in context outside of politics. Taking care of people, shelter, mental health, and basic human needs are not political issues - but our regressive conversations about right and left do not allow space for human issues.