Who Owns The Parks?

Before private equity entered the market, the most notorious landlord in manufactured housing was Frank Rolfe. Based out of rural Colorado, Rolfe doesn’t just practice predatory ownership tactics — via his Investor’s Bootcamp, he teaches them. “There’s a huge number of poor people,” Rolfe tells his students, “and there’s more poor people like every day.” But Rolfe’s one-man operation looks quaint compared to today’s investors.

The list of names is glitzy and notorious, including billionaires like Warren Buffett and Sam Zell; massive investment entities like Blackstone and Apollo Global Management; and NBA superfan James Goldstein, who can afford his courtside tickets thanks to a fortune amassed in part from fighting drawn-out legal battles against rent control ordinances for manufactured housing parks. As the Financial Times has reported, the parks provide a return on investment of more than 4 percent, “double the average US real estate investment trust return.”

Buffett, known ostensibly as a good-guy investor, has created a closed loop of exploitation in manufactured housing. One Buffett-controlled company, Clayton Homes, dominates the market: through various subsidiaries, the Seattle Times has reported, Clayton sells manufactured houses, exploitative loans on the houses, and their high-priced insurance policies. Clayton is closely intertwined with the Manufactured Housing Institute, the industry’s primary lobbying group, which has spent over $4.5 million over the last two decades protecting the interests of private owners.

The newer school of manufactured housing park owners includes companies like the California-based Three Pillar Communities. Its founder, Daniel Weisfeld, who identifies as a “manufactured housing innovator” on LinkedIn, says he aspires to have a “social impact” by “reducing racism” and “enhancing economic mobility.”

In one investor relations report, Weisfeld brought up a park Three Pillars owns in Petaluma, California, writing that because local rent ordinances had made ownership cost-prohibitive, the company had filed a federal lawsuit challenging them under the Fifth Amendment.

“There is now a good chance that, as a direct result of the city’s policies, we will have to shut [the park] down and convert the land to another use,” wrote Weisfeld. “Mobile home park residents will lose their place to live if the city’s regulations do not allow us to earn enough income to justify keeping our park open.”

What Weisfeld fails to acknowledge is that the residents’ homes don’t have to earn income at all. Under the ROC USA model, theoretically, the residents of the Petaluma park could take over and run the community themselves with no profit margin.

In 2023, Three Pillars bought a park in Colorado for $5.8 million. Its residents had bid the exact same amount, but Three Pillars’ offer was all cash. As Vail Daily reported, under Three Pillars’ ownership, residents got a “newly paved main road,” a long list of rules that “have reduced residents’ freedoms on the property,” and a “rapid rent hike.”

The Residents Strike Back

Formed in 2008 in New Hampshire, ROC USA grew out of the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, one of the earliest existing Community Development Financial Institutions, which aim to use market tools to support underprivileged communities. ROC USA has since created cooperatives in twenty-one states, with its successes largely clustered in the Northeast, the Pacific Northwest, and, increasingly, in Minnesota.

On a recent winter morning, I drove south from Minneapolis to meet Bev Adrian at Woodlawn, the resident-owned community where she’s now president. The sun was shining on the pickup trucks, the vinyl-siding-clad homes, and the park’s communal garden beds. Adrian — small-framed, abundantly energetic — hustled me into her home, which was full of Bob Dylan posters, cookbooks, and political manifestos.

Woodlawn voted to become a cooperative in March 2020, right at the outset of the pandemic. Indoor gatherings weren’t allowed, so the residents — “ecstatic” to vote yes, says Adrian — grabbed chairs and posted up in a central patch of Woodlawn they redubbed Park Square. Through its local subsidiary, ROC USA ran its traditional playbook for Woodlawn, which means helping the residents with technical assistance on how to form a cooperative and navigate the purchasing process.

ROC USA and its subsidiaries can also lend directly to cooperatives. The cost of a park varies depending on its size and location; for the last seven years, the average sale price for a ROC USA community has been $4.15 million. The ROC USA loans are repaid, with often better-than-market interest rates, thanks to the organization’s savvy use of state subsidies. On average, ROC USA residents pay $417 a month to service these loans. Residents also pay a one-time fee, usually just a few hundred dollars, to join the cooperative. If they leave, they’re refunded the money.

Before Woodlawn became a cooperative, Adrian used to regularly see folks drive in and out in Escalades and other conspicuous luxury vehicles — potential buyers, she was sure. To this day, she says, she gets solicited weekly, via postcards and calls: “‘Are you the owner of the park? Are you interested in selling?’” Despite Woodlawn’s status as a cooperative, private investors haven’t given up, Adrian says: “They’re just out there.”

As a nonprofit, Woodlawn is eligible for a “boatload” of state grants, Adrian says, and so Woodlawn has money and plans: to revitalize a private well for drinking water; to replace a load of sewer lines; to properly fix up the park’s rental units. “Who gets to spend millions?” Adrian says, laughing, incredulous at her good fortune. “It’s like winning the lottery.”

Adrian is part of an informal network of activist resident-owned community presidents fighting to increase the number of cooperatives in the state. That includes Natividad Seefeld, who helped turn her own community — the eighty-eight-home Park Plaza in nearby Fridley, Minnesota — into a cooperative in 2011. Since then, Seefeld has become a nationally recognized crusader for the resident-owned community model.

Seefeld is a garrulous great-grandmother with inexhaustible zeal. When I visit her in Park Plaza, she peppers her monologues with phrases like “That is serious straight-up bullshit” and “I would kill a bitch.”

As the chair of the ROC Association’s Policy and Advocacy Committee, she was instrumental in helping push through the PRICE Act, which will provide hundreds of millions in federal funding for manufactured housing. She’s become adept at luring high-profile politicians like Democratic Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison to Park Plaza. She’s also testified at State Capitol hearings for years; she just has to figure out scheduling ahead of time, so she can get time off her full-time job at a General Mills warehouse.

At those hearings, Seefeld regularly comes face to face with Mark Brunner, president of the Manufactured and Modular Home Association of Minnesota, the state’s main lobbying group for private owners of manufactured housing parks. According to advocates for manufactured housing residents, in recent years the lobbying group has successfully pushed back against proposed rent-control ordinances.

“He gets up there and he will straight up lie,” Seefeld says. “I always want to stand up and say, ‘That makes no sense!’ I have to sit there and calm myself down,” she says with a laugh. “He just fully despises me. I don’t know why. Some people are just that way.”

Before I leave Park Plaza, I sit in on a board meeting in the community center, which doubles as Park Plaza’s storm shelter. Built a few years back to replace an inadequate bunker, it’s dotted with primary-color children’s handprints and flags representing residents from Afghanistan, Italy, and Mexico.

The first order of business is the installation of solar panels on a resident’s roof. Another family’s home desperately needs new doors. Some of the community’s trees need shots to protect them from invasive emerald ash borer beetles. Again and again, residents ask the same fundamental question: How are we going to pay for this? And again and again, they find a make-do solution.

Before we wrap up, Seefeld reports that a resident named Suad has asked Seefeld if he can form a cleanup committee. Everyone is pleasantly shocked, but also unsure how to proceed: No one has ever actually volunteered to start a committee before. They decide they’ll figure out the details later.

Seefeld recounts her conversation with Suad, doing her best to imitate the accent of his native Bosnia. Dramatically raising her hands stiffly into the air, she shouts, “I want us to be beautiful!”

Useful Politicians

Matt Norris, thirty-five, smiley and sincere, represents District 32B in the state’s House of Representatives, encompassing a small chunk of central Minnesota that Norris says has more manufactured housing than any other district in the state.

We meet in his office in a state building packed with high school politics nerds and constituents holding tightly to manila folders, coiled and ready to unleash grievances. Just outside Norris’s office is a framed Tupac poster, paraphrasing the rapper’s lyrics: “Even though you’re fed up, you gotta keep your head up.”

Norris has become the go-to guy for manufactured housing in Minnesota. He’s seen residents’ anger firsthand, recently and most prominently at a park called Blaine International Village in Blaine, Minneapolis, that was purchased by Havenpark Communities. Based in Utah, Havenpark is highly active in Minnesota and has become notorious locally for rent spikes and deteriorating infrastructure. Before Havenpark, Blaine was family-owned. As one Blaine resident told me, “There was forty years of family ownership. They raised rent $200 in forty years. Havenpark, they’ve done $200 in four years.”

After Havenpark’s takeover, Norris held a town hall at Blaine to hear its residents’ complaints, which went beyond rent to crumbling streets and an inadequate storm shelter.

“The room was at capacity — the fire marshal would have stepped in if we had packed any more people in there,” Norris says. “And there were one hundred people waiting outside on a ninety-degree day because they were so furious about what was going on.”

Norris says he’s had success forcing Havenpark to address some of the basic maintenance issues, but there has been no compromise on rent.

Norris has been instrumental in passing legislation to support resident-owned communities. The State of Minnesota’s Housing Fund now has a revolving $10 million fund that cooperatives can utilize to quickly make an offer. Furthermore, if park owners sell to their residents, they get a tax credit that makes offers from their residents more lucrative, even if a private investor offers more cash.

Mike Bullard, ROC USA’s spokesperson, says that even more than the actual loan, it’s the technical assistance — expert guidance through the process of owning a park and maintaining its infrastructure — that is crucial to a resident-owned community’s success.

Traditionally, your local municipality is responsible for things like the upkeep of roads and the sewage system. In manufactured housing communities, the owners are responsible for all of that. If a pipe bursts, they need to know how to fix it. If a tornado smashes up a playground, they need to know how to fix it.

“In the affordable housing space, everybody agrees that there’s a huge need for technical assistance,” Bullard says. “It helps guarantee success, but nobody wants to pay for it. We bake it into the model.”

Others like Linda Shi, a professor at Cornell University’s Department of City and Regional Planning, emphasize the strengths of the ROC USA system. Shi, who’s published research on the topic, believes that ROC USA’s practices could be expanded beyond the ownership of manufactured-housing parks to other forms of housing.

“It has a national network of financing,” Shi says. “It has national technical assistance providers that understand the [local] housing policy and the state-specific legislation.” Could that model work for a group of big-city tenants wanting to buy their apartment building? Or a group of small-town retirees wanting to buy their retirement community? “Why don’t people replicate this model?” Shi asks. “We’re waiting for an answer.”

As Wall Street has begun buying up single-family homes, Shi’s question goes to the heart of an issue impacting anyone wanting to own a home in the United States: Who gets access to capital, and why?

Indiana University’s Fran Quigley has pointed out that the federal lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provide financing on favorable terms for private equity groups and private owners to take over manufactured housing parks. Writing for Jacobin, Quigley has asked, why can’t those “low-interest, low-down-payment options [go] to resident groups who want to buy their parks” instead?

The Courage To Go Cooperative

On my last afternoon in Minnesota, I drive into Breckenridge, a town of a few thousand people in the northwest part of the state tucked just south of the world’s second-largest statue of a catfish. After a few minutes’ cruise down the main road, I leave behind all evident signs of commerce or industry and cross a railroad track into wide-open flatland. Then I pull up at the Bois De Sioux Mobile Estates. (That’s Bois as in “Boyz.”) Within days, with ROC USA’s help, Bois De Sioux is set to become the newest resident-owned community in the country.

I meet Phil Huffman, Bois De Sioux’s president, and Kevin Pfeiffle, his second in command, inside a pleasantly yellowish laundromat-slash-community center. A handwritten note on a bulletin board advertises a 1995 Buick Skylark by promising it would “MAKE A GOOD DEMOLITION DERBY CAR.”

Huffman, who speaks in the deep drawl of a minor but beloved Coen Brothers character, says that before ROC USA came around, he’d never heard of a resident-owned community. Both he and Pfeiffle had previously lived in a park just over the North Dakota border where out-of-state owners were raising rents “constantly,” Pfeiffle says, while letting living conditions deteriorate. And when issues came up, Pfeiffle says the owners “don’t ever answer the phone.”

So in the summer of 2023, when Bois De Sioux residents got a letter telling them that their landlord, who’d owned and lived in the park for decades, was selling, they were ready.

Joel Hanson is the Communications Manager at the local ROC USA subsidiary. He was at the first meeting that Bois De Sioux residents held at the Breckenridge public library to discuss becoming a cooperative. “Phil already had plans,” Hanson says. “It had already materialized in [his] mind: ‘We’re gonna own this thing.’”

With the implementation of the federal PRICE Act, and with increased awareness of the predatory actions of private owners, ROC USA and its advocates believe now is the time to push the resident-owned community model further than ever. Today, Bois De Sioux is the tip of the spear.

It’s too cold to meander around, so we opt for a drive. Some homes are neat, some are ramshackle. Yards are dotted with basketball hoops, plastic animals, and at least one Jet Ski. There’s plenty of open space, too. The Bois De Sioux cooperative wants to fill this place up, to reach its full capacity of 72 homes. They want to put a flower bed out in front of the laundromat and plant fruit trees, maybe even use one of the lots as a community garden.

As the sale to the cooperative is still being finalized, Huffman says he’s still getting used to his new role in the spotlight. Before, he barely knew his neighbors. Now people come up asking him all kinds of questions: about infrastructure repairs, about park statutes, about changing fees. Most of the time, he says with a wide smile, the same thought crosses his mind: “Who the fuck are you?”

Park Plaza’s Natividad Seefeld was also at the Bois De Sioux cooperative’s first meeting; ROC USA often tasks her with cajoling would-be cooperatives into taking that fateful first step. She tries to be honest: “You’re gonna have to pay attention. You’re gonna be tired. You’re doing it for free.”

But she pushes, too, telling folks, “Just imagine if you say ‘no,’ what’ll happen next. Nine times out of 10, a seller already has a buyer waiting in the background — just waiting. This is your opportunity to take control of your finances, your rent — to take control of yourself.”