San Jose, the city with the most mobile home parks in California, has adopted new rules to protect tens of thousands of park residents from displacement by making it more difficult to redevelop the sites for other purposes.
Over the past decade, the city has worked to establish a new land-use category specifically for its 58 mobile home parks. The latest update means that when a developer or property owner wants to turn any of those parks into housing or another kind of development, they must first ask the City Council to change the zoning regulation to allow a project that’s not a mobile home site.
Some parks became subject to that requirement earlier this year. Last week, the council unanimously agreed to extend the protections to the remaining 43 parks not yet covered under the added zoning.
“You’re helping add layers of protection against displacement,” mobile home resident Jill Borders told councilmembers before the June 11 vote. “You’re helping answer the question that my 9-year-old daughter asked me after we were evicted: ‘How can I be born and not have a place to live?’”
Jill Borders sits in her house at the Imperial Estates Mobile Home Park on Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2023, in San Jose, Calif. Borders has lived at the mobile home park since 2013. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Mobile home parks have long provided a more affordable housing option for San Jose residents, often seniors and middle-income families. The homes, which residents own while leasing the land underneath, can cost around $350,000 to $400,000. Compare that to more than $2 million for a typical single-family house in the South Bay. An estimated 35,000 people live in 11,000 mobile homes across the city.
But in 2015, after residents at the Winchester Ranch Senior Mobile Home Park opposed developers who sought to convert their community into apartment buildings, mobile home owners across the city grew worried about getting pushed out. The Winchester Ranch residents eventually struck a deal that guaranteed them a spot at the new development.
Over the next few years, the City Council adopted new mobile home protections, including giving itself more authority to deny a permit for a mobile home conversion.
Now, by establishing a land-use category for all mobile home parks, anyone aiming to redevelop a park for another purpose must also get the council’s approval to change the new zoning regulations. That would mean completing the lengthy and expensive environmental review process required for many developments under state law.
“This is an added layer of protection if the owner of those properties hypothetically wanted to redevelop them for some other use,” said San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan.
Some in the local real estate industry, however, argue the new rules could hinder the city’s effort to alleviate its intensifying housing shortage by making it much more complicated to convert mobile home parks into more dense condos or apartments. Under state law, the city is expected to approve 62,000 new homes — about half of them affordable — over the next decade.
“San Jose has no chance of meeting its housing needs and obligations under state law if it is going to adopt policies like this that make it more difficult to redevelop and densify existing residential land,” said South Bay land-use consultant Erik Schoennauer.
Schoennauer, who represented the group that redeveloped the Winchester Ranch park, credited the conversion with increasing the number of housing units on the property from around 110 to almost 700. The developer also compensated mobile home residents and offered them the opportunity to live at the new apartment complex at a reduced rate.
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“How we transitioned Winchester Ranch Mobile Home Park is a much better land use policy approach for our city,” he said.
Before voting to approve the latest protections, councilmember David Cohen said the new rules are in keeping with the city’s goal of preserving affordable housing.
“We hope that the residents of our mobile home parks sleep easier knowing that we as a city are committed to this as one of the elements in our overall housing plan,” he said.
