Residents at Helendale Mobile Home Park and Blanton Mobile Home Park, in Hope Mills, North Carolina, have been notified that they have six months to pick up and leave their homes.

The two parks, located in Southeastern North Carolina, are home to about 70 families.  The Blanton family also owns a number of the units.

The parks will be converted to a new use.  Anyone who owns a home on the land must leave, per the notice given on August 28th, by the last day of February 2009.

According to a notice sent by the law offices of McCoy, Weaver, Wiggins, Cleveland, Rose Ray PLLC, the Helendale Park consists mainly of residents who own their homes.  The Blanton Park houses residents who have been renting both the land and the homes where they live.

Helendale MHP contains 26 singlewides.  Another 24 lots are vacant.  The oldest home in the Helendale Park dates back to 1968, but otherwise, all of the homes are built after the passage of the HUD code.   Most are relatively new, in fact.  Fourteen of the homes were built after 1990.

Notice of the closure went to the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency.  This is part of language written into N.C.G.S 42-143.  This law was revised in the previous short session.  One of the changes is the requirement to post the intent to change the use of the park to the NCHFA.

Residents at Raleigh’s Homestead Village Mobile Home Park are ecstatic over news that WJ Properties is dropping its request for a rezoning of the park’s 38 acres.

Cary Joshi of WJ Properties told IndyWeek that the firm would instead look elsewhere. The zoning request, to be heard Tuesday, remains active in a formal sense.

Claudia Shows, a resident at Homestead Village for more than 30 years, rejoiced.

“As long as it is still a mobile home park,” she said, “we don’t care. We have still got to be cautious, I suppose. But, I am so excited, I just want to burst! This is the best news.”

The park’s owners still want to sell. This news, though, means that they will not be selling to WJ. WJ had sought a rezoning to build a shopping center, several housing developments, and some open land on the tract. It would have introduced many new homes to the area. Estimates by The City of Raleigh predicted that more than 500 children would be assigned to the area’s elementary schools as a result.

Shows organized some of the residents. She was able to generate support from her college classmates, as well as to generate some good media. That said, the rezoning decision may be a product of larger forces in the financial markets. Joshi tells Bob Geary that the decision to drop reflects a lack of available financing for shopping center developments.

H1700, the bill that provides a tax deduction (of 5 percent of sales price) to park owners that sell to non-profits, passed in the budget bill before the end of the short session in the 2008 NCGA.

It is hard to concentrate at work today, what with the developing crisis in the financial markets. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the nation’s largest purchases of home mortgage securities, are spiraling downwards. What will be done about it? Will the regulators abandon their free market posture? Will Freddie be taken over? How would it be done? The questions go on and on.

People should be worried. The experts are not lying about the interconnected nature of our economy. Yes, have a very healthy economy in many ways. We have the rule of law, we have an exceptionally talented workforce, we have universities and hospitals and many beneficial institutions. Nonetheless, our mortgage market acts as one of the pillars of all that activity. Fannie and Freddie are the corner beams that keep it all together.

One way to imagine what it would be like, without them, is to look at manufactured housing. Neither agency has been active in buying securities made from manufactured housing loans. Yes, there are some programs where Fannie and Freddie participate. Those tend to be through special relationships, or for limited types of ownership arrangements. For example, the GSEs will buy homes with land owned by the same person as the unit.

That doesn’t do much for the millions of American households that live in land-lease arrangements. These are known often as “trailer parks.” A few private firms do buy the asset backed securities made from loans on manufactured housing. US Bank is a big player in this market, as is Wells Fargo, and Berkshire Hathaway. It might be comforting that the institutions who choose to invest in manufactured housing abs also happen to institutions that are emerging as “survivors” in the current crisis. Its a market without GSE participation, but with some corporate demand.

That is not much different from what could be on the horizon for single family site built homes in the United States if Fannie and Freddie collapse. Now, that’s a dire scenario and it hasn’t happened yet. Nor do any of our leaders appeared to be inclined to let it happen.

Nonetheless, the impacts that such a de facto policy of non-participation by the GSEs in manufactured housing paint a compelling motive for action. Manufactured housing is often criticized as a “depreciating asset.” One of the chief reasons for that is the lack of liquidity for loans made on used mobile homes. Its a cash market, sort of like the market for condominiums in Argentina.

And that drives down prices. If you live in a $300,000, maybe after Freddie goes down, you live in a $200,000 house. Oh, and you have a $15,000 ($1.5 trillion/number of U.S. households) mortgage on your share of that GSE debt that the government just assumed on your behalf.

Check out the expansive coverage of the situation facing residents in Raleigh’s Homestead Village Mobile Home Park in this week’s Independent Weekly. The story, “Paradise Lost: Mobile Home Park Residents Caught in a Catch-22″ is another example of the crisis of park closure that plagues many communities in the country.

Bob Geary, a writer with plenty of experience covering planning board and development issues, visits with Claudia Shows, the Estradas, the Bryants, and the Webbs. His story explains the concrete problems facing these households. He then links their plight to more systemic troubles that corrupt the sustainability of homeownership for residents of mobile home parks.

This story came about, in part, due to the power of blogging. Mr. Geary noticed the story while researching for issues on BlueNC. It was a diary entry about the situation at Homestead Village that (more…)

The title of my book is “This is My Home.” The words sprung from something that a woman living in a nice single wide in Durham told me. She was angry. A local community development official asserted that she did not live in a house, as her “home” was in fact in a land-lease park. “This is my home,” she said.

Her assertion would seem to be self-validating. If she says her singlewide is her home, then it is. Yet the law finds a more nuanced perspective. The Supreme Court has often become the arbiter of disputes about this very topic.

Search Warrants and Mobile Homes

The Fourth Amendment says that police have to get a search warrant to search your “home.”

That is not true if they want to search an automobile. The motor vehicle exception creates a different standard for Fourth Amendment protections when the police want to search a car. Police can search a car, or any mobile vehicle, if they have probable cause. The logic, expressed in Carroll v. United States (1925), was that the mobility of a car creates an urgency that makes the procedural endeavor of getting a warrant an undue burden.

Well, what about a mobile home? It turns out it is not so simple. In California v. Carney (1985), the justices held that travel trailers deserve to be classified akin to cars. The decision has been interpreted to be relevant for situations involving boats, airplanes, and campers as well. Carney says that when a person living in a motor home is wanted for a felony, the police can enter his or her home at will.

In South Dakota v. Opperman (1976), the Court spelled it out further. It held that people have a lower expectation of privacy when they choose to live in a motor home

That means that people living in travel trailers (or boat houses, or airplanes, or cars) cannot expect that police will need a search warrant to enter their abode.

People living in mobile homes that no longer have wheels or a means of motorized transport are accorded a higher level of protection, however.

Mobile home residents have an advocate in Justice John Paul Stevens. He saw the inequity in the law for people who live in “mobile” homes. Justice Stevens insisted, in a dissenting opinion in U.S. v. Ross (1982), Stevens writes that officers should be able to recognize when a vehicle is actually a “living quarters.” In such an instance, he says, it deserves a higher level of protection, even if it doesn’t look like a castle. The residents have the right to expect privacy over their quarters. He points to a decision, United States v. Chadwick (1977), that found that although luggage is mobile, it should be accorded protection from unreasonable searches.

All of this is meant to provide another wrinkle in the many ways that the law currently undermines people living in manufactured housing.