Durango Mobile Home Park Residents Form Community Land Trust

According to an article by Kirbie Bennett and Jamie Wanzek in High Country News, a Colorado manufactured housing community offers “one model for how to preserve affordable housing, with the potential to reshape housing in the West in a way that allows residents to guide the discussion.”

When threatened with a buyout by a notorious institutional investor, residents of the Westside Mobile Home Park banded together to make their own offer. “With the support of Elevation Community Land Trust, Westside’s residents were able to purchase their park, becoming one of the six community land trusts in Colorado. It was the first time that Elevation applied the community land-trust model to a mobile home park.”

The Durango example is unique because “It’s generally uncommon for housing co-ops to partner with community land trusts,” in large part because they tend to exist in different places. “Now owned jointly by its residents and Elevation, the park operates as a community land trust, which removes land from the real estate market and transforms it into community-owned property.”

As Planetizen has noted in the past, manufactured housing has long served as a key source of affordable housing around the country. “Across the country, 22 million people live in manufactured homes. While nearly 80% of residents own their mobile homes, Esther Sullivan, an associate professor of sociology at University of Colorado-Denver, notes that only 14% own the land beneath their homes.” Increasingly, corporate owners are buying up these parks and raising the land lease rates on residents who can’t afford the rent increases.

“In years to come, residents, with the help of the land trust, intend to redevelop the park by removing the trailers and transforming the units into homes. The co-op and land trust are currently in the early stages of redeveloping the park, and residents are leading those discussions.”