Residents at one of Bellingham’s smaller mobile home parks, on Samish Way, are getting ready to celebrate the purchase of the property where their homes sit.
Meanwhile, those who live at the much larger Lakeway Mobile Estates are scrambling after initial work on a deal to buy their site fell through.
The deal on Samish Mobile Home Park should close by March 15, said Victoria O’Banion, who leads acquisitions for ROC Northwest, a program of the Northwest Cooperative Development Center that supports resident-owned communities. O’Banion has been steering Samish park residents through the transaction for the past few months, helping them secure a loan and negotiate with property owners Katie and Michael Reams.
“The residents are super-excited about acquisition,” O’Banion said. “There’s even one resident who’s trying to move a family member into an empty unit, so they’re anticipating the benefits of cooperative ownership.”
The sale will come in somewhere between $4.5 million and $5.1 million, O’Banion said, confirming initial figures from December. O’Banion and Katie Reams both declined to name the exact price before closing.
The Reamses initially wanted to build a multi-story residential building with affordable units on the 3-acre site of the mobile home park, but new city regulations approved in October 2022 made it prohibitively difficult to change the use of that property from anything other than a manufactured home park.
“The zoning [rule] the City of Bellingham recently passed does not protect affordability, it protects the land from being developed,” Katie Reams said in an email to Cascadia Daily News.
Reams added that ROC Northwest made a competitive offer on the property.
“Selling to the residents will ensure permanent affordable housing in this location,” she said. “We do not have to sell to the residents but are choosing to because it feels like the right thing.”
Off Lakeway Drive, however, a deal simply couldn’t get done, O’Banion said.
In a Feb. 13 letter to Lakeway residents, O’Banion gave ROC Northwest’s “professional estimate” of the value of the park property as “a minimum $35 million.”
Even with the benefit of a grant and a very low-interest loan for part of the sale, the total loan package “would be unaffordable for many people in the community and would create an unacceptable risk of nonpayment for lenders,” the letter said.
ROC Northwest estimated that the loan repayments, coupled with the cost of day-to-day maintenance and operation of the park, would result in a rent increase of “well over 100 percent,” O’Banion said.
Residents of Lakeway Mobile Estates would not talk on the record about their efforts to purchase the site. A representative of Follett USA, the California-based property owner, did not respond to a request for comment.
At Samish Mobile Home Park, the residents-turned-owners will see a 40% increase in the rents they pay for their lots. Such an increase is “pretty standard,” O’Banion said, as the lot fees now need to cover the repayment of the loan residents took to purchase the property.
What residents get in return, O’Banion said, is control. Samish residents approved their community’s budget on Feb. 17.
“In resident-owned cooperative communities, they know where the money goes,” she said. “In an investor-owned community, residents pay and they have no idea where the money goes.”
The Samish residents’ loan was reduced by $1.3 million in grants from the state Department of Commerce.
The state grants are an essential part of ROC Northwest’s program, helping to make property ownership possible for the typically lower-income residents of mobile home parks.
“That grant fund will be depleted by the middle of this year,” O’Banion said, adding that more money for the fund is proposed in the current legislative session, set to adjourn on March 7.
“It is money that we need to be able to continue,” O’Banion said.
Ralph Schwartz is a former CDN local government reporter; send tips and information to newstips@cascadiadaily.com.
