When Amilcar Benitez bought a mobile home at Harmony Place in Alexandria, it needed a lot of work. The flooring, insulation and plumbing in the two-bedroom home he shares with his wife and two children were damaged, prompting Benitez to invest late-night hours — and money — into home improvements. Since making the purchase in 2015, he’s put about as much cash into the property as he did to buy it, some $24,000.
“We’re doing it little by little. Now it’s better for my kids,” says Benitez, a construction field engineer.
His home, as well as his neighborhood, has gone through immense transition in the past year. Last fall, the owners of the mobile home park along Richmond Highway (Route 1) in Fairfax County were looking to sell and pursued an offer from a real-estate investment company. Benitez and other Harmony Place residents quickly worked with the county and an Alexandria-based community organizer to create a counterproposal. If accepted, a local nonprofit would own and manage the park, backed by county financing — a model the county now regards as a template for future ownership proposals. But in December, the park owners closed on the deal with the investor, Six Rock Properties, for $1.5 million less than the proposal arranged by tenants.
“I personally tell him, ‘Look, you’re trying to take our opportunity,’” Benitez recalls. “You have a lot of money. And this is a low-income community.”
Nearly a year later, residents of Harmony Place are contending with challenges that are all-too-familiar to mobile home owners across the D.C. region and the country. While manufactured homes offer an affordable path to home ownership, they also present an abundance of challenges. Parks are often in need of considerable repairs and residents don’t own the land on which their house rests, which leaves them vulnerable to the decisions of landlords — increasingly private investors — who may prioritize profit over the well-being of the community.
Manufactured homes constitute the largest unsubsidized affordable housing stock in the country, with some 22 million Americans, or 7% of households, living in homes that were built in factories. More than 350,000 Virginians live in communities of mobile homes, generally synonymous with manufactured homes, and Fairfax County is home to roughly 1,750 units. Prefabricated homes cost significantly less than on-site builds, and offer more square footage than many apartments. But ownership comes with significant trade-offs, chief among them the uncertainty of just how long residents can afford to stay.
The future for residents of Harmony Place is precarious. Tenants say much-needed repairs aren’t happening quickly enough. The rent, currently $900 per month, is expected to rise next year. And a major transportation project getting underway in the next few years could wipe out some homes and raise land values, making redevelopment of the park more enticing to developers.
The community at Harmony Place
Of the eight mobile home communities in Fairfax County, six of which are along Route 1, Harmony Place tied with a nearby park for the lowest healthy place index in a 2020 county report. The index grades a neighborhood’s overall well-being, including its “performance” with housing, education, healthcare, air quality, and other factors. The park’s score was 47.8 on a 100-point scale.
Tucked into an industrial area where Mount Vernon meets Hybla Valley, Harmony Place was built on a flood plain. Before it changed hands last year, Benitez says the park was ravaged by a host of ills over time, from flooding and potholes, to sewer issues, to electrical hazards.
Many residents have lived at the park for years, with nearly a third calling it home for more than a decade, according to a 2021 county-commissioned survey. The community of 84 households is overwhelmingly Latinx, and 88% of surveyed residents speak Spanish as their primary language. The majority of residents are housing cost-burdened (spending more than 30% of their income on housing). Even before the pandemic, most said housing costs made it difficult to pay for necessities such as phone bills, medical expenses, and food.
A slide from the 2020 “Development Fundamentals and Mobile Homes” report produced by Fairfax County’s Affordable Housing Preservation Task Force Mobile and Manufactured Homes Work Group.
Since the 1960s, two families have co-owned Harmony Place, says former owner Michael Wren. Last year, the three co-owners — who bought the business from their fathers in 2000 — were looking to sell; the longtime property manager, TAB Management Inc., had reported difficulty collecting rent during COVID.
“He said if we’d thought about selling it, it might be a good time,” Wren says.
In the 2021 survey, conducted by the Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance, more than half of participating residents said prior park ownership had raised rents in 2020 and 2021. The average rent increase at the time was $36.53 per month, or about 4%. Wren says TAB was working with residents to help them get financial assistance
The park is also challenged by the expansion of Richmond Highway set to begin construction in 2026, which would potentially eliminate several homes on the property to make way for a bus rapid transit line. Between rent collection and the forthcoming transportation project, Wren and his business partners decided to put the property on the market. They reached back out to a real-estate investment company that had expressed interest in the park: Six Rock Properties, and got an offer for $8,000,000 in August.
Tenants and Workers United — a community organizer focusing on affordable housing, immigrant rights and other social justice issues — had been working with residents through the pandemic to assess and help meet their needs, including connecting them with COVID testing, vaccines, and food assistance. When residents learned Harmony Place was for sale, TWU switched gears and started looking for ways to help the residents make a counteroffer.
“The community wanted to own their land, wanted to create a co-op,” says TWU executive director Evelin Urrutia.
TWU helped create co-op housing for largely low-income Alexandria residents three decades ago, the Arlandria-Chirilagua Housing Cooperative. But the process, which includes establishing a board and bylaws, would have been more time-consuming for Harmony Place than the 60 days they had to make a counteroffer, Urrutia says. So they developed an alternative: Dumfries-based Catholics for Housing would own and operate the park, and the county would handle the financing. The nonprofit has owned and managedEast End Mobile Home Park in Manassas since 2018, buying it after it sustained a raw sewage leak for several years.
In Virginia, a 2020 law provides that if a park owner receives an offer to buy the property, the owner must notify both the residents and the state Department of Housing and Community Development at least 60 days prior to the closing date. It also stipulates that the owner consider any counterproposal made within that timeframe by an entity that is supported by at least 25% of residents. (Though similar to D.C.’s more robust Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, the Virginia legislation does not give tenants the right of first refusal.) Harmony Place residents alleged that they had received delayed notice of the offer in 2021; with the help of Legal Services of Northern Virginia, who took their case to Fairfax County Circuit Court, the residents were awarded additional time to make a counteroffer.
Late last year, Harmony Place ownership considered both proposals — one from Catholics For Housing and the other from Six Rock, to whom they ultimately sold the property. Wren and his partners had concerns about moving forward with the nonprofit bidl, Wren says, including possible tax changes in 2022 and the time it might take to secure funding from the county.
“I was kind of under the gun to get something done in 2021,” Wren says. They closed on the deal with Six Rock in late December, selling for $7,000,000 after negotiating with the investment company. The county was willing to provide up to $8,500,000 for the nonprofit’s proposal.
New ownership
Six Rock Properties, founded in 2014, owns 16 mobile home parks across North Carolina, South Carolina and now Virginia; Harmony Place is its first property in the commonwealth. Its founder and CEO, Chris Ebert, has a background in corporate finance and investment banking. He says he is drawn to the “supply/demand dynamics” of manufactured home communities.
“It’s an imbalance; the demand is just so much higher than the supply, and just from an investment standpoint it just provides more stability,” Ebert says, adding that he’d like each of his communities “to be the best park possible” by investing in its maintenance and upgrades.
Since early 2022, Six Rock has made improvements to the park, including repaving its streets and installing a new plumbing system. Benitez, 35, says he’s pleased with the freshly paved streets but wants to see additional repairs and improvements: the plumbing work destroyed many driveways and patio areas in the neighborhood that still need to be fixed, power lines are hanging dangerously close to homes and could be hazardous during storms, and he’d like to see a playground built for the kids who routinely play in the street. He says Ebert has held at least one virtual community meeting in 2022, but has yet to meet with residents in person this year.
“We tell him, ‘Look, we need a meeting with you, but you have to come to the community. It’s your community; you have to come and see how it is now,’” Benitez says.
David Perez Teofani, who lives across the street from Benitez, has lived at Harmony Place with his wife and two young children for two years. The 33-year-old worked at a D.C. restaurant until the pandemic hit, and was out of work for about two years before finding work in construction. Teofani recently paid off his trailer and says he does his best to take care of his home but would like to see better maintenance at the park. The brick patio he laid outside his home, for example, was destroyed by the plumbing repairs several months ago and has yet to be fixed, he says.
“I understand they are new owners, but we are people,” says Perez, who notes that many children and older adults live in the community. “It’s a very bad situation.”
Ebert says the plumbing work is not yet complete because overhauling a whole network of water and sewer lines takes time. He also says he will be visiting the park this fall to meet with residents, and will observe the power lines and determine whether any problems should be addressed by the utility company. Building a play area is also a possibility, depending on space, Ebert says.
Some residents are pleased with Harmony Place. Oscar Orlando Rojas has lived there for about 10 years and shares his mobile home with a roommate. “I’m very happy,” he says. For Rojas, the rent increases commonly associated with capital improvements are not a big concern; he says he recognizes that the cost of “everything” has gone up amid pandemic-era inflation.
But rent increases, and the ability to remain part of the community, are a big concern for many Harmony Place residents. Fear of displacement ranked among the tenants’ top concerns in the 2021 survey, which was administered before residents knew about the Six Rock offer.
Owning their homes, but renting the land
The vast majority of Harmony Place residents own their homes. But like many mobile home park residents, they have to rent the land under it. When park tenants get priced out due to surrounding development or rent increases, it’s not easy to move their homes, and there are few vacancies elsewhere.
“Many of these mobile homes are very old; they are difficult to maintain,” says Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance executive director Michelle Krocker. “If a mobile home park is purchased, it’s not like you can drive your mobile home down the road to another mobile home [park] because mobile homes in general are under threat.”
A brightly colored home at Harmony Place.Tyrone Turner / DCist/WAMU
One of those threats, Krocker says, is the transformation of Route 1. In 2018, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved Embark Richmond Highway, a plan that includes widening the thoroughfare, creating a bus rapid transit line and a 3-mile extension of Metro’s Yellow Line from Huntington to Hybla Valley. County officials in 2018 said the transportation projects, and surrounding redevelopment, could nearly quadruple the area’s population.
“All of that improved transit and increased density raises surrounding land values. … With the six mobile home communities located along the Route 1 corridor, that provides an incentive for owners to sell the property because their value has now increased,” Krocker says. “They’ve invested thousands of dollars in their mobile home, but if the community is sold, they have no place to go and they have no place to take their mobile home.”
A related challenge to the viability of long-term mobile home ownership is the recent trend of corporate investment, such as Six Rock’s offer. For most of their history, manufactured home communities have been mom-and-pop operations, including Harmony Place’s prior owner. But corporate interest has been on the rise. In the past eight years, roughly one-fifth of mobile home parks have been purchased by institutional investors.
“At the same time as we have that retiring group of mom-and-pop owners, we have this gold rush of investors seeking to gobble up parks,” Esther Sullivan, an associate professor of sociology and the author of Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place, said on a recent episode of 1A. “We should be clear; it’s not only private equity. … There’s a range of corporate money that’s seeking to own and operate these parks. Why? Because of the profit margins.”
Mobile home parks are an increasingly attractive asset class for investors. Park owners have minimal responsibilities in terms of upkeep and amenities, and the ongoing shortage of affordable housing — made worse by the pandemic-era housing market and current interest rates — ensures a steady stream of tenants. Because of this demand, many corporate investors have the leverage to raise rent substantially.
Residents walk in the manufactured home neighborhood.Tyrone Turner / DCist/WAMU
Fairfax County Supervisor Rodney Lusk (D-Franconia District), who worked with Harmony Place residents as they prepared their proposal with Catholics for Housing, says the issue with corporate investment is that those entities are usually “focused on one thing — and that is extracting additional value.”
“I hate to say it; it’s been successful in a lot of places,” Lusk says. “There’s a lot of pretty reputable private equity firms that buy these parks and try to reposition them. So that’s our fear, right?”
Ebert says he has agreed with Lusk not to raise rents through his first year of ownership. However, he does anticipate some rent increase in 2023.“My initial inclination is to do a 5% increase, but … we haven’t put out notices or anything like that,” Ebert says. “I don’t want to make promises, but it shouldn’t be more than 5%.”
That’s less than apartment rent increases in Northern Virginia, which experienced a 13% average increase in the first quarter of this year. But any increase can be hard to bear for low-income families.
“Landlords are free to adjust their rent to inflation, not necessarily to increases or decreases in wages,” says Walewska M. Watkins, an eviction prevention attorney with Legal Services of Northern Virginia who served on the legal team for Harmony Place tenants last year.. “That’s always a concern for the low-income clients that I see … it’s just not keeping up; what they make is not keeping up with what’s required of them.”
A model proposal that could help other parks
In September, the Fairfax County Manufactured Housing Task Force that was created in 2021 presented its recommendations to the county’s Board of Supervisors. The Harmony Place proposal was cited as a “template” for future challenges to new ownership.
”The purchasing model used for Harmony Place could be used in future situations where a property is for sale and the residents would like to organize and make an offer to purchase. The county encourages nonprofit organizations to engage and collaborate with residents of manufactured home communities,” the report reads.
Nonprofit ownership of parks could help keep rent down, Lusk says, because “they’re less likely to be motivated by profits” and more motivated to improve living conditions for residents.
“We have to figure out a way to encourage some level of home ownership for these individuals. And the question is, ‘How do you do that?,’” Lusk says. “The first step would be trying to figure out how you get a not-for-profit to come in and reposition the asset and then to think about how then could that not-for-profit help the residents become the owners of their own units and their own land.” One way the county has been trying to accomplish the latter, Lusk says, is running a new job-training program located near the park that can help lift incomes.
Another model for assisting mobile-park residents is county ownership. Fairfax County purchased a mobile home park four decades ago, part of which is now being redeveloped as North Hill. The county purchased the site, about 2 miles north of Harmony Place, with “the intent to bring high-quality, affordable homes to the area.” After creating one manufactured home community on the land, the remaining 33 acres were in planning stages until 2020, when construction broke ground on North Hill. The mixed-income development, financed through a public-private partnership, will sport 279 affordable units, as well as market-rate townhomes.
Resident co-ops are also gaining steam as a solution when a park is in limbo. ROC USA and its partners have helped nearly 300 communities across the country achieve cooperative resident ownership since 2008.
TWU is working with at least two area mobile home parks who have offers on the table, and coordinating with local nonprofits on possible counterproposals. For Harmony Place, Urrutia says the best-case scenario for the families is to get “an investment from the county.”
“We need to create a healthy condition for the families and [try] to keep being organized and push back,” she says. “People can be evicted in many ways, right? One is you decide to sell your home and move on because you’re tired of the situation. Two is that you definitely cannot keep paying your rent and you have to move on. … If the rents continue going up and we don’t have [support] or the owner doesn’t give back to the community, then he will end up with an empty lot that it will be easy for him to demolish and create whatever he wants to create.”
When asked whether Ebert has any plans to sell or redevelop the park in the coming years, he said Six Rock Properties is built to “own and operate parks — that’s what we do.”
“It’s like a virtuous cycle,” Ebert says. “You want people to actually want to live there. And so you provide a nice, clean, safe place and do your part, and hopefully they pay rent and then everybody’s happy.”
Though Amilcar Benitez has called Harmony Place home for nine years and lived in two of its mobile homes, he hopes to move out sometime in the near future. His children, 6 and 11, are getting older, and he says he’ll need a third bedroom soon.
He has stuck around to see how Harmony Place progressed under new ownership and says he’d like to wait until economic conditions are more conducive to moving out. But in a couple of years, Benitez says he’ll be ready.
“We’re still thinking about [whether] we can buy a house,” he says. “That is our goal, and we’ll see.”
Tyrone Turner contributed reporting to this story.
This article is part of our 2022 contribution to the Homeless Crisis Reporting Project, in collaboration with Street Sense Media and other local newsrooms. The collective works will be published throughout the week at HomelessCrisis.press.
This story originally appeared on dcist.com