Residents Stand Up for Their Mobile Homes 

Double-wide dreams

The mobile home was never supposed to be a punch line. In the lean years of the Depression, it was a lifeline — a factory-built shelter on wheels that let workers follow the work. World War II drove demand through the metal roof. By 1945, the federal government had ordered 150,000 mobile homes for defense workers; after the war, these were used to house returning veterans and their families. Almost overnight, manufactured housing went from fringe to federally endorsed, and by the 1950s, communities with names like Paradise Cove and Shangri-La had become legitimate rungs on the ladder to a better life.

A note on terminology: Today’s manufactured homes are very different from those postwar trailers. The term “mobile home” technically applies to factory-built homes constructed before June 15, 1976. “Manufactured home” refers to those homes built after that date — sturdier, better insulated and not designed to be moved. The majority of the residences in Meadowood are manufactured homes.

When mobility stopped being aspirational and started being permanent, the culture turned too. By the time trailers and manufactured homes had become a major source of working-class housing, the phrase “trailer trash” had entered the language as a slur against the people who lived in them. Zoning boards barred manufactured homes from most residential neighborhoods, herding them into designated parks and walling them off from the surrounding communities.

Manufactured housing has long been a natural fit for older Americans. Nearly half of manufactured home residents are over 55, according to AARP research; in Colorado, adults over 65 head 28 percent of manufactured home households. Nationally, roughly 5 million Americans over 50 live in manufactured housing, more than in any other form of affordable rental or ownership housing. The appeal is practical in that manufactured homes cost up to 50 percent less per square foot than site-built housing, and they offer single-story living, lower maintenance and tight-knit neighborhoods where someone notices if you haven’t come outside in a day or two.

When the Notice of Intent to Sell arrived at Meadowood, 58 residents (about 40 percent) were between 55 and 69, and 81 (nearly 60 percent) were over 70. Many chose the park because doctors, grocery stores and neighbors were nearby. For some people living there on fixed incomes, often managing health issues, the idea of moving wasn’t just financially ruinous; it was physically impossible.

“For older people, manufactured housing offers a route to a secondary American dream: that of downsizing into a smaller home in a community of their choice,” says Esther Sullivan, a sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver who has spent 17 years studying these communities. “The layout creates cohesive, safe environments that are remarkably supportive for aging in place. And now that’s exactly what’s under attack.”

Parks have always changed hands. What’s new is the scale and sophistication of the buying. In recent years, institutional investors have increasingly targeted these places as scarce, high-demand assets: New parks are hard to build, and affordable housing is in short supply.

Three of the nation’s four largest private equity companies now hold manufactured housing in their portfolios. The idea is to buy parks in appreciating real estate markets (Littleton-area home prices have roughly doubled over the past decade); install new management; reduce expenses, such as by shutting down communal spaces; and raising lot rents, sometimes dramatically. Havenpark Communities has acquired more than 80 properties, yet it doesn’t brand its parks or publicize its ownership, which is why Meadowood and Wolhurst Lake residents had to piece the truth together through lawyers, word of mouth and late-night internet searches.

“They are not being upfront in terms of their ownership,” says Jordan Ash, housing director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit watchdog. And rent increases that might look modest on paper can quickly strain residents when they arrive year after year. “For a resident living on a fixed income, a $200-a-month rent increase can mean choosing between groceries and medication. For retired people without savings, that can mean homelessness,” says Ash.

It’s the sort of arithmetic real estate investors love, and one of them, Frank Rolfe, is unusually open about why. His company controls tens of thousands of manufactured home lots, and he runs a for-profit training program called Mobile Home University. At his online boot camps, according to an episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, students pay thousands to hear Rolfe explain the appeal with stunning candor: buying mobile home parks works because “the customers are stuck there. They don’t have any option.”

Sullivan, the sociologist, attended the in-person program as part of her research. “They even went as far as to say: If there’s a clubhouse, shut it down. If there’s a pool, sandbag it,” she says, pointing out that these perks create extra costs and liabilities. (Rolfe did not respond to repeated interview requests.)

Sandy Cook and her team didn’t need a seminar to know how to respond to the bid from Havenpark. They called Tim Townsend at Thistle Community Housing, a Boulder, Colorado, nonprofit that works with residents trying to buy their parks. Thistle is part of ROC USA (Resident Owned Communities), a national network that helps homeowners form cooperatives and secure financing to purchase the land under their homes. Together, Cook, fellow resident Sharry DiQuinzio and Townsend set the first target: getting as many of Meadowood’s 92 households as possible to formally commit to becoming resident-owners. Cook and DiQuinzio worked the park door by door, answering questions, listening to fears and making the case against just waiting to see what Havenpark would do.

“You get dismissed a lot when you get to a certain age,” says DiQuinzio, 73, who was all in from the first meeting. “We’ve spent our whole life raising kids, paying taxes, doing everything right — and then a corporation with a lobbyist in the state capital can just come in and take it all away. We need to be better advocates.”

When they counted hands at the local library on February 24, 2024, nearly everyone in the park had voted yes to buying their own property before a big company did.

Meadowood fights back

Thistle’s Townsend wasn’t exactly optimistic. This was the first older adult community Thistle had the opportunity to work with, and the numbers were daunting: 92 homes, $18 million — that’s roughly $195,000 per household, on incomes that averaged well under $50,000 a year. And that didn’t include fees and other costs that Townsend knew could add a couple million more. There was no board, no reserves, no experience with cooperative financing, and a deadline was closing fast. “We saw the price tag,” he says, “and were like, ‘Oh, great. This is going to be very impossible.’ ”

ROC USA could have loaned up to $15 million toward the purchase price. But at standard commercial interest rates, the monthly payments on a loan that large would have pushed lot rents so high that buying the park would have been nearly as punishing as losing it. Thistle would agree to work with ROC to finance a big chunk of the bill, but only if Meadowood could secure millions in outside money — grants, forgivable loans, government financing at deeply discounted rates. That would be the only way to bring the monthly burden down to something 92 households on fixed incomes could actually manage.

Cook knew she had to fight for every dollar. She was on the phone every day with state housing officials, county commissioners, foundations, nonprofits — anyone with an affordable housing budget and five minutes to spare. She showed up at city council meetings with her neighbors behind her. She applied to Colorado’s Department of Local Affairs (DOLA), which funds affordable housing at steeply discounted interest rates — and then called the representative assigned to her case every week for months. She kept a full drawer of state regulations, which she read, she says, “front to back a dozen times.”

Cook’s farming roots drove her even on hard days. “That cow must be milked twice a day, whether you’re sick or not” was how she put it. “You still get up and do it.”

The city of Littleton came through first, with a $200,000 grant for earnest money — a nonrefundable deposit that proved to the seller that Meadowood was serious and bought a critical deadline extension. Soon after, Littleton and Arapahoe County pledged $75,000 for inspections and legal expenses. A Denver attorney, Hillary Ellis, agreed to take the case pro bono. “I do big deals,” Ellis says. “But this one felt different. When you see the faces of people who’ve worked their whole lives for peace of mind, and then some big entity tries to take that away, it starts to feel personal.”

Then a few major commitments began arriving. Two nonprofit lenders — Impact Development Fund and the Colorado Housing Accelerator Initiative — committed a combined $7 million in interest-only financing. What swayed them wasn’t the financing structure — it was Cook herself, and the sight of a community that wouldn’t back down. “This wasn’t a bunch of older folks saying, Woe is me,” says Arapahoe County Commissioner Carrie Warren-Gully. “They actually had a solution.”

But a critical piece was still missing. DOLA had never awarded more than roughly $2 million on a single manufactured housing park deal. Based on Cook’s calculations, Meadowood needed nearly double that. And the news went from bad to worse. Thistle, with other deals in the pipeline and a lean staff, couldn’t keep committing to weekly meetings if there was no clear path to closing. Townsend told Cook that Thistle was out.

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