“Seeing people experience homeownership for the first time never gets tiring,” Davies said in the interview.ĭavies told the magazine that he’s a “huge fan of Charles Koch’s ideas of freedom and ‘good profit.’” Koch, a libertarian billionaire and one of America’s richest men, has poured tens of millions into conservative causes and candidates over the years, and his foundation bankrolled legal groups leading the court battle to eliminate prohibitions against tenant evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, The Guardian reported in May. The company is run by Matthew Davies, who said in a June interview with Authority Magazine that “(w)e pride ourselves on maintaining and expanding the affordable housing stock under our control.” Instead, the owners sold to Harmony Communities. Residents submitted two offers - including a $3.725 million bid that was at or above asking price - but were rejected both times. Their attorneys alleged that the owners broke a new Colorado law requiring mobile home park owners to negotiate in good faith. Tanner and the rest of the Golden Hills community were hoping to be one of the few success stories.Īfter their park went up for sale over the summer, residents quickly formed a cooperative and partnered with a Boulder-based nonprofit organization, Thistle, to come up with funding. Thus far, however, only two groups of residents have successfully purchased their parks since the law went into effect, with a third set to close on a deal this month. The provision’s intent was to help these homeowners buy the parks in which they lived, giving them more control over lot rent, rules and the community some have called home for decades. State lawmakers, seeking to give mobile home residents stronger protections, added an “opportunity to purchase” clause in their revised Mobile Home Park Act, which Gov. “We believe in charging a fair market rent” Joyce Tanner at her home in Golden Hills mobile home park in Golden on Sept. “People are pretty overwhelmed and confused and concerned,” said Joyce Tanner, president of the Golden Hills resident co-op. Now Golden Hills homeowners are scrambling for the third time this year, hoping to scrape together enough funding to purchase their park as their corporate-owned future comes into focus. The playbook by now is familiar, housing experts say: Corporations come in, raise rents immediately and often, while instituting rules and regulations that many residents feel are onerous and over-the-top. Golden Hills is just one example of what can happen when corporations buy mobile home parks from mom-and-pop owners, who by and large kept rents affordable as red-hot real estate markets sent rents soaring in metro Denver and cities across the country. All the while, Harmony is raising rents 50% beginning in February and has instituted a host of new rules that regulate everything from the awnings on mobile homes to the size of dogs residents can own.Īnd just a month after closing on its purchase of the park, Harmony offered to sell Golden Hills to its residents - at a significantly higher price than the company just paid for it, residents say. They wouldn’t keep on his maintenance man who’s been by his side for decades. They don’t know how to run a park.Īfter the park’s owners rebuffed the residents twice in their attempt to buy Golden Hills, they ended up selling to Harmony Communities, a California-based corporation that operates 33 parks across the western U.S.Įrwin, who managed Golden Hills under its previous owner for more than two decades, thought Harmony would be solid owners, a company that billed itself as “family oriented,” he said.īut when Harmony approached him to stay on, Erwin said they offered him one-quarter of his pay (a Harmony representative denied the accusation). Golden Hills’ new cooperative members weren’t business people, he thought. When Ken Erwin first heard about efforts this past summer among his fellow homeowners to purchase their Golden mobile home park, he counted himself skeptical.
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