Can resident-owned mobile home parks save manufactured housing communities?

The Sans Souci Community is something of a manufactured housing success story, at least so far. In late June, the residents of the nearly-11-acre property off Highway 93 in unincorporated Boulder County purchased the mobile home park from its corporate owners for $3.3 million. Sans Souci (“without worry” in French) is now completely resident-owned. 

“The overarching goal is autonomy and security,” says Michael Peirce, Sans Souci resident and president of the co-op that just purchased the park south of Boulder. “So to be autonomous, you need affordability and control over your living circumstances.”

Seen as the largest reserve of unsubsidized affordable housing in the country, preserving manufactured home communities is a priority for state and local leaders grappling with unaffordability across the region. Bolstered by a new Colorado opportunity-to-purchase law and supported by a national nonprofit that specializes in resident-owned communities, Sans Souci has become a beacon of hope for other manufactured housing communities. 

But some of the challenges of resident-owned communities are just starting to surface in Colorado, as there are only five such parks across the state, all purchased by residents in the last two years. In order to secure financing for the park, Sans Souci residents chose to increase their rent by $150 a month. There may also be additional infrastructure costs to account for flood mitigation, replacing a self-contained water system, and updating its sewer plant, among other projects.

Already, other communities in the area are facing the realities of running their own parks, and some limitations in the new opportunity-to-purchase law, which requires mobile home park owners to notify residents of intended sale, allowing them 90 days to put together a purchase offer themselves. Residents at Table Mesa Village, just across the highway from Sans Souci, have submitted several offers to purchase their park, all of which have gone unanswered. And a community in Fort Collins recently failed to put together an offer to purchase their park. 

“It is a huge challenge to achieve success under this new [opportunity-to-purchase] timeline,” says Andy Kadlec, program director for Thistle ROC, the Colorado affiliate of the national nonprofit ROC USA. “We’ve done it, but it’s a challenge.”

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