Renters In America Are Running Out Of Options

i'm 75 years old i had to get out of this trailer it was making me sick now i'm living in my truck tonight i'm going to try to lay across this way because my legs swelling so bad they just kept raising it and raising it and i felt like i was losing control of my life private equity is about the quick buck everything else be damn the problem with the system now is greed so urban suburban ex urban rural do we have a housing crisis in america yes you didn't even hesitate there no i don't hesitate republican or democrat nobody wants affordable housing in their backyard there's no life like being homeless [Music] the affordable housing crisis in america is a national issue there's nowhere that is immune from it but it's especially acute in places like manhattan and big cities where to my left you have public housing and right to my right six million dollar apartments for sale [Music] there might be disagreement on cause there's certainly disagreement on solutions but there's a unanimity of opinion that the united states is in the midst of a housing crisis after two years of lockdowns in a faltering economy an inflation rate creeping towards double digits the cost of housing has exploded with rent increasing 11 percent in 2021 and home prices a staggering 19 in a single year this building is asking for a 28 rent increase shame change the disappearance of regular stimulus checks and the federally mandated moratorium on evictions for those on the margins of the american economy the future looks grim this building was established for moderate low-income housing 28 nobody can get over that my income isn't going up social security in the pension they don't raise 28 new york has tried almost everything to alleviate this problem with limited success over the past 10 years the plan has financed construction and preservation of more than 130 700 affordable units this plan over the next 10 years will create opportunity for so many people are currently being priced out of our city in the past 10 years the new york city housing authority has processed 25 million applications for the housing lottery in a city of 8 million residents but as anyone who's ever bought a powerball ticket can attest lotteries are an insufficient solution to an existential problem chris mayer is an economist and professor of real estate at columbia business school he spent most of his adult life studying the thus far inelectable problem of affordable housing market rates in new york city are never going to create a situation where affordable housing is going to be widely available i mean there's not a lot of land where you can build not a lot of land but you can build a density globally cities are much more dense than they are in new york and there are many places right well they say they don't want it right they're not in my backyard why is it that you look over there and you see all these really tall buildings why shouldn't we be able to build up higher here and in many parts of the city yes we need some infrastructure and we should put money into effective and efficient public transportation but we need to be able to build more units because housing will not become less expensive if new york is an attractive place to live housing will not become less expensive unless we build more of it there's no way around it yeah on the continuum of affordable housing options in america at the cheapest end is the humble trailer park which after years of negative associations has been rechristened manufactured housing they're inexpensive and often available to those with bad credit and six percent of americans live in one there are though some downsides so we're pulling into the schwartz creek estates which is a mobile home park in michigan that is now owned by a private equity firm and people can't afford to stay in their houses holy sorry i get that reaction a lot are those yes so i keep tarantulas holly hook is the founder of michigan mobile home residence for affordable housing she makes her living selling young adult ebooks on amazon her niche is apocalyptic novels give me an idea of what an apocalyptic book is usually it's a group of survivors trying to survive like a major disaster like an asteroid impact or a nuclear blast so this is comparatively not as bad the situation you're in right now is not quite apocalyptic it's not quite apocalyptic it's pretty bad but it's not that bad while rents are increasing everywhere what might sound like small increases in the manufactured housing sector say a hundred dollars can be catastrophic for those on fixed incomes the necessary thing to remember with mobile homes is that if you own it you still pay rent that's because your mobile home isn't mobile it's in a fixed position and while you might own the structure on top of the land someone else owns the land it sits on three years ago the utah-based company haven park capital bought swartz creek estates where holly lives july of 2018 they came in and put notices on our door saying hey we're haven park capital we just bought your community okay we bought your community yes we are pleased to acquire your community is how they worded it because of course they were pleased was anybody in the community please no because they immediately put on a 22 rent increase for the slab of dirt fee yeah which is a good way to put it yeah and how much is a slab of dirt rental fee well when i started out it was only 290 a month under the old owner that was in 2012. that was in 2012. that's a pretty good deal there so it's gone up from 290 to today the lot fee by itself is 416. 416. and there's other fees heaped on top of it now that used to be included in our rent we have trash sewer we have a school tax we have an admin fee after they took over billing us for water it's been a roughly a 55 percent increase in three years there's going to be some increase at some point right i mean the rent has to go up i mean everything the expense of everything goes up inflation etc what do you think a reasonable rent would be or a reasonable rent increase three percent per year seems more reasonable the previous owner they did raise the rent a couple of times but it was ten dollars and i think that happened once or twice in the five years before haven park came in haven park responded to our inquiry about increasing rents with a statement saying they were necessary because they enabled us to make key community upgrades add amenities and cover rising cost inflation in the period covering holly's rent increase haven park told us that their operating costs at swartz creek increased 59 percent driven largely by property tax increases payroll increases and insurance increases thieven park has been in the news for similar rent increases at other parks across the country haven park capital planned to raise the rent 69 percent but recently announced a new policy it would not increase lot rents more than 50 in a year who owns this park now haven park so this is a haven park capital or they call it something else now right haven park bunnies and ferries or something it's something nicer yes right yes yeah remember what is haven park uh communities but it used to be haven park capital yes right okay so what are the general complaints about haven park capital in this community the general complaints are they're always raising the rent constantly raising the rent uh there's excessive fees administration fees trash sewage fees pet fees even when you own your home harold johnson works as an organizer for mh action an activist group dedicated to building campaigns to protect the affordability and quality of manufactured housing communities and advance racial economic and gender justice she's also a former mobile home owner whose last fixed address was a missouri park managed by impact communities one of the largest owners of manufactured housing parks in the country i was actually renting the home and i was renting the land after about four or five months the management came to me and offered me a rent option program where i could start purchasing the home so rent to own sort of thing yeah since i've done so good with renting she wanted to offer me to purchase the home she said it would be a lot cheaper and so i took her up on her offer after about nine months into purchasing my home i received a letter saying that they're not going to renew my lot lease and i thought well they're not going to renew my lot at least because they're going to start another lot lease and so i asked them about that and they said no you have 90 days to move how the hell does that work that you're starting to own the home and then you can't rent the ground that the home is on i didn't know it at the time how common it was yeah johnson says her lot lease was terminated and she was subsequently evicted the court went in favor of impact community because on my lease it said that i can in my lease or they can end my lease and he went with impact community he went in favor of them not having the five thousand dollars it would cost to move her home it was repossessed by the mortgage company so what they did was technically legal if the court rubber stamped it they're saying it's legal and so that's the laws that need to be changed to make that illegal for them to do that so where did you go after that i've been living in a hotel with my family since then and so i am i am considered homeless i would never want anyone to go through what i'm going through it's nothing there's a personal there's no life like being homeless one insider told me that a flurry of negative news stories has made the manufactured housing industry press shy and our attempts to get people on the record seems to prove that but one entrepreneur frank rolfe who runs a so-called university for potential mobile home park investors has become the de facto public face in the grey eminence of the industry and he has little problems saying what everyone knows to be true but thinks impolite to say one of the big drivers to making money is is the ability to increase the rent we didn't have them hostage if they weren't stuck in those homes in the in those mobile home lots it would be a whole different picture the subsequent press has not been kind to rolf wow usually when someone is that contemptuous of poor people they're immediately visited by the ghost of christmas future i asked ralph about these comments this is frank frank this is michael moynihan from vice how are you hey i'm doing good how are you doing great so you come into a lot of media focus because of the uh university if i said i want to take your course how would you sell it to me that this is actually a great profit generator for me you know we don't sell people on investing what we do is we educate them if they are going to invest how to do it properly the main attraction is people are betting on the fact that the lot rents will continue to go up probably for years to come i've talked to some people who say we were happy maybe slightly dissatisfied with our previous owner but when these big guys come in and they jack up the rent 30 percent there have been you know new charges for water that they didn't have to pay for before it doesn't matter what the item is no one likes paying higher prices typically 10 of the park is using more water with higher water charge than the entire lot rep i've seen water charges as high as five six hundred dollars a month they have no sense of conservation at all the cost of waters has gone up a lot that to me does not seem in any way unjustified i mean almost every single park we've bought we've literally brought the park back to life and to make it worth doing you have to raise the red do you really want to refer to people who are living in your parks as hostages well when i give a class it's 30 hours that sound bite is a few seconds of 30 hours i don't understand how it could be contextually any different if you say if we didn't have them hostage if they weren't stuck in the homes in the mobile home lawns i certainly do not believe customers are hostages and if that offends anyone i apologize for offending them but no one at that class came away from that thinking any different than these are the customers and it's not they're not hostages we don't tie them up or anything like that so that i mean that's not in any way correct i don't think anyone actually would think that the word mobile is a misnomer it is not a mobile home i thought they must be cheap to move they're not cheap to move at all so again i liked that do you mind not being liked we are liked by our customers the rents had doubled but their quality of life had gone up infinitely because they had roads that were paved and working water and sewer and a nice office and a nice entry and new signage so it all comes back to value the majority of the residents are thrilled with that so we're liked by our customers but we're just kind of not liked by the media one thing that the media never gets right on that whole concept is mobile home park people have a very real option that no other housing people have not houses not condos not anyone i mean the options are they can sell the house if they're unhappy they can sublease it if they're unhappy they can obviously walk off and abandon it but the fourth item is any mobile home park owner in the us will happily pay to move anyone who unhappy's home from one park to their park it costs about five thousand dollars to move a mobile home and probably every single park owner out there with the exception of some moms and pops will happily pay that bill [Music] they have the ability to not extend your lease on your property depending how you're treating your property even though i own my house i can be evicted if i'm not following whatever their guidelines are there's really no security they can say at any time hey you got to go but they're really not movable especially have decks on them and everything else you know it's pretty expensive i don't have 10 000 to move this that's what it costs and i can't afford to sell it because i can't afford to fix it it's a pretty incredible sentence i can't afford to sell it so how much was the trailer well i bought it they sold it to me from nineteen nine that's an 86 trailer that trail is only worth about five to six thousand dollars grover canine is a 75 year old retired welding instructor and maintenance worker he spent the last few months living out of his truck every time i come here i see this and it hurts my whole life's in this 10 by 20 shed so you've been living in your truck for a couple of months yeah which is better than living in the trailer yes to me it is the trailer that i was in is full of black mold the furnace would come on it was like i was strangling i couldn't breathe and the more i investigated it the more i found out what was wrong with the trailer who owned the park when you bought the trailer the group that owned it is called impact they don't take care of anything most of these trailers are 10 15 years old or older they buy them from some place down south and that's the company yep impact yes so they sold you that true piece of piece of yeah contractually is it their problem like when you sign up to live there do they have any obligations at the time i bought the trailer they told me it was okay you didn't have an inspection no because i moved in in the winter time and they told me the trailer is fine there's nothing wrong with it neither impact nor the park manager is responded to our request for comment two of canine's neighbors said they saw the mold in grover's home and that they too had similar problems because of recent flooding but one of grover's neighbors said impact had made improvements including fixing some of the park's roads and a bus stop well michigan mobile home residence for affordable housing is first of all an informational website about haven park we found out that bellwether enterprise who's a subsidiary of enterprise community partners the big non-profit housing company they were actually financing haven park's buy-up of our communities and so far as we know they tangled web we yes so they're a non-profit yeah a big affordable housing nonprofit from what i understand they're an affordable housing nonprofit affordable and non-profit are the two key phrases there that are funding a large finance capital group to buy homes and raise around yes if i'm following that right that seems something illogical about that but it's i yeah i believe it's quite illogical too illogical but typical a well-intentioned government program requiring fannie and freddie to better serve families in the manufacturing home market a contribution to mitigating the housing crisis is taken advantage of by those who well doing nothing illegal are already cash flush and using the low interest loans to acquire more parks faster residents like ms hook were left with an impossible choice of banning the home they own with nowhere to go with literally nowhere else to take their home or pay rent or try to pay rent they can't afford holley's agitating attracted the notice of senate housing committee chair sherrod brown who invited her to testify both fannie mae and enterprise claim they advance affordable housing but when they finance predatory investors like haven park they destroy it neither fannie mae or bellwether responded to our request for comments enterprise community partners told vice news in a statement that the business of manufactured housing requires both policy and capital solutions to protect residents and make sure that speculative developers don't buy up those homes how is fannie and freddie involved in in your business they have been the bedrock to many of these older properties being brought back to life and as a result of them doing that people have the confidence to go in and buy mobile home parks with them financing them so is it fair to say that the government is subsidizing some of these purchases it's a regular loan but the industry has such a poor stereotype that many lenders won't make loans on mobile home parks so fannie freddie bridge that gap let me just put it in simple terms like you're a guy that has money coming in uh taking money from poor people and you know it doesn't matter as long as the economy is going south the need for affordable housing grows exponentially regardless of politicians or really anything single-family homes in california are thousand dollars a square foot that's not affordable and so home prices just don't make any sense and as a result people get stuck they can't buy stick belt homes apartment rents are insane that's what fuels the demand for affordable housing so you think there are bits of legislation and you know on a state level that you think would be beneficial you have to define what beneficial is you're not going to be able to hold back the force of the market when it comes to rent i mean you can try rent control but it hasn't stuck almost anywhere in 100 years and due to the ever-increasing demand for houses and departments all rents have been frozen to prevent profiteering during world war ii the federal government introduced wage and price controls and large-scale rent control the instinct of a lot of people is rent control so in the trailer parks where you have people who own the structure on top of it i think rent control is a pretty reasonable solution given that situation so this is a targeted rent control right that would be if you own something that isn't on top of somebody else's land they cannot just basically torture you to death because you'll be forced to move out and you can't take that with you exactly that problem is one of the examples of ways that you know low-income people in this country get taken advantage of that to me is a great place where you'd sort of say rent control really works what about large i mean in the country as a whole i mean is rent control a viable solution outside of that very one specific example of trailer parks the downside of rent control is it reduces people's willingness to build stuff the trade-off you have to make is how do i figure out ways to keep people from being ripped off but how to allow the market to work to allow people to build more housing and the way to get more housing to me is instead of saying we have a fixed amount of housing and what we're going to do is not let anybody raise rents on it so we just build these bigger and bigger and bigger lists of people who want to get into the housing and that's not a good solution the solution instead ought to be to make housing more affordable and while economists tend to agree on very little there is something approaching a consensus that rent control hasn't produced the desired results and was abandoned in liberal enclaves like berkeley california and cambridge massachusetts we are a country that has an inequality problem would you agree with that yes how do we house poor people make it a heck of a lot easier to build immediately and i would put tens of billions of dollars into vouchers at the federal level to help tens of billions of dollars yes we have to have a way to sort of allow new people coming in whether they're young people whether they're families whether they're immigrants and people who are coming in new to a market and to give them the ability to buy and live in affordable housing which is the things that our parents had the ability to do if we want societies that people can afford we have to build them here you might expect something approximating a conclusion wherein i condemn villainous landlords and defend virtuous tenants followed by a pretty simple fix for a housing crisis that has eluded local and state governments for centuries but that i've solved in 30 minutes these stories are never so simple the virtue and villainy never evenly distributed stories are often complicated by bad personal and economic decisions worsened by a broken system compounded by landlords motivated by a bottom line but perhaps this too is wildly oversimplified short of the government taking over the housing market and somehow solving the problem of stagnant wages the landlords and mortgage brokers servicing low-income clients are necessary and will always be motivated by profit but therein is not where the housing crisis lies if anything as christopher mayer suggests we need more housing which means more mortgages and landlords and we need higher wages and better jobs and then we've fixed it easy right here's where sadie and i stay [Music] how do you get out of this situation i'm hoping for a miracle you don't see any obvious way i know right now i've thought about suicide i've thought about it to be honest with you i've been talking to people and that's helped just like talking to you now that takes some of the pressure off [Music] [Music] i'm michael lairmonth editor-in-chief of vice news too often traditional news outlets shy away from the real stories and experiences of those living through global conflicts not vice news our reporters are on the ground fearlessly covering the human stories that shape our world you and millions of others can continue to read watch and listen device news for free but we hope you'll consider making a one-time or ongoing contribution of any size advice.com contribute every contribution no matter how big or small helps support the journalism vice news brings to you every day thank you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 3,940,737

Keywords: VICE News, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, VICE on SHOWTIME, vice news 2020, Housing Crisis, Low-income housing, NYC Housing Crisis, NYC Low-income housing, High rent, Mobile Homes

Id: KgTxzCe490Q

Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Tue May 24 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/DeusEx-Machinist]

I bought a mobile home in a trailer park in my 20's because it was my only affordable choice. Lot rent was $450 a month, which was doable. Within a year, the tent jumped to $750 and I had to, as per the lease, sell the trailer to the park directly.

They refused to buy it from me which basically meant I had to give my $7000 investment to the park, which is what I ultimately did. I turned the keys in to the park office and moved out of state.

3 years later I got a court summons where I had to take time off of work to drive back. The park manager herself was suing me for "eviction."

This park was saying that the trailer was unlivable and destroyed, so they had it removed from the property, only when I got back, it was very much still there with a family living in it.

The park does that trick over and over again and they have a judge that just rubber stamps evictions for them, so I had that on my record for 7 years for nothing.

[u/odyseuss02]

Trailer parks were always the answer for affordable living until they started to get demolished or bought up by investors starting around 20 years ago. And good luck getting a permit to build a new one. I bought a trailer in my early 20's for $5000. The lot rent was $75 a month. I could make that in a day. Cheap living was normal. Now people have to work themselves to the bone just to exist.

[u/Shinagami091]

In my city, corporations are buying up older apartment complexes and renovating the insides of them so they have modern aesthetics such as marble counter tops, wood floors, stainless steel appliances, fancy tile backsplashes, etc. but then they also increase the rent to what it would cost to live in a brand new apartment community.

We’re talking taking a 600 sq ft apartment that used to rent out to around $1/ sqft to nearly $2/sq ft. So single people looking for affordable housing are now forced to live in some questionable areas of town.

[u/HustoNweHavE]

Shit is getting more and more dystopian. I just looked at a few “off grid” units in Appalachia NC, that this couple is trying to rent out. They were literally in century old Barns… made for live stock. Rent ranged from 400-900 a month.

Only one was insulated. One was just a bare bone loft with sunlight shinning through every board with open/ exposed eaves and bird nests. They were built out by hobbyists with pallet wood who exchanged rent for work on top of century old foundations. So nothing was professionally done. No running water, no electricity, no stoves or kitchen to cook in.

[u/Sportsam26]

When looking at apartments recently I found a "luxury mobile home park" with 1 and 2 bed homes for $3000 per month

[u/shit_knife]

I just lost out on a home. Buyer was out of state all cash. These fuckers are driving up home prices and then renting them out. This is a major problem.

[u/floofnstuff]

Predatory corporations have been buying up rental communities and single family homes as well. It’s been a housing nightmare since late 2021.

I don’t recognize our country anymore sounds too dramatic but I can say pre pandemic US feels quite different than post pandemic US.

[u/Zerbulon]

Housing market should be strictly monitored and intervened if necessary, because having a place to live is a basic human right and should not be left to predators.

[u/Addie0o]

My parents paid a lot rent of 70$ plus utilities so like 130$ total in 1996. Same lor today is 900$+ utilities.