AG presents proposal to protect tenants of mobile homes

The Iowa Attorney General’s office has introduced a measure to the state Senate designed to protect tenants of mobile-home parks across the state, including the embattled Regency Mobile Home Park just outside of Iowa City.

It lacks the teeth of last year’s failed proposal, but Bill Brauch, assistant to Attorney General Tom Miller, said this proposal stands a better chance of passing the Legislature.

The measure, approved 2-to-1 by a Senate subcommittee on Monday, outlines a set of conditions that would need to be met before a landlord could legitimately terminate or not renew a tenancy, it would require a one-year lease for all mobile-home park tenants, and it would give tenants 14 days — rather than the current three days — to pay rent after receiving a nonpayment notice before they’re evicted.

“We think that this legislation cuts across the board and addresses issues not only at Regency but also other mobile homes that we’ve been made aware of over the years,” said Brauch, also the director of the office’s Consumer Protection Division. “Not just to benefit Regency residents, but also others, and it gives them greater rights.”

Currently, landlords in Iowa don’t have to provide justification for evicting tenants, a departure from 33 other states that require a legitimate reason. The proposal also requires landlords who terminate a lease or deny renewal provide at least 60 days notice, including specific reasoning for the termination. Current law already provides for 60 days written notice, but it does not require justification.

Most mobile-home tenants operate on month-to-month agreements, and Brauch said the year-long leases are necessary because most mobile-home tenants have purchased their mobile homes and rent the space from the mobile-home park. Evicting a mobile-home tenant is akin to evicting a homeowner, and for most of them, moving the unit would be too expensive to be an option, Brauch said.

Mark Patton, executive director of the Iowa Valley Habitat for Humanity, said that in some cases, it wouldn’t be possible given the time restraints. A permit is required to move a mobile home.

“The reality is different than a normal tenant; you’ve actually bought this object,” Patton said. “Once it’s parked, the chances of it being moved again are slim to none.”

Some measures of the current proposal are less ambitious than last year’s, and the current one excludes altogether several provisions that the previous bills pushed for. Last year’s legislation would have provided one month to pay an overdue rent before being evicted. It included language that would have required that someone selling a mobile home provide information on debt owed as well as its assessed value. It would have instituted a $500 penalty for a mobile-home retailer that doesn’t obtain a proper title from the county treasurer within 30 days of acquisition.

“We decided, rather than try to resurrect it, to go with a shorter version we thought would have a better chance of being enacted,” Brauch said.

Last year’s bills received intense opposition from the Iowa Manufactured Housing Association, which represents mobile-home park owners across the state. Joe Kelly, the group’s executive vice president, already has come out against the new proposal. He could not be reached for comment Monday.

Johnson County supervisor Janelle Rettig, who’s been following the mobile home issue for years, said last year’s bill already wouldn’t have done enough to address the problems at Regency and other mobile-home parks in the state, although she said anything is better than nothing. Rettig said the underlying problem is that the laws are written in mobile-home park owners’ favor, and the tenants don’t have a lot of protections.

Mobile homes built before 1976 — 17 percent of the nearly 3,000 mobile homes in Johnson County — were not constructed to meet current building codes, Patton said. That means many don’t have egress windows in bedrooms, they have aluminum wiring, which has since been banned because it’s a fire hazard, and they’re collecting molds and mildews as a result of particle board floors, he said.

Patton, who said the current legislation is unlikely to pass, estimates that about three-quarters of the mobile park owners in the state are upstanding companies. The rest, like Carbondale, Colo.-based Regency of Iowa Inc., are not.

“Regency has demonstrated that bad players play rough,” he said.