Ryan lely/Sonoma Valley Sun
At a full council meeting last week, members of the Rancho de Sonoma mobile home park were able to watch the meeting on Sonoma’s new cable channel SVTV 27, which provided the first live broadcast of a city council meeting.
At its June 6 meeting, the Sonoma City Council voted unanimously to adopt a 45-day moratorium prohibiting any permit or approval for the conversion of mobile home parks to resident ownership within the city of Sonoma.
The term “conversion to resident ownership” means that not only the mobile home is owned by the resident, but the land beneath the mobile home is also owned by the resident.
It’s an issue because the conversion has been proposed by the owners of Rancho de Sonoma, a 100-unit, 55-and-older park off Highway 12, just south of Maxwell Shopping Center.
When mayor pro tem Joanne Sanders wanted to know just what was going to happen in this 45-day period, city attorney Thomas Curry said that this time gives the council an opportunity to identify and then fix the general nature of the problem – study the issue of regulating mobile home park conversions at the local level. Curry said that the moratorium could be extended, but not indefinitely.
In Sonoma there are three mobile home parks containing some 498 mobile home spaces which in turn house an estimated 655 residents – 475 of these spaces are subject to city rent control.
Concerned that the affordable housing stock would be greatly diminished, council member Steve Barbose said that it would cause an affordable housing crisis without the moratorium.
Draped with signs reading SAS, or Seniors Against Speculation, mobile home residents overflowed from the council chambers into the hallway, waiting their respective turns to address the council about financial fears for their “golden years.”
Sue Loftin from Carlsbad, Calif., who represented the owners of Rancho de Sonoma, urged the council not to pass the moratorium – contending that there was no legal basis and noting that residents had been offered lifetime leases at better rates than city rent control would allow.
Although these conversions are advocated as an economic benefit to the community, state courts have previously held that even a single sale of a single lot within a mobile home park may lift local rent control on the whole park, said conversion opponents.
