Gargoyles and prayer flags might not fly at parks with stricter rules, but at Mapleton Mobile Home Park, the residents make those decisions. Photo by Greg Lefcourt

Like treasured oases, Boulder’s mobile home parks exist under the blazing sun of a hot market, touted as an affordable option to permanent housing. Within Boulder city limits, there are six mobile home parks: four privately owned, two run by nonprofit organizations. Who owns a park and how it’s managed can mean heartbreak or a little bit of American Dream heaven.

Whether you buy an existing unit in a mobile home park or have one moved in, you still have to rent the land under it—sometimes with restrictions that trump your rights as a homeowner. In 1976 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) decreed that “mobile homes” built after that year should be called “manufactured housing”—a phrase that hasn’t caught on very well. Whatever you call it, you don’t own real estate; you own a “vehicle,” according to the State of Colorado.

The biggest privately owned park within city limits is Boulder Meadows Mobile Home Park—86 acres bisected by 19th Street, with Yarmouth Avenue to the north and Violet to the south. Created in 1971, Boulder Meadows is owned by Countryside Village Associates/Boulder Ltd. Partnership, and managed by Uniprop, based in Birmingham, Mich.

According to Charles Langston, Boulder Meadows’ manager for 16 1⁄2 years, the park has 638 sites, whose monthly rents range from $500 to $550. Rates are raised annually. “Rent doesn’t depend on the size of the individual lot. It depends on the location within the park,” he says.

Boulder Meadows has a reputation for being tightly run; regulations govern everything from garden-hose storage to what upgrades are required. While mobile home owners have the right to sell their property, park owners can determine which units get to stay. (“They’re low on PR and high on being a**holes,” fumes one frustrated resident, who asked not to be identified. “This is supposed to be a community. People don’t like being dictated to on every detail.”)

“We have copies of our rules and standards available to any potential buyer at our office,” says Langston. “We assess every unit that comes up for sale, and we require that some units be brought to our current standards by either the seller or the buyer, or they have to be removed.” The catch is that “a seller may not tell a prospective buyer this; we’ve had times when the buyer was surprised later,” Langston says.

But refurbishing a mobile home has its challenges, according to Jan Bach, head of the statewide Mobile Homeowners Tenants Association and a councilwoman for the city of Thornton. “It is simply cost prohibitive to do the kind of upgrades most often demanded, because of the structural nature of mobile homes,” Bach says. “Replacing the style and materials of roofs, siding, widows, skirting, carports—the licensed companies and technicians who can do this work are few and extremely expensive. The seller will not recover the cost of these changes.”

Take It for a Spin?

So, aren’t mobile homes supposed to be, well, mobile? Why not move a few blocks to a less contentious location? Because “manufactured homes” on nonpermanent foundations are officially classed by Colorado as vehicles, the title, taxes and so on are governed by the Department of Motor Vehicles. Yet these “vehicles” can only be moved by professional mobile-home movers, and even the shortest trip costs upward of $1,000.

Even when upgrades are not required, there may be problems particular to mobile homes. In 1994 Rebecca Jessup, a teacher, paid $16,000 for a pre-owned singlewide in Boulder Meadows with three bedrooms and two baths. The lot rental then was under $400 a month, and Jessup was thrilled “to be able to live inside Boulder in a well-kept park.”

What she didn’t know was that the unit’s plumbing was made from a material called polybutylene, a rigid plastic with a failure rate so high that it was named in a class-action suit. Polybutylene is not even recommended for hot-water use. Jessup wasn’t aware of the suit in time to get in on it. “We’ve replaced all the problematic parts with copper,” says Jessup. “But buyers might be put off, anyway.”

Every park has its own rules and standards—and its own way of making them known to prospective buyers.

Vista Village Mobile Home Community, near Boulder Municipal Airport at 5000 Butte, is owned by California businessman Harvey J. Miller and managed by Donna Kennedy. Lot rentals for the 305 units, all owner-occupied, average $450, according to Assistant Manager Debbie Raines. Raines says that while a few things might be explained at Vista Village beforehand, no one sees “all the details” until the buyer is ready to sign the lease.

Orchard Grove Mobile Home Park, 3003 Valmont Road, is locally owned by the Orchard Development Corporation. It has 220 units, owner-occupied, with no vacancies, according to Stacy Gentry, who has been the onsite manager for 21 years. The park has laundry facilities and a swimming pool for homeowners, but forbids pets. If anyone wants to know more about the park’s rules and standards, Gentry says, a copy for on-site reading only is available “on my door.”

The smallest mobile home community within city limits, located off North Broadway on the east side, is listed with the city only as Northgate. It has about 15 units, but there is no address, phone number, website or other visible means of contacting the management. Other small communities that dot the Boulder area—Ponderosa Mobile Home Park at 4475 Broadway, Sans Souci Mobile Home Park off Route 93 near Marshall Road and San Lazaro Park Properties at 5505 Valmont Road—are in unincorporated areas and privately owned.

“Unique in the Country”

The oldest mobile home park in Boulder is also a nationwide pioneer. Mapleton Mobile Home Park, between Folsom, Mapleton and Valmont streets, was created around 1947, occupies a little over 14 acres, and has about 137 lots, most of them rentals that are “permanently affordable.”

What makes the park unusual is that while it is owned by Thistle Community Housing, a locally-based nonprofit, it is managed by the residents. The Mapleton Home Association makes the rules, maintains the park and decides on rent increases. “It is unique in the country, as far as we know,” says Jim Harrington, special projects coordinator for the Mapleton Mobile Home Park and Thistle Community Housing. “We were approached by the residents, who were concerned that the owner could just sell the land out from under them. There is no model for what we came up with. We are the mold.”

The only other nonprofit-owned park in Boulder is Boulder Mobile Manor at 2637 Valmont near 30th St., created in 1961. Boulder Housing Partners bought the park in 1997, and it is managed by Diversified Properties. There are 66 units, 12 owner-occupied, the rest rentals owned by BHP.

The rules for moving into any property owned by BHP are explained during the housing application process, according to Pamm Gibson, acquisition planner for the Development Division Program of Boulder Housing Partners. BHP buys any units for sale as they come up, and all rentals are priced under a reduced-rent program. The aim is to keep the park “permanently affordable,” says Gibson. Plans are to upgrade utilities and eventually replace the units with new manufactured housing on permanent foundations. Tenants will be housed elsewhere during the changeover and have the option to return. At that point, the community will no longer be a mobile home park.

In the end, points out Ray Weitzel, a former president of the Boulder Meadows homeowners’ association, mobile home parks are an economic stopgap. “There are people here in this park who are losing any hope of reselling their homes,” he says. “Once you’ve added in the cost of moving and installing it, plus the rent, you might as well take that money and buy real estate.”

Perhaps in a less heated market—but when you need an oasis, it’s hard to pass it by.

Charmaine Ortega Getz, a freelance writer, lives in downtown Boulder.