A mobile home is often the last piece of independence for seniors in Arizona who are just about able to pay to live on their own.
A worrying rise in lot rents, on the other hand, could break that sense of safety.
Debbie Suits, who has lived in Tempe for a long time, was frustrated that rents were going up.
ABC15 says that the price she paid for her lot has gone from $700 to $1,000 since she arrived five years ago. This has left her and her husband wondering what to do next in a market that has given them no other choices.
In the same way, people all over the country are calling for rent stability in the hallways of mobile home parks, where price hikes that used to be measured in dollars have turned into percentages that are hard to understand and hard on the wallet.
Some people who live there have told scary stories about sudden rent increases that happened when corporations took over as owners.
In an interview with WHAM, Candi Evans from Iowa talked about getting a cold notice taped to her door: her rent was going up by 63% thanks to an investment company. Evans’ situation seems less like an outlier and more like a sign of a common syndrome that affects people who are poor, crippled, or nearing the end of their lives.
Even though prices are going up quickly, not everyone has given up on stopping the tide.
It was clear to Julie Butler. Her house is on community land, and it will be taken back by the tribe by 2026. She will be kicked out not by a person, but by the rules.
Butler, a registered real estate agent, told ABC15 that the homes had to be evacuated so that the land could be used by its original owners.
Still, she uses her uncertainty to help others by running a nonprofit that finds cheap lots for mobile homes, giving people who have been uprooted hope.
But even this has problems. She says that her goal to build a community with cheap roots is hampered by strict zoning.
When the problem shows up in Arizona, it looks like big businesses don’t care about it. People who have put money and faith into their homes, hoping for a stable place to live, are being pushed out by continuously rising rents. An unnamed Phoenix resident told ABC15 that she had to leave Phoenix and go back to Wisconsin because the rent was too high to stay put. As a result, there are more and more seniors who are lost and looking for safe harbor in a housing market that often seems to have forgotten who they are and how weak they are.
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