“A Decent Home” documents the struggle of RV owners for everything they have

Mobile home parks here and across the country are being bought up by private equity firms and wealthy investors.

It may seem like an odd investment, but the people who live in these parks often own their prefab homes – but not the land they stand on. And they're not actually very mobile.

The 2022 documentary film “A Decent Home” tells the story of many of these mobile home owners and their struggle to stay in their homes when their rents were raised – or their land was sold out from under their noses.

Sara Terry spent seven years producing the film, which will be screened at Glendale Community College on Friday, August 30.

Conversation highlights

Since when have investors been buying up mobile home parks? How often does this happen?

SARA TERRY: This is quite normal now. It actually started in 2015 when the Carlisle Group was one of the first big private equity firms to start buying up mobile home parks. They bought a few in Florida and a few in California. And all the private equity firms everywhere were watching what Carlyle was doing and they had pretty spectacular success. And they followed his lead, like they did all over the United States.

What would happen to the people who live there? Would they hold on to the apartments and raise the rents? How would they make money from it?

TERRY: Now, I know in some cases, like in Phoenix, parks were sold to developers who then closed and turned into construction projects. But typically a private equity firm holds a park because private equity basically looks for places where they think they can make more money. And mobile home parks used to be a family-run business where they charged a reasonable rent for the land that the owner of the mobile home or manufactured home paid to live there. And that rent stayed relatively low but fair because the homeowner pays for everything, you know, the upkeep of his home, the repairs. It's not like renting an apartment.

So private equity has been able to increase the rent on the property – sometimes as much as 60% or 70%. That might not sound like a lot when you say, “Oh, the rent went up from $320 to $405.” But imagine if your mortgage went up 40% or 60%… that has a huge impact on people, a lot of people on fixed incomes or a lot of people who already have two or three jobs. It's like this is the first rung on the ladder of the American dream. This is where people get their first chance to own a home.

Tell us about some of the people you focused on in the film. You talked to people who own mobile homes all over the country, but you focused on this place in Aurora, Colorado, called Denver Meadows.

TERRY: Yes, Denver Meadows was, there were two parks – one in Iowa and one in Denver Meadows – that were the main storylines of the movie. There are a couple of other parks there as well. But in Aurora, Colorado, in Denver Meadows, the owner decided he was going to try to sell the land. And he did it in a kind of very secret way, and the local residents found out about it. And this community of over 100 people, mostly Latino, a lot of immigrants, a lot of families. You know, parents working two and three jobs. When they organized, with the help of an organization called 9to5, they went to every city council meeting in the city for about three years and fought against the attempt to sell the land. It was an attempt to rezone without them knowing about it.

It was, it is a heroic fight. Because what happened, I won't give away the end of the movie. But what happened in Colorado is that Colorado went from being one of the worst states in the country in terms of protecting mobile home parks to being one of the best. That's not saying much, because there's still a lot of work to be done. But everything that's changed in Colorado is because of how these people fought for everything they had.