Leaning on spare tires or sitting in lawn chairs in the maintenance shop at Milner Mobile Home Park, homeowners listened eagerly Tuesday night to a proposal to convert the neighborhood into homeownership in order to stabilize their housing situation.
The homeowners — including retirees, construction workers, housekeepers, a school bus driver, an accountant, a nurse and a music teacher — listened to a presentation from the Yampa Valley Housing Authority, which could help the owners navigate the logistics of buying the park. The owner’s asking price is $8 million. That price is more than double the $3.8 million the 10-acre park sold for in 2021, according to Nicole Nanio, park manager and local resident.
In a letter dated July 24, MHS Parks, owner of the San Antonio-based Milner Mobile Home Park, announced its intent to offer the park for sale. Pursuant to state regulations under Colorado’s Mobile Home Park Oversight ProgramThe letter set a 120-day deadline within which homeowners had to submit offers to purchase the park.
Brent Smith, the representative for MHS Parks, did not respond to calls or emails.
“These are very uncertain times for us. We can learn together as a community and get through this time as a community.” – Misty Carter, organizer of the homeowners meeting
“It’s a very uncertain time for us right now,” said Misty Carter, a homeowner who helped organize the meeting. “We can learn together as a community and get through this as a community.”
More than 50 people attended the meeting, and several residents expressed concern that if the investor and owner sells the park to another for-profit company for $8 million, the rent on their properties could increase dramatically. This could put the rent unaffordable for many residents on fixed or low incomes who may also have a mortgage to pay.
After the park was sold in 2021, lot rents rose from $500 when there was still an owner on site to $735 after the purchase and then to $925 on Aug. 1, Nanio said.
Jason Peasley, executive director of the Yampa Valley Housing Authority, told homeowners Tuesday that the nonprofit is assisting owners with advice, research and possible grants, even though the park is outside the housing authority’s jurisdiction.
“The target scenario we are working towards would be to introduce subsidies to bring prices down to the point where property rents do not need to be increased,” Peasley said.
As of Wednesday, 36 of the 40 homeowners had committed to submitting a formal application for assistance from the nonprofit Thistle Community Housing to try to become a resident-occupied community, Carter said. Thistle is based in Boulder. is part of ROC USA, which offers financing at lower interest rates and advises parks’ governing bodies for at least 10 years for a fee of up to 3.5% of the purchase cost, said Thistle director Tim Townsend. ROC has helped nine parks in Colorado transition to resident ownership, including parks in Durango, Leadville and Boulder.
Some Milner residents have approached the park owner in hopes of getting a lower price to sell the park to the 40 existing owners. Colorado regulations require the owner to give a good faith evaluation of an offer made by residents.
Peasley warned that things must move quickly because once the property is officially on the market, the park owners will have to make an outside offer of $8 million or more.
The current lot rent of $925 in Milner is in the middle range of mobile home site rents in Routt County, which are as high as $450 including water, sewer, trash pickup and snow removal for some sites in housing authority-owned parks. At the high end of lot rents are Dream Island at up to $1,175 and West Acres at up to $1,375.
The housing authority has supported mobile home parks in recent years, with the nonprofit purchasing the 27-unit Whitehaven mobile home park in west Steamboat Springs in 2022. That purchase was supported by contributions from two anonymous donors and low-interest loans and kept the lot rent stable at $685, Peasley said.
The housing authority is working to upgrade an aging water and sewer system in Whitehaven and will then ask residents if they would like to start their own housing development, Peasley noted.
The Milner homeowners know there’s a lot of work ahead, including establishing a co-op with a board of directors. Peasley said he’s helping with research and due diligence to determine the condition of the park’s infrastructure, such as water and gas lines, to help with the process and offer the price.
Keilty Briggs, a park resident and organizer of the meeting, said the sale notice had been stressful for residents and left her “disturbed but positive.”
“I do deep breathing exercises every day,” Briggs said. “It’s what you think about when you go to bed every night and what you think about when you wake up.”
