SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome to Pulse on Politics, rooted in place but expansive in scope. This podcast keeps a finger on the pulse of political currents shaping our region and the nation at large. We share bold voices, real stories, and zero spin. I am your host, Tamara Graham. Welcome to the conversation. Welcome to the conversation. Welcome, my friends, to Pulse on Politics. I am Tamara Graham. We've got a doozy of a topic for you today, the first of a two-part series. It's a topic that I recently learned about myself through a friend of mine who's been going through something very disheartening, and he's actually joining us on the podcast today. And it's something that is affecting communities across the Great Lakes Basin and the entire United States. And it is hedge funds and mobile home parks. And what you're about to learn is going to make you pretty angry if you are someone who actually cares about anyone outside of the top 1% in this country. You may be surprised at... as I was to learn that hedge funds are buying up mobile home parks in mass, not only in Michigan, not only in the Great Lakes Basin region, but all across the United States. And it's not because they care about affordable housing. I will tell you that. These so-called quote-unquote investments, and I use that term very loosely, have real implications for real people living in these parks and for the future of affordable housing in America in general. This podcast is the first in a two-part series that we're going to have. And I'm joined by three guests today who have a stake in this trend. Paul Terranova, who is a Midwest community organizer with Manufactured Housing Action, also called MH Action. And we're also joined by Theo Gantos and Pamela Maxey. And they're two residents who live in some of the parks that we're talking about today, and they're going to share their stories. And there are some pretty incredible stories on what these hedge funds do once they get a hold of these mobile home parks. So we are going to dive right into this. All right, welcome everybody. How's everybody doing today? Good.

SPEAKER_03: 2:26

Thanks.

SPEAKER_01: 2:27

Excellent. So I want to start out by everyone introducing yourselves. I want everybody to get to know who each of you are a little bit. Paul, we are going to start with you. Just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and what brings you here to be part of this conversation today.

SPEAKER_04: 2:44

Sure. So yeah, my name is Paul Terranova. As you said, I'm the Midwest Community Organizer for MH Action, which basically means that I support leaders like Theo and Pam and about 1,200 others across the state of Michigan who are resident leaders living in manufactured housing communities trying to make life better, either by addressing issues locally in their parks as they come up, or by banding together across the state and trying to get stronger protections. So yeah, my background's in community organizing, and when I learned about MH Action and learned about the issues, it just felt like one of the kind of... kind of a key canary in the coal mine for what's happening in this country. It cuts across every demographic, it cuts across every ideology, but you go into any manufactured housing community and you'll find wonderful people who are taking care of their neighbors, who are mowing the lawn for the senior who lives next door, who know each other either by name or by their dogs, not walking dogs around the park. And you start having a conversation and immediately you start hearing the rents are going up. They've added new fees. They're starting to penalize us for this. They have a huge list of rules that we could never possibly follow, but they're not following the rules themselves and they're not maintaining this and they're not maintaining that. And it's just a very clear issue that unites really wonderful people against some folks who aren't so wonderful.

SPEAKER_01: 4:23

Yeah, yeah. Theo, tell us a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_00: 4:28

I'm a semi-retired systems guy, database theorist, engineer. And now I'm just a paralegal trying to help defend people against... under my wife's direction, who's an attorney, we're doing eviction defense for a lot of folks that are having trouble, you know, helping them to defend themselves and get representation. So, and I got into this 15 years ago, we moved here. It was in the previous owner was abusing everybody in here and stealing their homes which this week came to light how many he stole um and just saw one after another after another basically serial uh destruction of families and uh so so we really said, okay, we got to dig in and try to stop this. At first, it was difficult. We did make some early headway. Then we met up with some folks in some other parks. From there, we met up with MH Action. Since then, it's been, okay, now we have a chance. It's not just steamroller versus grape. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 5:56

we're going to get into the nitty-gritty of what that looks like, too, in this conversation. Pam, tell us a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_02: 6:05

I've been a stay-at-home mom, actually, for the past 18 years, so... You don't want to say it's coming to an end, but it's graduating high school. It's coming to an end. Right? I have lived here in a manufactured housing community, I want to say since 2016. And I got involved in MH Action, I don't know, a year and a half or so ago. And it's interesting, the people that actually led me to MH Action was the EGLE. I know we'll talk about them later, but I had filed a complaint about our water system here, and they told me about MH Action. And so that is how I got involved. And yeah, been involved ever since.

SPEAKER_01: 6:52

All right. What I want to do with this conversation, I want to talk a little bit about the statistics of... mobile home parks, what is happening to them across the country. And then I also want to address the stereotypes of who lives in manufactured housing, because there's some pretty incredible stereotypes out there that the general public has regarding this. So Paul and Pam, I'm going to let either of you answer this. I want you to address the stereotype that the average person or that a lot of people have with regard to people who live in manufactured housing. Tell us how it differs from what people believe that it is. Either of you can answer. Oh,

SPEAKER_02: 7:39

my goodness. I think there's a huge stereotype that people living in manufactured housing are basically just living off of the system. We're lazy. It goes on and on. What I found when I actually lived in manufactured housing, because this is my first time, I hadn't lived in it until around 2016, like I said, and I just found it so different. I found it to be a great little community in here. It's people who care about each other. I had lived in an apartment before I lived here and Somehow, even though people lived in closer quarters, we never really met our neighbors. We never knew each other or got out and talked to each other. Nobody, I'd lived there for almost four years. I didn't know any of my neighbors. And when I moved into manufactured housing community, that all changed. Suddenly everybody wanted to know who you are, where you came from. Do you need any help with anything? And we have people here in my community. There's about 150 lots, so the families here range from every aspect of life, everything that you could think of. Sure, there are poor, but sure, there are also people that aren't poor. There are every race in here. There's every political spectrum. There's a little bit of everybody. It's not at all what people want to think that it is. It's actually a great standard, I think, that a lot more of society should take care to be like, I would think.

SPEAKER_04: 9:24

Yeah, I would jump in and just say that at this point, three years into organizing with MH Action, I think I've probably visited somewhere between 100 and 150 manufactured housing communities knocking on doors. And I don't know that you can say there is one kind of even one kind of manufactured housing community, the, the difference between, um, you know, an over 55 there, you know, you'll find a range of like the over 55 community where there's not a blade of grass out of place. Um, and there's a pool and a tennis court and even one I saw with a, you know, nine hole golf course. Um, and then there are parks that are, you know, 30 homes and pretty distressed and have been neglected by some of these companies for a long time. But in all of those parks, you're going to find a range of folks from a range of experiences. You'll have a decent number of folks who are seniors and retired, folks who have made a plan. They saved their whole lives. They retired. They figured out what they could afford and they bought a home and, you know, based on sort of a reasonable expectation of inflation and so forth, this is a plan for their sort of forever home, their final home. You'll also find a decent number of folks with disabilities, young families, kind of working class families, folks who are working in skilled trades, lots of folks. You'll see lots of trucks with, you know, tools and ladders on the sides, right? So lots of folks who are working hard and lots of folks who have worked hard and who continue, like Pam said, to take care of each other.

SPEAKER_01: 11:10

Yeah, I think mobile homes have, you know, they've played, they've traditionally and always have played such an important part in the housing ecosystem. You know, and then You look at retirement communities in Florida or mobile home parks in California where a mobile home is going for a million dollars because it's out on the beach. So there's such a vast array, as you said, of people that live in these. And I know when you think of a million-dollar mobile home park, you don't think of that as affordable housing, but in California market, it is affordable housing.

UNKNOWN: 11:43

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 11:43

But especially around here in the Great Lakes Basin. So I want... Can you talk a little bit more to the role that the parks have played in... Historically have played in providing affordable housing in the United States and what that future looks like?

SPEAKER_04: 11:58

Theo or Pam, you want to jump in first?

SPEAKER_00: 12:00

Well, it started in a big way right after World War II. They didn't have enough housing for families to start out. So then... Obviously, the building of these evolved. They were little more than trailers you would attach to a car and drive off. But then as they started to become bigger and more permanent, it got into, oh, well, I guess we're building a house. Just a house that we can move around. to its final destination. And that's really basically what it is now. There's a single and there's doubles and then there's extensions. But it's basically, it's a modular way of building a house that has pluses and minuses. But the biggest plus is that it can be manufactured and then shipped to a site rather than built on site so the labor is all in the factory and it's just installed. Then later on, they decided, okay, now we have to have a place to put all these, have some regulations. 1959 was the first year in Michigan really tackled this. And they also dealt with the idea of how to tax these. And they made a deal with the property owners then. They said, okay, we're not going to tax these like a regular house. So the idea is you're going to sell the home. And because you're a licensed seller now, that's where they were going with it. So we'll regulate that. And then you have to put it on a lot. You could charge them rent, but you'll only have to pay$3 a month toward tax as a result. That kind of got changed eventually as 1985, they have the new law came into effect in 87. And that's the one we're operating on today. That's essentially until North Morse Estates pleaded guilty. It had never really been enforced for operating without a license. It just shows that if you leave laws around for 40 years, some brilliant guys are going to find all the holes. Six-year-old playing video games. Anybody does that is going to know. There's ways

SPEAKER_03: 14:25

around.

SPEAKER_04: 14:27

That's where we're at. Yeah. To get at kind of the role, I mean, it's a huge role in terms of affordable housing. The statistic we hear all the time is 22 million Americans live in manufactured housing, 6% of the housing stock in the country. And in Michigan, I think the census data was something like somewhere over 480,000 Michiganders living in manufactured housing communities, 1,000 licensed parks. So, So they tend to be tucked away and a little bit out of the public eye, but it's a huge It's a huge piece of affordable housing. And if we think back a year or so when the governor talked about a massive investment to try to create 10,000 units of affordable housing, we're looking at between 150 and 200,000 units of affordable housing that are under threat right now. So that math doesn't work. If you continue to allow the predatory companies to actually reduce the amount of affordable housing, we're going to be in trouble.

SPEAKER_01: 15:41

And as we speak,

SPEAKER_00: 15:42

it is ongoing.

SPEAKER_01: 15:43

Yeah. When did hedge funds become a thing in affordable housing? Because it's important to know this is the trend across the United States. Right. With residential homes as well as small businesses, hedge funds in Wall Street and property and farms, hedge funds in Wall Street are starting to come in and buy everything up. Yeah. I did not realize that this was happening with mobile home parks in mass. So when did this trend really start? When did you really start to see this happen in mobile homes?

SPEAKER_04: 16:16

Well, from MH Action's perspective, there was a group of residents who were organizing locally, and they actually started to recognize this around 2011. The story I always hear is that it was after the 2007, 2008 financial crisis. You have some of the Wall Street types who are looking for, quote, safe places to put their money. After

SPEAKER_01: 16:42

they killed the housing market.

SPEAKER_04: 16:45

Exactly. So, you know, it's about and just to be clear, hedge funds, private equity firms, real estate investment trusts. There's a whole variety of these structures. We just call them kind of predatory structures. players. But I think, yeah, I think that's been, I think it's been, you know, 12 to 15 years that it's been going.

SPEAKER_02: 17:09

I know like where I live at Hillcrest, they bought in, I don't know the exact year, but it was in the eighties that it was bought by private equity. Wow. Back in the eighties. It was the eighties or the nineties. Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 17:21

And her, her park actually was bought by the same company that used to own this park before my previous owner. So RHP, This was actually his first park, I believe. And he bought it from the actual original owner's wife at the time. And I saw this sort of happen because I had a grandmother who lived in a... mobile home. Like, and it was always considered respectable, you know, even in the 1970s. And I just saw this sort of shift around 1990. It just sort of being a sort of looking down on folks. And a lot of these folks were veterans. They might be disabled, you know, different things. And I was like, saw a lot of these guys as, you know, old vets, World War II vets. You know, they tell me stories about, oh, yeah, we went in, had to You know, Bon Ploesti and all, you know. So I never saw this as a negative thing, but I guess it did change. And then the guy that bought this park used private equity money to do it before. You know, this is around 2000, 2000. But he wasn't as evolved on the playbook. about how they harvest the companies. So he was just basically doing the slow squeeze the whole time.

SPEAKER_01: 18:55

So let's talk, I wanna dive into what actually happens with these hedge funds because they are not treating these mobile home parks as investments in people. They're like everything that they do, they are treating them as investments to squeeze as much revenue out as absolutely possible. And the repercussions of that are horrific. And this is where I got interested in this story because I was chatting with Theo about what was going on. And it was... just about a month ago now it was, when his mobile home park was sued and litigated in court. And they were forced to sell the property and received only a$25,000 fine, which I think is just an absolute joke. But more on that when we get to the policy side of things. But he showed me his water. Theo, did you... Do a jar of water for us today. He showed me, he sent me a picture of what his water looks like.

SPEAKER_00: 19:57

This was actually 14 days, two weeks after the prosecutor announced that he was filing charges for operating without a license. And he deliberately held up another thing of water that was actually not as bad as this. This isn't the worst either. I mean, there's people like send me pictures of tubs just filled with something that looks like mud.

SPEAKER_01: 20:20

So let's dive into that. What happens when an equity firm comes in and takes over a park? Someone walk us through what that looks like because it's

SPEAKER_00: 20:33

pretty incredible. Well, the pool stops being run because somebody screws up and forgets to pay the gas bill. So the boiler freezes and that, you know, oh my, we can't spend$10,000 on a new boiler. Well, dummy should have paid the gas bill. And then usually in the case of our community center, the hot water heater, all the pipes burst, you know, so that's the community center has been down and the pool.

SPEAKER_02: 21:06

Right. It's just interesting because it's happening right now. So when I first moved here, we were owned by RHP Properties. I had filed complaints regarding our water with the health department, with EGLE, Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. They're in charge of water in Michigan. Right. It's just been a process trying to get things figured out. Basically what it boils down to is it's been a years long of a battle. You know, you reach a point where you finally think you're going somewhere and somebody cares and somebody is going to fix the problem. And in my case, it was the EGLE was able to come out here and verify that we have a Safe Drinking Water Act violation. So they cited the park. And just within a few months later, guess what? The park gets sold. So the new park owners, another private equity company, we're now owned by Cambio. Well, they don't care. They're aware that there's a safe drinking water act violation. They're aware that we can't drink the water here. But what they're focused on is taking out all of the blighted trailers, which we do want them to do. It's something that I had been asking RHP to do for years because they're blighted. They attract vermin. They're disgusting. They're falling apart. They're full of mold. So RHP never would do it, but now Cambio can come in and do it, which, okay, fine. That's great. But basically all they do, and this seems to be the playbook, is they want things to look nice on the outside. They don't care what anything is like on the inside. So although they're aware of the infrastructure needing to be fixed and that we can't drink our water, they're just pulling out the new homes so they can put the brand new homes in. And I'm telling you, they're lining us up in here like we're cattle. I've never seen trailers... Mm-hmm. No

SPEAKER_01: 23:31

one's forcing them. No one is forcing them to fix the water issue. No. All of this is a major, major public health crisis just waiting to happen. It is. Water, vermin, disease. I mean, no one is forcing them. No one

SPEAKER_02: 23:49

is

SPEAKER_01: 23:49

forcing them. Yeah, that is insanity. That's insanity. And this is happening everywhere. This is happening everywhere. This isn't just, you know, it's happening in this park or, you know, that park over there. It's literally happening in every park that these hedge funds take over.

SPEAKER_00: 24:06

Well, when you don't care, it's everywhere, you know, and it's...

SPEAKER_04: 24:14

I mean, I think the way to one way to think about it is that this is this is the emerging dominant business model. So it's not this isn't just about a company or a an individual owner doing something. This is a business model where you, you know, you buy a park, you immediately raise the lot rents. You do what they call unbundling. So traditionally, historically, a lot of rent would cover things like water, sewer, trash. you know, taxes, those kinds of things. But suddenly those become additional fees. You reduce staffing. So instead of having someone in the office every day, now you have a manager who's covering three, four, sometimes five parks. You reduce maintenance. Things that used to be done in well-run parks, things that used to be done every year are done on that sort of as needed if there's a problem kind of basis. And when folks report issues, you know, folks will report, oh, hey, they're, you know, 40, 60, 70% of the streetlights are out. And the answer from the manager will be, oh, that's not in the budget this year. And one of my old mentors always said, a budget is just a statement of priorities. And so what they're basically saying is that's not a priority right now. The companies have different sort of focus areas or slightly different practices. Some of them will be very focused on the sort of beautification stuff that Pam talked about trying to raise the curb appeal so that they're in a way you can think about it as they're simply looking at a financial asset that they can try to raise the value of on paper. So they've purchased a park and they raised a lot, they raised a lot of rents in the fees and suddenly on paper, it looks more valuable. In some cases, they'll then borrow against that to buy the next park. In some cases, it seems like they do that sort of traditional private equity thing where they have the LLC take out debt and then to pay themselves back so that they've made their money, whether the park is successful or not. And they can just kind of, some of them will buy parks that are in really, really good shape. And then kind of ride them down as they, you know, as they try to force the residents to do all the aesthetic work and they neglect the infrastructure underground and all that kind of stuff. So it's just, it's an extraction model. And I think we were able to look at data from Lara about licensed parks and What we could relatively easily tell is well over 70% of the home sites seem to be owned by out-of-state or big corporate players. It's probably worse than that with the LLCs owned by LLCs, but that's what we could tell.

SPEAKER_01: 27:05

Yeah. And let's talk about that for a moment because Theo sent me some information where this park was owned, a park was owned by this equity firm, but it was a shell company of this equity firm and then the shell company of that equity firm. So it's like literally, it could be three to four deep of the same company. They're just using different names. Let's talk about that for a moment, the strategy of that. And how they're not being held accountable for that, it seems. Pam, when you just said that yours was just sold and it's owned by Cambio now- Is that a completely different company or is that a shell company of the company that owned it before who actually got the fine or whatever it was that they actually did receive? And did they receive a fine? It seems to me they're getting slaps on the hands.

SPEAKER_02: 27:56

No, they didn't receive a fine, just a notice that you need to fix this as soon as possible or what will happen, nobody knows,

SPEAKER_01: 28:06

but fix it. Is nothing,

SPEAKER_02: 28:08

apparently. No, fine. As far as, to my knowledge, Cambio is an entirely separate private equity entity than RHP Properties, but what they'll do, I know what RHP Properties did, they own, I think it was over 250 manufactured homes in several states, but each manufactured community, I'm sorry, that they buy is a different LLC. So Hillcrest Acres was its own LLC. And if there's a problem with Hillcrest Acres, it doesn't have to necessarily be attached to RHP because it's its own LLC. And then on and on with every single other manufactured home community. That is also what Cambio does. So Cambio owns us, but I think our license in LARA, is probably mentioned as Hillcrest Acres, but I have to verify that. But yeah, no, they're a separate but equally evil private equity entity.

SPEAKER_00: 29:13

It's a multi-headed hydra, and that's what I've seen too. And sometimes you have to do detective work to even find out who is at the head.

SPEAKER_01: 29:21

It seems so, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 29:24

Well, I mean, there's recently... Go ahead, Theo. Well, I was just going to say there's a recent filing uncovered that there's yet another entity that Alden is using to hold titles of homes and acquire titles of homes. And they've just tried to use a strategy to get like 37 homes and take the titles here as a way. I don't know why they would do that other than to just expedite the sale of this property.

SPEAKER_04: 29:55

Well, that's, yeah, I mean, I think Theo's Park is an interesting example where you have, you know, there's a North Morris Estates LLC of some kind that is just that park. And then there's, above that, there's Homes of America. And then above those, there's Smith Management and Alden Global Capital. And now he's just found another company that is, you know, the sort of financing and sale of parks, of actual homes there. And, you know, the chances of those at the top, you know, Randall Smith, the person who is, you know, the head of Alton Global Capital, you know, of him being held accountable for the situation that Theo and his neighbors are facing is minuscule when you're, you know, when this is the first prosecution of anyone.

SPEAKER_00: 30:43

I got it. On this document, it says both Heath Freeman, which is Randy's buddy that he's on Wall Street. who is now CEO of, uh, I think a CEO of Alden. Yeah. Or, and, or CEO of homes of America as well. Right. So, uh, you

SPEAKER_04: 31:04

can see that you can see the connections. It's not that you can't see the connections, but it's the, the actual accountability and being held, held to account and having some consequences for treating people the way that they have, uh, That's, that is a whole nother, that's a whole nother, that's a whole different level.

SPEAKER_00: 31:22

These are so hard to investigate that the state even messed up and they, they gave me this thing, you know, cause like I had to point out to them that the original filing, cause they were sending out a denial letter. Okay. We're, we're denying your license in November of 2023. And I had to point out to them, I go that MHP name. That LLC doesn't exist in Michigan. There is no LLC with that name. And I said, so do you check these LLC? No, we go by what they put on the form. I go, so I could just put Donald Duck, like big quack LLC, and you're not going to check it?

SPEAKER_01: 32:01

Jeez. So there's no accountability.

SPEAKER_00: 32:03

I got checked for renewing my driver's license.

SPEAKER_01: 32:05

Yeah. I was going to say that they're finding every loophole. It's like they're deliberately searching for every loophole they can to extract as much out as possible. And they're not being held accountable for literally anything. So nothing is going to change until they are held accountable.

SPEAKER_00: 32:23

Well, and it's your pension money, too. It's like everybody's 401k money. That's what's being invested here. But we don't need maximum profit extraction when it comes to airplane travel. Yeah. Or water quality or something important, right? Well, there's a

SPEAKER_01: 32:46

fallacy. There's a fallacy that 401k takes up a large percentage of the stock market and it does not. 93% of the stock market is owned by 10% of the people and of that remaining 7%, 401k is about 40 to 60% of that. And that's it. So it's not, that's such just, it's such a fault. It's not a good argument. It is a very weak argument because it is not everyday people's money that is being invested in this. It is billionaires becoming billionaires and extracting money off the backs of everyone else is what this is. So let's call this for what it is.

SPEAKER_00: 33:25

The billionaires are definitely behind it. It's their genius of how to hack the system. Well, it's their

SPEAKER_01: 33:31

system. They built it. So, yeah. I

SPEAKER_04: 33:34

think another piece that's just useful to think about is, you know, as Theo's talked about and Pam has talked about kind of the loopholes, I think it's both loopholes and it's also just wearing down already under-resourced enforcement, you know, agencies or mechanisms. Why don't you make a new strategy? Yeah, so, you know, we'll talk to... Local governments who are like, well, you know, I remember talking to a legislator who was a former mayor and he talked about having a run in with one of these companies. And as a local government, they sent them notices, sent them letters, sent them to all the things, you know, whatever the violations were they're dealing with. And they just got ignored by the corporate office. It's like, why do we need to deal with this little problem? community in Michigan until they actually had to sue them. You know, you find, I remember actually Pam talking about a situation of trying to get some of the, you know, blighted homes removed and the local township saying, well, yeah, we could come in and remove them because they refused to. And it would cost us something like$10,000 to$20,000 a piece to pull them out. And then theoretically, we should be able to collect that money from RHP, but good luck. And if there are 10 or 20 of those homes, that could end up with being a big part of a small township's budget.

SPEAKER_02: 34:58

So they literally shamed me for the question, basically. They shamed me by telling me it was going to come out of my own taxpayer money to have RHP remove all these blighted homes.

SPEAKER_04: 35:09

Yeah. And then we've seen multiple situations where... Even sometimes a state legislator will call us, you know, I'll get a phone call and saying, this is Senator so-and-so or state rep so-and-so. We've got a situation in our district. Can you help? And they've already got Eagle involved and they've already got Laura involved and they've got the local township and they've got the county, you know, health department and the state legislators. And they're all at the table and they all seem to be engaged. They all seem to be like sincerely wanting to try and fix the situation and And they can't find the levers to do it. Now, someone could argue that they're just, you know, they're just not doing their job. But, you know, I've seen probably four or five of these situations in Michigan where I have, you know, folks who are really upset about what's being done to people in their districts. You know, two, three years later, it hasn't changed.

SPEAKER_01: 36:02

Do you think it's because their hands are tied or do you think, why do you think it is?

SPEAKER_04: 36:07

I think it's the combination. I mean, okay, so one of the ways that we often talk about this is if you think about a line that like this is the law, right? And on one side of the law, you've got the things that are legal but probably shouldn't be. Raising rent 100% on retired seniors, fee gouging, all kinds of stuff that's perfectly legal but really shouldn't be. We call it lawful but awful. Um,

SPEAKER_01: 36:36

and on

SPEAKER_04: 36:38

the other side of the, on the other side of the line is you've got all the things that are illegal, but unenforced. And that's where the feels you want the, why don't you make me strategy works. And so, you know, it's every township building inspector and every, you know, Laura, um, investigator has many, many, many, many, many things that they're dealing with. And, um, oftentimes it feels like if they can just be intransigent enough, there aren't big enough penalties looming over them.

SPEAKER_01: 37:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 37:12

That

SPEAKER_01: 37:12

$25,000 I think is a joke.

SPEAKER_04: 37:15

Right. That's a latte for Randall Smith. And then there's just, yeah, there's just the fact that those, you know, A, those penalties almost never come to pass. And if they do, they're nothing that's going to phase these kind of folks.

SPEAKER_00: 37:34

What's interesting is the evolution in the way that they deal with the building trade, the building inspectors. In the old days, you get builders building houses. They never want to have a run-in with a building inspector because that's only going to cost them money from their perspective. So they're always respectful. You realize the guy's busier than heck. And, you know, he's probably spread too thin anyway. And so they just want to say, hey, the guy wants it done a certain way. Okay, no problem. You know, I could just change that. No problem. But they're not prepared for outright defiance. And they're not prepared to enforce every single act that they make. Oh, you've got to remove that pile of debris. No, you can't park homes in the street. Are you kidding? The fire trucks can't even get through. Yeah, of course you've got to patch those potholes. Of course you've got to plow the streets. What happens is there's a fire in the back of somebody's house.

SPEAKER_01: 38:30

So this extraction, the term that you used, Paul, which– Is a very strong word, but it's essentially what is happening. It's working because people are being evicted. And where the hell are they going? Like, where do you go from some of the most affordable housing available? Where do you go? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 38:52

Oh, you

SPEAKER_00: 38:54

know, I can't pass a credit check after that.

SPEAKER_04: 38:57

I was talking to a woman who lives in a park. This was in Illinois, but it was a park owned by the same company that owns Theo's. She was actually renting the home, but it was in such bad condition that first the The local, she had a housing voucher. First, the local government pulled the housing voucher, said that the home is not in good enough condition for us to subsidize. And then the school actually sent Child Protective Services to look at the house.

SPEAKER_03: 39:30

And

SPEAKER_04: 39:31

she was told she had to get the kids out. She had an hour to get the kids out or they were going to leave with a social worker. So I talked to, you know, for months. What the hell? For months, I was talking to her afterwards, and she and her three kids were living in her mother's living room. I had a

SPEAKER_00: 39:50

lady give me the same story just the other day. Came right by my house. Said, Theo, what do I do? I got sewage coming up underneath the house. Is it your house? I go, yeah, it's my house, but it's their connection. And my kids are all sick. I go, well, you're not drinking the water, are you? She goes, no, but it's underneath my house.

SPEAKER_01: 40:12

Residents are suffering every consequence that the hedge fund owner should be suffering. And it's being taken down and out on the people who actually live there who are fighting to have them comply with fixing everything around there. Well,

SPEAKER_04: 40:34

I think the other thing to just keep in mind is while the evictions and displacement is kind of the most dramatic the most dramatic stories often. Um, the thing that I think this business model kind of counts on is the fact that people will do almost anything to keep a roof over their heads. And so sometimes it's a matter of driving, you know, you drive through a pristine looking park, beautiful pool, beautiful, everything. And, and, and then you talk to some people and someone says, my 85 year old neighbor is living on, you know,$1,300 a month. So security is, And... Yeah, she made a plan and she bought the house with her remaining assets and she was able to afford the$400,$450 a month for the slab of dirt underneath it that covered the water and the sewer and the trash. But now this other company has come in and now it's$750 a month,$800 a month lot rent, plus you're adding on water and sewer and trash. And the water sometimes fluctuates between$60 a month and it'll go up to$200 with no particular reason. And we don't know why. I keep asking about it, but it's And so, you know, you've got someone who was responsible, did what they were supposed to do, made the plan, you know, all those sorts of things. And now they're, you know, having to go to food pantries and choose between rent and medicines. And we hear those stories all the time, but you don't necessarily see them because they will do whatever it takes to keep a roof over their head. Because you can't be 85 and homeless. You just can't.

SPEAKER_01: 42:07

Yeah.

UNKNOWN: 42:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 42:09

Yeah. It's also interesting how much I think the government ends up subsidizing some of us in ways like I know where I live and a lot of people, our water bill, for an example,

SPEAKER_03: 42:23

we

SPEAKER_02: 42:24

get charged by the community, our water bill, but it shows up on our statement every month as part of our rent. Now the billing is erroneous. Sometimes you'll get a$100 bill. Sometimes you get a$30 bill. I know people who literally have had a$1,000 bill. I had a lady who had a$5,000 bill. Just for the water. Just for her water. And instead of the RHP properties at the time saying, oh, we made a mistake. We'll have to fix it. They took her to court. over an eviction. And my point in bringing this up is that there will be times when people get these ginormous water bills that they cannot afford, but since it's counted as their rent, if they can't pay the full thing, they'll get a seven-day notice to quit and they go to court over an eviction because technically what they couldn't pay was their water bill. And if they're lucky, They can call the DHS, maybe somebody that can help them on their rent. But I think a caveat is that these people that are helping, oftentimes it's the DHS, they don't realize that they're paying someone's water bill, an outrageous water bill that's erroneous. But it's included in your rent and you got to do it or you're going to get evicted. And so that's just another tactic that they use to constantly...

SPEAKER_00: 43:43

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. It's disgusting. It'll steal your home in a heartbeat. It's the quickest way. Basically, they just put the Trojan horse of a faulty water meter under there, and you don't have any recourse.

SPEAKER_01: 43:58

Right. So it's deliberate. Oh, yeah. Allegedly. Oh, sure.

SPEAKER_00: 44:04

Deliberate on purpose, accidental on purpose.

SPEAKER_04: 44:07

There's something called ancillary revenue. which I was talking to a reporter from one of the business magazines who was working on a story on this. And he was like, yeah, no, ancillary revenue is something that they talk pretty openly about. And that can be the unbundling that we talked about, where now you're paying for things that used to be part of the law rent. It also goes for kind of punitive fees and fines. So there are some companies that one of their... regular practices is to have the manager drive through the park either once a week or once a day giving people notices citations for various rule violations and keep in mind when these parks count when these new owners come in you go from having a one-page lease to having sometimes no lease and just a 14 20 20 to i've seen a 50 page

SPEAKER_00: 45:06

list of 14 pages of tiny print that you need like a microscope to read.

SPEAKER_04: 45:12

And so you get, so you've got, um, someone, I talked to someone who had a$75, you know, these are like, you've got a light, a fee or a fine because you had a potted plant on your porch, but there was no plant in it.

SPEAKER_02: 45:25

That was where I live. My neighbor.

SPEAKER_04: 45:28

Because you have a ladder, um, um, Right. Yeah. And a lot of times they'll, they'll tack these things on. I've heard of some, I've heard of some situations. This isn't quite as common where, you know, you just made the park manager mad and they tack something on. I'm good at that. But oftentimes those, whatever those fines and fees are, or the, as, as Pam said, they become grounds for eviction. So, you know, that becomes considered part of your rent and you pay your rent and they just take it out of the fine first. Even if that's not technically legal where you are, they'll do it and then leave it for you. And I think one of the things that doesn't get maybe appreciated quite as much is the level of stress that that puts on a human being's life.

SPEAKER_01: 46:52

Yeah. To

SPEAKER_04: 46:53

be in a situation where you could lose your home. Mental

SPEAKER_01: 46:57

health. Yeah. Mental and physical health. You're constantly in a fight. You would have to be constantly in fight mode. Yeah. I can't

SPEAKER_00: 47:03

even imagine a lot of stress. A lot of people are just turtled up. They just don't want to deny that this is going on and just go along and do whatever they can do until they can't. It's like I even had somebody here. I said, you got to get an attorney. You got to get an attorney. Go here. Go there. They're waiting. They'll help you. Didn't get an attorney. Now she's gone. She's getting evicted. She had to put her kids with her ex, get rid of her animals. Now she's gone.

SPEAKER_02: 47:35

Out of fear. And

SPEAKER_00: 47:38

I see it every day. I see the people looking at me going, what do I do? I need to work on my car. That's a problem. I go, just Don't leave it on the jack so it's obvious.

SPEAKER_01: 47:52

Yeah, it seems like your kids can't even play in the yard.

SPEAKER_02: 47:55

No.

SPEAKER_01: 47:57

You can't do anything. They want

SPEAKER_02: 47:59

us to appear like we don't live here is basically what it is. Everything has to be pristine and perfect as if nobody lives here. From 8 to 5, Monday through Friday, apparently, is what we joke about. And the only

SPEAKER_03: 48:15

purpose is to get

SPEAKER_02: 48:18

you to leave. The only purpose is so that they can run around with their rural reminders. And mind you, some parks like mine, they don't keep up their end of the bargain by any means. We're talking, they won't keep the lawns mowed, but they'll write up someone in between to unload lawns. for having theirs unmowed. You know, it's just, it's petty. It's ridiculous. Leaves. Yeah. Trash in yards. They'll let a blighted home that the entire home is full of trash. Rats included. Raccoons sometimes, you know, cockroaches, mice, squatters, even sometimes we've dealt with that. And then the person across the street gets, gets a rule reminder that their shed door is askew. It's ridiculous. It is ridiculous.

SPEAKER_00: 49:11

We had a blight at home sitting next to us for almost 10 years. And they were just giving us the finger about why they weren't going to remove it. We made them remove like 50 others working with the township. And this was like one of the last to go.

SPEAKER_04: 49:28

Yeah. I think that a lot of what they do has multiple... sort of multiple benefits for them and costs for everyone else. So the, the huge lists of rules, it's a, it's a source of ancillary revenue for fees. It's also a way to keep people scared and from speaking up. And then, you know, there's a, there's at least a, a, you know, well, we're going to anything they can do to quote, improve the aesthetics, make things, make something look very like, vanilla and uniform, I think they see that as raising the curb appeal and sale value of the property. Or

SPEAKER_01: 50:09

raising rents, right? Yeah,

SPEAKER_02: 50:12

absolutely. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 50:14

We had to change the siding on the home that is a HUD-approved home, and actually that's That's not allowed. And then they were also saying, oh, everything's got to be painted a certain color, yet they don't paint any of their properties that color.

SPEAKER_01: 50:29

It's like the worst HOA on the planet. I

SPEAKER_04: 50:37

think at one point we did actually see someone who was putting in rules about what color your curtains had to be. Actually, inside the home that you own. Oh, yeah. Or, you know, charging a pet fee for a cat, an indoor cat that you own in a house that you own. I mean, that's perfectly common. That's all over the place.

SPEAKER_01: 50:57

So they're charging you. They're charging the homeowner. So the person owns the home, and they're paying the lot rent, and they are being charged a pet fee to have their own pet in their own home.

SPEAKER_02: 51:12

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 51:13

What the hell?

SPEAKER_02: 51:15

Everyone. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 51:20

My mind is blown here, you guys. Like, truly, my mind is blown.

SPEAKER_00: 51:24

They didn't understand they were just a cell in a spreadsheet. Right. They weren't a real

SPEAKER_01: 51:29

person.

UNKNOWN: 51:29

Yeah. No, don't.

SPEAKER_02: 51:32

My mind's

SPEAKER_01: 51:32

blown. How are y'all doing? Like, how are y'all doing? Like, how are you going through every day? I would have lost my mind.

SPEAKER_00: 51:39

This is my uniform.

SPEAKER_02: 51:41

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 51:41

We're at war.

SPEAKER_02: 51:44

We're like the only ones, barely the only ones, too, that even, you know, everyone is so afraid to speak out. I'm the only one really where I live that will speak out because the fear of retaliation and all these rule reminders and oh my goodness,

SPEAKER_01: 52:04

it's maddening. Where are the politicians? Because, you know, Theo sent me a letter and I'm going to say her name here. Emily Am I pronouncing that correctly? Dievendorf. Dievendorf. She's a state representative in the 77th District. To me, this is a form letter. And, you know, it goes back to what you were saying, Paul, that some of them seem to care, but their hands are tied. Well,

SPEAKER_04: 52:30

I just want to... To the point where... I don't want to jump on one... I think there's

SPEAKER_01: 52:34

a particularly rough situation there. No, it's just because that's the letter I received, so it's the one that I'm focusing on. It's just... I think it's, to me, it's just saving face. It's like, yeah, I care, but I don't care at the same time. And perhaps she does. I'm not going to put words into her mouth. But it seems to me with politicians, too, and this is my opinion, I will say that out loud, that they're more concerned with being elected than actually helping their constituents as well. And so there's like a double-edged sword here, like being stuck into the guts of all of you. Like, where do you, you know, we're going to talk about policy in the next one, but where do you go from here? I

SPEAKER_00: 53:14

make it simple. See what the shirt says? It doesn't say MH care. It doesn't say MH talk. It doesn't say MH think. It doesn't say MH study. It says action. I think a lot of politicians buy into

SPEAKER_01: 53:28

the stigma too. What are you doing

SPEAKER_02: 53:29

outside of policy?

SPEAKER_01: 53:31

You think they fall to the stigma, you think? They

SPEAKER_02: 53:34

fall into the stigma too. Some of them most certainly, I think they do. I

SPEAKER_04: 53:39

have to say, I think that the team, Pam and Theo and the other 25 to 60 leaders who've been actively working with legislators have made a huge difference. Two and a half years ago, when we met with state legislators about what was going on, oftentimes their reaction was, Oh my God, I didn't, I had no idea that this was happening.

SPEAKER_01: 54:05

Yeah. This isn't being reported on nearly enough. Like

SPEAKER_04: 54:07

at this point, unless we're talking with a brand new legislator who was just elected and, you know, it just started office in January. Those are the only people who are now saying, Oh my gosh, I never knew that this was happening. Um, basically everyone else. And that's because again, um, Theo and Pam and the others, I think over the last year and a half or so, met with about 114 legislators, offices, some of them 24 times. Wow, we're really exhausted.

SPEAKER_01: 54:40

I am too. You got that on top of just living every day dealing with this, you know, goodness.

SPEAKER_00: 54:48

We even had a group go down there and hand out water bottles from different parks with brown water in it.

SPEAKER_02: 54:54

They could see all the water, yeah. Yeah, no one wanted to drink it, did they?

SPEAKER_00: 54:58

And we had one guy saying, oh, well, I heard that this is good for you. Oh, here, take two.

SPEAKER_02: 55:03

Yeah, iron's good for you. Someone literally said that.

SPEAKER_04: 55:08

But to your question, I think there was a very strong bill package last year that came– I think relatively close to passing. We had all the votes in the state Senate and I'm just going to publicly say it. It was the former, what we heard, we were not on the phone call, but

SPEAKER_03: 55:29

what we heard was

SPEAKER_04: 55:31

that the former Speaker of the House called the former Senate Majority Leader and told him that we did not yet vote. have the votes in the House while we were kind of madly, you know, Pam and others were madly going door to door getting those votes. And so, you know, I think everyone saw the debacle that happened at the end of the session last year. And this bill got caught up, this bill package got caught up in that. But I think there are, I mean, we have had I don't know how you can't be outraged.

SPEAKER_01: 56:26

The average person, I don't know how you cannot be outraged over this.

SPEAKER_00: 56:30

Some people, it makes it easier because they feel like they're punching down. They're thinking, oh, these people deserve it. These people wanted this. It's like, no.

SPEAKER_04: 56:41

I do think it's also important to recognize that the opposition, the industry associations, spent something like$500,000 last year. It took a lot of money to keep that from happening. from going through. And when we looked at their, you know, their associations pack, I think in five years from like 2017 to 2022, like their, their cumulative budget was something like$119,000. So. Oh, wow. So

SPEAKER_01: 57:13

you like quadrupled it.

SPEAKER_04: 57:16

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 57:17

I

SPEAKER_04: 57:18

think we should be getting a commission from the industry association because they're getting a lot of, a lot of money because of what

SPEAKER_01: 57:24

we're doing.

UNKNOWN: 57:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 57:25

We'll talk more about the ins and outs of that policy issue in part two, but I do want to ask this question regarding it. Is that package going to be restructured and brought back?

SPEAKER_04: 57:38

We're going to have the conversations we're meeting. Everything's more challenging in a split legislature because you've got to get Democrats and Republicans to talk to each other and agree with each other. I think this possibly is an issue where we could get some of that. What exactly is going to be able to happen? I don't know. But our membership goes across the political spectrum.

SPEAKER_03: 58:03

Yes.

SPEAKER_04: 58:03

And we meet with people across the political spectrum. So it's not a problem for us. We have great conversations across the political spectrum. It's the folks in Lansing who have to learn how to do that too.

UNKNOWN: 58:15

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01: 58:16

Oh, my goodness. This is just– this is unreal. You know, and the thing is, is with something like this, this affects the housing market across the board because mobile home parks are supposed to be some of the most affordable homes. Well,

SPEAKER_00: 58:32

if it's$2,000 to be able to rent.

SPEAKER_01: 58:35

Yeah, it's not. It's not any

SPEAKER_00: 58:37

longer. Well, what does that do to single-family home prices too?

SPEAKER_01: 58:40

Right. Like if that is the starting– if that's the entry– Of owning homes, affordable homes. No one is going to be able to afford a home here in the very near future unless you bought it 50 years ago and are sitting in it. So yeah, where do we go from here is the question.

SPEAKER_00: 59:00

I guess jail because the Supreme Court said it's illegal to be homeless now.

SPEAKER_01: 59:04

That's true. That's true. You can't win either way you're going on

SPEAKER_00: 59:09

this. You got to go to the shelter. Oh, they got nobody in the shelter? You're going to jail and we're going to charge you. to be out on the street, really. In New York, it costs$400 a night to put somebody in a shelter. Four-star hotels don't cost that much.

SPEAKER_04: 59:25

Something's wrong. I think it's important to say that this isn't that hard to fix. This isn't complicated. It's not complex. It's simply political will. It is purely political will. I mean, even if you want to think in the most capitalist terms, you have two sets of private property owners whose private property is attached. And right now, one of those sets of private property owners has absolute power over the other. So you have two choices. You either have to put protections into law to keep them from abusing that power, or you have to do something to Make the power, you know, to even up the power.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:07

It's essentially a racket. It's racketeering.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:10

Yeah. Well, the greedy aren't going to stop being greedy. Like you're not going to, they're not suddenly going to decide to be altruistic. Yeah. They're not going to suddenly decide to care.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:18

You know, my IV pump or my, my heart, you know, defibrillator or whatever, either. It's like these people that are just profit-motivated. It's like they don't care about performance. Wait a minute, that's kind of important. Your airplane's not going to fall out of the sky or

SPEAKER_04: 1:00:35

something. I think it's also important to say that what these folks were fighting for last year would actually have enshrined profitability into state law. So there was no question about the parks being profitable. So the way that it would have worked in terms of the rent gouging was any park could raise the rents at the rate of inflation without any, with no questions asked. And if they had some kind of expenses that were actual expenses in the park, they needed to, to, you know, redo the sewer system. They need to read, you know, repay the sidewalks, whatever those kinds of things were, then they would just have to go to the manufactured housing commission,

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:14

just come in, open their books,

SPEAKER_04: 1:01:15

open their books and show, show that the operate like local operating expenses, capital expenses, and a reasonable rate of return were required this way. This rent increase.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:26

And then we can't do anything to stop them. We just got hammered with

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:30

rent control. It's rent control.

SPEAKER_04: 1:01:32

But it was a simple rent justification kind of a situation that would have allowed and actually in some ways maybe incentivized them to do improvements in the communities. But then

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:45

you can raise your rent anyway, no matter what. That's my point, though.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:49

If you're allowed to... raise rents in a mobile home park at the rate of inflation, that's kind of insane as well. That

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:57

still prices people out. Now they own the homes and want to rent them out at exorbitant rates and treat it like an apartment, yet they're not taxed on it like an apartment. They basically are ripping off the government, too.

SPEAKER_04: 1:02:11

I think the point is, though, that what folks were asking for was relatively modest and reasonable. And it was just basically saying, yes, communities can't just raise the rent in order to send an additional$2 million to the Singapore Sovereign Wealth Fund. It can't just be extractive. If you need to raise the rent for something that is actually for the park itself, a lot of residents that I talked to One of the first things people will say is, well, if you can raise my rent, I'm okay with that if you're actually going to spend it here. I

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:44

know I am. Hey, will you open the pool? If I could see these things, could I have safe drinking water? We used to have a

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:51

nice kitchen. Really? Did you not have your own water? With a griddle and everything in our community center. We used to have wedding receptions and birthday parties and christenings and whatnot in there, like crickets. actually rats.

SPEAKER_04: 1:03:05

Well, and there was also, I mean, I think, I think to give a little bit of a, I think a lot of the people that I talked to when they talk about the parks having been purchased, they're like, Oh, you know, the mom, when I rented from a mom and pop, when we had the lot rent from a mom and pop, it was$350 a month and it covered water and sewer and trash. And then this company came in and within four years they've doubled it. And now it's, and then they're, they've added those on top as fees. We did go and visit a resident-owned cooperative in Clinton Township, and they have a move-in fee that is to join the co-op,$2,500. Oh, my gosh. But that's part of the moving price. But once they do that, instead of lot rent, they have something called their co-op fee, the monthly co-op fee, which covers water, sewer, snow plowing, and I believe trash. And that was$125 a month. And that was it. I've never heard. It's$125 a month, period. And I've driven through there a couple of times and talked to people out on their porches and they love the community. It's run by the residents. So there are models and clearly you could operate a park that way. That gives you a sense of the scale of what's being extracted. Because

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:23

it's not debt leverage. Yeah. It's not debt leverage to drive the price up so we can sell it so we can get a higher comp so now so-and-so can buy it so we can make a$3 million profit on it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:35

Yeah. And we're going to talk about that in part two because we're going to talk about what can be done differently. And there are examples, very good examples out there of how to come out of this. Unfortunately, I think it is going to require laws. to force this. And we will talk about the policy side of that as well in the second one. But man, is this an issue? Holy moly. Like I, you know, this

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:01

is where your aunt or your uncle or your grandpa or your grandma might be living. And do you really want to see them preyed upon like this?

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:08

Yeah. Half a million people of our population in Michigan alone is facing this, you know, and not to mention across the country. It's just kind of obscene how like, Yeah, you're playing with people's lives and you're playing with public health.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:24

Destroying what can really be like a gem of a community. When these people get to really know each other and we look out after each other in here. And that's like really the ideal. That's what you want in a community. But you basically handed these guys the blowtorch to destroy it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:05:42

Right. And they actually have the resources to do it the right way is what kills me. These private equity people, it's not like they're the mom and pop owners from back in the day that didn't have all these resources available. These people have anything they could need, which is evidenced by Cambio coming in and immediately they can pour thousands upon thousands into all of a sudden we can get streetlights now. But that's because they want people to come in and buy the new homes that they're bringing in here. They can pour in thousands and thousands and thousands upon thousands to do that, but they don't really want to have us have safe drinking water. They don't want to fix the sewer. It's just so disheartening and maddening. Something that came out recently is if you don't want to mow your lawn this summer, you can pay, I think it's$80 a month to have Cambio mow your lawn. And they're trying to entice people to sign up for this program because what they're going to be able to do with the extra$80 a month that they're going to earn from people signing up for this, we could have something new and really cool in our community. I mean, are you kidding me?

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:58

A company store.

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:00

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:00

You have to buy your groceries from the company store. This

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:03

is

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:04

what they're doing. And they'll pay you in paper money from Monopoly or something. Well, still

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:09

don't address the water. I can hardly stand it at times. I can't. How do they sleep at

SPEAKER_04: 1:07:15

night? One of the things that we often hear from the other side on the big infrastructure issues is, you know, oh, my gosh. we inherited these issues from the previous owner. Or they didn't care to look. And we always say, it's not like your great-aunt Bessie died and left you a mobile home park. You're a multi-million dollar real estate investment company. If you don't have the competence to check,

SPEAKER_03: 1:07:50

you

SPEAKER_04: 1:07:53

probably don't belong operating... you know, housing for vulnerable

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:57

populations. Do us all a favor and move on.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:00

Yeah, that was like, we were talking about licensing a while back and Lara and such. And I go, there's no test to see. I had to take a test for driver's license. I even had to take a test to be a brake mechanic, but there's no test. Oh, do you know the law? You have to take a test for almost

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:16

everything now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:18

Do you have a test? Do they even check your ID? Oh, are you really Mr. Duck? Donald Duck? Is it? That's what you wrote on your application. I didn't see your ID. So, you know, that could be your LLC. It could be big quack LLC. That's so true. It is true. I can show you examples.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:38

Yeah, that's crazy. You

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:41

should at least be able to know who's coming in to do the pillaging.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:47

Know your pillagers.

UNKNOWN: 1:08:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:49

Oh my goodness. Well, thank you guys for all your willingness to come on today and talk about this and really starting to expose what's going on. This is a larger conversation that we're going to continue for sure. Thank you. We have part two that we're doing next week. And like I said, we're going to talk about the policy side of it there and some solutions and what some organizations are even doing in this field to change all of this and to create... Which every park needs to be run like these, I think, personally. A little precursor to what's coming up.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:26

Closer you get to the street, to the who lives there, that's the key. Because nobody has more stake in it than the actual people living there.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:35

Absolutely. Absolutely. And y'all matter. It blows my mind. It truly does. My mind is blown with this topic because it is... It is horrific to me. It's horrific. This is the chipper coming for all of us. Yeah, but affordable housing is an issue to begin with. And because of predatory lenders and buyers and hedge funds and Wall Street. But I think you all get the absolute brunt of... I don't even know like the proper term to say of like just how they treat people. Like they're complete and utter disregard because you all don't have a lot of options. And it costs so much for you to move your mobile home to anywhere else. Tens of thousands of dollars.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:30

If they can be. Yeah, exactly. Some of them just don't fall apart, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:34

But a lot of people can't afford to move them to begin with. So you're stuck. You're stuck fighting. Well, Theo and Pam, I commend the two of you for fighting. Keep up the good fight. Seriously. I am sure it is exhausting. On top of just living in an environment like that, that's exhausting.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:53

Almost a year ago today, Pam was at my birthday party where we were protesting.

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:59

Yes, we were. That was your birthday party protest. It was a birthday party protest.

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:04

Nice, nice. All right, guys, thank you so much. And we're going to keep on this. This is something I want to keep talking about. Thanks, Tamara. And as things move forward, we'll keep updating. Thank you so much

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:17

for having me. It's a honor to be here.

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:19

Absolutely.

UNKNOWN: 1:11:21

Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:22

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