With June 1 rent increases looming, mobile home residents face uncertain future

There’s only a week and a half until Joann Wellman’s rent at Pinewood Park increases beyond her capacity to pay.

The 20-year resident of the mobile home park on Bremerton's east side broke her back last summer, after falling in shock upon reading a notice about pending leases at a new rate. That experience was part of a Kitsap Sun story on Wellman and her neighbors in November 2023. After publication, a group of retired Boeing engineers working as handymen called the Peninsula Support Organization Bluebills arrived and installed a handrail for her to get down the stairs.

At the time, she needed it. But now, her health has declined so much that she can’t even use the handrail. Now, she doesn't talk to anyone. She stays inside, confined to her Bremerton home by disability, fear and anxiety that she will be forced out onto the street.

Pinewood Park residents will see their monthly rent increased from $615 to $700 for motorhomes and $850 for mobile homes after their community became the latest purchase of Hurst & Son LLC, a real estate investment company with a headquarters in Port Orchard. The company owns nearly 80 mobile home communities across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and North Dakota, five of them being in Kitsap County. They’ve raised rents up to 55% in Aberdeen, Yakima, Spokane, Bellingham and Moscow, Idaho, tacking on additional expenses like utilities, penalty fees for rule violations, and a water usage cap. At mobile home communities that have for years provided a refuge for seniors living solely on Social Security or other assistance, ownership changes and an increasingly tight real estate market are now pushing residents past the breaking point.

Wellman keeps telling herself she’s got to “get things sorted out” and pack up all of her belongings to prepare for Hurst & Son’s new lease and increased rent goes into effect June 1. But her modest home is tidy, and as of mid-May without a cardboard box in sight.

“I think about it, ‘Where am I going to put them?’ and I don't know,” Wellman said, sitting in the same spot on the living room couch where she’d interviewed six months ago. “And then I think, ‘Well, maybe he'll (Hurst & Son) be nice and let me stay, so I did all that packing for no reason. But then, I think, ‘Well, maybe I should anyway, just in case.’”

Instead, Wellman moves slowly with the help of her son who provides live-in care and sits at the couch beside her walker and a T.V. tray littered with housing resources, a doctor’s letter, her son’s work schedule and blank pages. She waits for June 1 knowing only that she can’t afford the new rent, and not where she will go if she can’t afford to pay it.

“I worry about it every day, if I'm going to have a place to live or not,” she said.

Resistance by choice, compliance by default

Wellman, like many of her neighbors, did not sign Hurst & Son’s new lease. She won't be immediately evicted for refusing, but she also doesn’t exactly know what will come next, leaving some tenants in a near game of chicken with the investment company.

“I really don't know. It's either I do (pay the rent) or I get out,” said Wellman, whose lease had been month-to-month for the last 20 years she's lived in Pinewood Park, when it was owned by DSR Enterprises. “I suppose that’s the way they're putting it.”

All Wellman knows is that new ownership has come with tighter rules on the exterior appearance of the mobile homes, which she and her son say have resulted in crackdowns on porch chairs, fencing and equipment like a wheelbarrow stored outdoors. Wellman assumes that agreeing to the lease means comply with not only the new rent, but also the new rules.

New ownership also asked Wellman’s son, David Wellman, who has lived with her mother for the past 14 years, to perform a background check in order to be added to the lease. David works a retail job three or four days a week, trying to bring in money while taking care of his mother and covering household chores. The two feel betrayed by such scrutiny.

Though Wellman said she doesn’t know whether she’ll be evicted when the new lease begins, Hurst & Son field manager, Levi Black said tenants were given a proper 90-day notice in accordance with the state’s manufactured/mobile home landlord-tenant act. The new lease agreement, along with the increased rent and responsibility for utilities, will go into effect June 1 whether the tenants have signed their lease or not, and would have had to give the landlord a month’s notice of their intention to vacate.

Wellman will have to pay $850 now, if she wants to keep her decades-long home. She and David said they can’t afford that.

Though the November story did bring Wellman in contact with a community member who wanted to help her with rent for a month or so, and other Hurst & Son tenants experiencing similar situations, an ongoing investigation into Hurst & Son by the Attorney General’s Manufactured Housing Dispute Resolution Program has brought Pinewood Park tenants little relief in the face of rents.

The program did, however, determine that some tenants in Hurst & Son mobile home parks hadn’t been provided with the required “notice of sale” and that some had modified lease renewal dates without tenant agreement and imposed rent increases on non-lease renewal dates, actions which the program prosed Hurst & Son revoke and reimburse. The program also determined that Hurst & Son had illegally transferred permanent structure maintenance responsibilities onto tenants and that its $65 penalty fees were “excessive and not clearly justified.”

The manufactured housing dispute resolution program could not be reached for an update on the investigation upon inquiry from the Kitsap Sun.

“They have no right to do this to people,” Wellman said. “I mean, in June I'll be here 21 years. Now that's hard – just take my home right out from underneath my feet.”

Two tenant families have already sold their mobile homes for $10,000 and $45,000, the neighbors reported, and several more are preparing to leave by the end of the month.

Marilyn Warren, who the Kitsap Sun spoke with in November, also chose not to sign the new lease, which would raise her rent to $700 – almost half of her social security payout a month. She also has no plan to live anywhere else. She can’t make one.

“I can't go anywhere. There's nowhere to go,” she said. “It's really scary. It's making me sick. I mean, every morning I wake up crying and I start thinking about it: ‘Where am I going to go?’ and I can't come up with anything.”

Dealing with the daily stress of the unknown

To calm her nerves, Warren prays every morning and turns on Christian music as she lays in bed. She says she’s burnt out.

Tenants in the park are hardly a solace to one another. The once communal neighborhood is quiet and no one talks to each other anymore, Warren and Wellman said. So when Warren starts getting upset, she leaves and doesn’t come back until after dark.

She walks around the Goodwill and sits in the Best Western lobby writing fiction. As the day gets late, she plays trivia, attends open mic nights and makes friends with the musicians.

“That's my life, and it's all to distract me from this,” she said. “I just forget about it until I come home and then it hits me again, and then I go through the same routine and do it again the next day.”

Warren used to love living in Pinewood Park, but now, she can and will speak on end about constant surveillance from the park manager and write-ups for dog dishes mistaken for bowls of oil, Styrofoam planters mistaken for illegal fire pits, fencing, latticework, overgrown blackberry bushes and lawn maintenance.

Wellman feels it too. It takes assistance from her son to get down the two steps into the yard from her back door, but Wellman doesn’t want to set foot outside, afraid she’ll “do something wrong,” she said. “It just made me feel so uncomfortable.”

“It's all force and rules, like it's a prison camp for old people,” Warren said. “This country does not care about the seniors. Money is first… Who's got the money is the one that gets supported by the laws. The law is not to protect poor people or middle income.”

With June 1 approaching, it’s getting hard for Warren to put off thinking about the possibility of leaving her home in Pinewood Park, where she's lived since 2017. When asked what they would do next, each of the three tenants interviewed by the Kitsap Sun cried.

The housed-to-homeless pipeline

Sandy Richards panhandles by churches, auto repair shops and street corners to make her rent at Olympic View Community, a mobile home park in Olalla.

When she moved to the park in 2005, the rent was $420 a month. Hurst & Son, the same owner as at Pinewood Park, bought the park in 2021 and raised the rent to $700. Richards’ next lease, starting this summer, will be more than $800 -- and she only receives a fixed income of $933 a month, leaving her to beg for the rest.

“Where am I going to move to? I fear about being homeless,” Richards said. She was homeless previously, as well as being addicted to drugs more than 25 years ago. Now her rescue dog, Stormy, sits on a leash beyond her front door, where the Bible's beatitudes are painted. Her previous pets are buried at the edge of a wooded area just across the path behind her unit.

Richards struggles with diverticular colitis and wakes up sick some mornings with pain in her left quadrant. She can only eat soft foods and must always be near a toilet.

“I can't be homeless,” she said. “That will literally cost me my life.”

If tenants do not pay their rent or any other charges, like utilities, specified in their new rental agreement within 14 days of written notice to pay or vacate, tenants can be evicted, according to the manufactured/mobile home landlord-tenant act.

“The process that is laid out there and in 59.20 (the MHLTA) is the one that we would have to follow,” Black said. “It's something that we just do have to continue with because we can't make special exceptions and arrangements with each person because then not everybody's being treated equally and fairly… it will work for some, it will not work for others. We understand, but again, it's not our goal.”

Wellman can’t sell her home and can’t afford any other mobile park or apartment. She has a sister who has dementia who is living with her daughter, but Wellman would only be able to stay there for a day or two.

“If they tell me to go, then we're just out in the street with the dog,” Wellman said, looking at her 7-year-old rescue. “That's it.”

Wellman said her recent interview with the Kitsap Sun will be her last. She doesn't want people to see what happens to her and her son after June arrives.

“I don't want anybody to know about how hard it is,” she said.

A senior's shrinking options

Warren has tried to get into senior housing but has been at the top of the waitlist for two years. When staff attorneys from the Northwest Justice Project visited Pinewood Park in October, they suggested several public housing resources such as Kitsap Community Resources, the Bremerton Housing Authority, Housing Kitsap, Kitsap County Division of Aging and Long-Term Care and Kitsap Veterans Assistance, and relocation assistance with the Washington Department of Commerce. Warren has been met with long or closed waitlists.

In 1999 Warren's home in Redding, California, was foreclosed and later destroyed in a fire. At the time she bounced around at temporary living situations before eventually buying her current motorhome, which she drove around for eight years, avoiding the permanent costs of renting a place to park.

“It was fun, it was simple,” Warren said, but now she’s 78 years old and is scared to drive the 27-foot vehicle around. “I don't want to live that way anymore.”

Warren has been on the lookout for camper vans on Facebook marketplace. If she were to find one under 20 feet in length with a working bathroom, she could swap out her motorhome and go “stealth camping,” parking in different spots to avoid run-ins with the police. But she’s only seen campers listed at five figures – outside her price range.

Buying a mobile home or motorhome and renting a spot at a park used to be a cheap retirement option for seniors in her situation, Warren said, but now climbing expenses have changed how she sees her own life.

“These are not poor people. I never considered myself poor in my whole life,” Warren said. “I could always manage. I never went to welfare or anything. I never had food cards. I raised my daughter by myself. I worked. I made good money. I bought two houses. I did all of that. Now, at this age, I can do nothing.”

“We'll make it somehow,” Warren said through tears as she looked down at the table in a breakfast restaurant along Wheaton Way, just blocks from her home. “We'll make it, we'll make it,” she reassured herself.

“Sorry, I just get so upset.”

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Kitsap mobile home tenants face homelessness due to rent increases