Mobile home parks provide a more affordable place to live, especially in mountain resort communities like the Roaring Fork Valley, but the number of these registered parks in Colorado declined from about 900 in 2019 to 761 in 2024, according to state data published last year and a survey conducted by 12 news organizations.
As a growing number of investors buy up mobile home parks, residents can face displacement due to redevelopment and rising rents.
In response, state and local governments have passed legislation and policies in recent years aimed at protecting residents from being evicted or priced out, and some advocates want lawmakers and local stakeholders to do more to preserve one of the largest sources of affordable housing in Colorado.
Humberto Murillo grew up in the Mountain Valley Mobile Home Park off Highway 133 near the entrance to Carbondale and is now raising his own family there.
“Where we're standing now, my grandfather bought this, I want to say, early- to mid- 80s and I was born in ‘91 … and now I have two little girls that live here and go to school here, so essentially, my whole life has been here,” Murillo said. “When my wife and I first bought our mobile home, it was kind of a stepping stone, and then COVID happened, and everything went to $2 million around here, and for someone like us that's unfeasible.”
Like many mobile home residents, Murillo owns his house and pays a “lot rent” to the park’s owner to lease the land underneath it.
For the past several decades, Mountain Valley was co-owned by a group of friends who invested in ownership of the park together, including a Carbondale resident named John Cooley.
“We always felt like we had a connection to him, because if anything happened, we had a manager on site,” Murillo said.
In 2018, the ownership group sold the park to a buyer in Texas who sold it two years later to the current owner, Utah-based company Investment Property Group (IPG), for $9.5 million, according to Garfield County property transaction records. The real estate investment and management company has properties across 13 states, including more than 110 mobile home parks, according to the Mobile Home Park Home Owners Allegiance’s online database.
In 2019 and 2020, IPG also purchased Apple Tree Park across the Colorado River from New Castle for $22.7 million and the Aspen-Basalt Mobile Home Park along Highway 82 near Willits for $11.2 million, according to Eagle and Garfield county property records. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Residents pursue ownership
Mountain Valley and Aspen-Basalt residents received notice from IPG that their parks were going up for sale this spring for a combined $42 million, and residents like Murillo and Miguel Carballo are worried that another investor group could raise the rents or redevelop the land. Though the parks were initially listed for sale together, the seller has since split the property sales, but residents are working together to put in offers on both.
Carballo, who works in maintenance for Colorado Mountain College in Aspen, has lived with his family in the Aspen-Basalt park for 20 years and has seen his community change ownership several times over the decades.
“Nuestros hijos nos preguntan: ‘Papá, ¿qué vamos a hacer si nos corren de acá, si nosotros perdemos nuestras viviendas? Yo aquí tengo mi escuela, mis profesores, mis compañeros de escuela, ¿qué voy a hacer yo si nos sacan y nos corren de aquí?’” Carballo said. “Como sería una catástrofe para nosotros mismos como adultos, pero sería aún peor para nuestros niños tuvieran al moverlos de nuestro valle.”
(“Our children ask us, ‘Dad, what are we going to do if they kick us out, if we lose our home? I have my school here, my teachers, my classmates — what will I do if they take us away from here?” Carballo said. “It would be a disaster for us adults, but it would be even worse for our children if we were forced to leave the valley.”)
With the help of the local nonprofit West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition and Boulder-based nonprofit Thistle Community Housing, Mountain Valley and Aspen-Basalt residents have teamed up to raise funds and secure loan financing to buy the land under their homes. Thistle is the Colorado affiliate of ROC USA, a national nonprofit that helps manufactured home parks transition to resident-owned communities, also known as “ROCs”.
On June 27, residents submitted bids to buy both parks for the current asking price, and while IPG did not accept the initial offers, the residents still have time to continue negotiations, according to Thistle’s ROC program director Tim Townsend. Under state law, the residents have 120 days from the latest notice of sale on April 9, which would mean a deadline of August 7. However negotiations could be extended slightly, as an attorney representing the seller wrote in its rejection letter that residents have until August 18.
Thistle is also helping residents at Mountain Mobile Home Park along Highway 6 in Glenwood Springs, which went up for sale in December last year, buy the park from a local owner. According to Townsend, they’re under contract and will likely close on the property in August.
The nonprofit has also partnered with the Colorado Poverty Law Center to offer information to residents interested in learning about resident-ownership models and state protections for mobile home park residents.
As of July 2, there were nine parks in Garfield and Eagle counties listed for sale in the state’s mobile home park sales database.
Strengthening state legislation
In 2020, state lawmakers passed new legislation giving residents the opportunity to purchase their park as a collective if a landlord anticipates “selling it or changing the use of the land.” And in 2022, legislators extended the amount of time residents have to secure financing and put in an offer from 90 to 120 days after receiving a notice of sale.
“The owner has to review the offer, has to consider it, and if they do accept it, wonderful,” Townsend said. “And if they don't, they have to provide the terms that maybe were not met, or that could be met, to get it accepted.”
Another law, the Mobile Home Park Act, which passed in 2019 and was updated the following year, strengthened eviction protections and created Colorado’s first Mobile Home Park Oversight Program, which oversees an annual park registration system and provides education on state laws. The program also receives and investigates complaints, mediates disputes between residents and park owners, and has authority to take enforcement actions.
In recent years, lawmakers also created state funding that’s available to residents interested in buying or improving their parks, including the Mobile Home Park Acquisition Fund and Proposition 123 funding for affordable housing, but Townsend said these funds are limited.
“The prices have been so high that the only way some of these deals become realistic for residents is if they have access to low interest rates and subsidized funds,” Townsend said. “But if the amount that they're allowed to get from state funding pools is limited, it doesn't necessarily do the justice that can be done, especially for the big price tags like Mountain Valley and Aspen-Basalt.”
Alex Sanchez, who grew up in the Aspen-Basalt park and leads the Latino advocacy nonprofit Voces Unidas, helped push for many of Colorado’s mobile home protections and he agrees that more state funding is needed, along with more assurances for residents to have their offer accepted.
Although park sellers are required to consider an offer from residents “in good faith” and provide reasonable justification if they deny a bid, Sanchez also wants lawmakers to reconsider giving residents the same “right of first refusal” that public entities in Colorado have when putting in a purchase offer. Under state law, if a nonprofit, local government or school district is offering to buy a mobile home park on behalf of residents, the seller has to grant that public entity the first opportunity to purchase the park before accepting any third-party offers.
“Right now, the residents, even if they have a bid that meets the price, the owner today could choose not to give it to the residents,” Sanchez said. “We believe that's wrong and we believe that residents should have the opportunity to buy their own park first.”
In the case of communities that are not able, or don’t want to buy their parks, Voces Unidas is also pushing state lawmakers and Gov. Jared Polis to reconsider passing rent stabilization measures that have failed at the legislature in recent years.
“It's a way to sort of put some parameters like, ‘What's fair, what's right?,’ so that you would cap the rent increase at a certain percentage based on market numbers,” Sanchez said. “Clearly the free market has not been able to regulate rising rents in mobile home parks, so rent stabilization is a great tool to keep housing stock available while still not preventing owners from making a profit.”
Stakeholders raise funds
To prevent significant lot rent increases and meet a high price tag of $42 million, Aspen-Basalt and Mountain Valley residents are hoping to secure at least $20 million in subsidies.
They’ve been holding community fundraisers at the parks and the West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition has been helping them secure financial assistance from local governments and other stakeholders.
“No estamos pidiendo que alguien venga y nos compre a nosotros todititas nuestras propiedades,” Carballo said. “Nomás ocupamos una ayuda, un soporte de otras entidades, para que sea más factible para las familias poder vivir y quedarnos siempre viviendo en nuestra comunidad.”
(“We’re not asking for someone to come buy all of our homes for us,” Carballo said. “We just need some help—some support from other entities—to make it possible for our families to stay and keep living in our community.”)
As of July 7, Pitkin and Eagle counties, along with five municipalities from Aspen to Glenwood Springs had agreed to contribute a total of $11.1 million. Atlantic Aviation and Aspen One had pledged a combined $1.5 million and the coalition had also secured $275,000 in private commitments.
“Nuestra comunidad somos un ente que ayuda en todas las comunidades cercanas, lo que es Aspen, Basalt, Snowmass y por eso queremos seguir viviendo y proteger nuestra economía,” Carballo said.
(“Our community is part of the workforce that helps all the nearby communities, such as Aspen, Basalt, Snowmass, and that is why we want to continue living and contributing to our economy,” Carballo said.)
According to resident-led surveys of both parks this spring, there are about 450 people who live across the two communities, including about 150 kids. The surveys also found that about 85% of adults living at the two parks work in Aspen, Basalt or Snowmass, many in industries like hospitality, construction, landscaping and housekeeping.
Lessons from local efforts
In recent years, local governments, nonprofits and residents have also experimented with other avenues for preserving mobile home parks and keeping them affordable.
In 2018, Pitkin County bought the Phillips Mobile Home Park near Woody Creek from the local family that owned it with the eventual goal of upgrading aging infrastructure, building more homes and potentially transferring ownership to the residents.
In 2023, the local nonprofit MANAUS, which wound down its operations last year, and its subsidiary organization the Roaring Fork Community Development Corporation (Roaring Fork CDC) purchased the 3-Mile Mobile Home Park south of Glenwood Springs. The residents are now in the process of buying it back from Roaring Fork CDC.
But according to Pitkin County Commissioner and Roaring Fork CDC Executive Director Kelly McNicholas Kury, the costs of maintaining both 3-Mile and Phillips parks have been significant, especially when it comes to needed upgrades for major infrastructure like roads, water and sewage systems.
“That is a real challenge to talk about how we fund that, and then also wrestle with the fact that we didn't fund these systems at other parks,” Kury said. “Those residents have been charged with trying to figure that out on their own.”
There’s been a more piecemeal approach taken in past decades by several parks in Aspen and Pitkin County, including Smuggler, Aspen Village, Woody Creek, and Lazy Glen.
Residents at these parks self-organized and worked with local governments on a range of strategies that have included buying the property collectively or individually in order to subdivide the land as well as setting up homeowners’ associations, and deed restrictions.
While subdividing the land can allow people to build wealth, Kury is concerned that some residents can’t afford to buy their individual lots and breaking up the properties can cause prices to soar.
“We sometimes can now see properties in these mobile home parks that reach a million dollars rather than kind of a lower, more affordable level, because they've been replaced with a home, not a mobile home,” Kury said.
Local governments can also use zoning and land-use policies to protect existing parks from future redevelopment, something Kury sees as another tool to preserve affordable housing that’s already there.
“It just ends up being cheaper when compared to building new housing,” Kury said. “And you know, it prevents the displacement of families that are part of our communities.”
The displacement of families is something Jon Fox-Rubin, who has been involved in a range of local housing initiatives over the decades, has seen before.
Fox-Rubin was on Basalt’s town council as well as the planning and zoning commission in the early 2000s. During that time, he helped craft and pass an ordinance that required any redevelopment of affordable housing to build replacement units on the same property or elsewhere in town.
“So if someone was going to redevelop them, they actually needed to create an equivalent amount of housing,” Fox-Rubin said. “The original goal was that they'd have to create that housing first, then give the residents a right of purchase to the new housing before they would be evicted — that was a very aspirational goal, and the legislation unfortunately did not survive.”
Basalt later revoked the 100% housing-replacement requirement in the legislation, and in 2014, hundreds of residents were forced to move out of the Pan and Fork Trailer Park after the town found the area was flood-prone and decided to redevelop the land in partnership with MANAUS and its subsidiary the Roaring Fork CDC.
Instead of newly-built replacement housing, the residents were offered cash assistance to help them relocate. As of 2024, Basalt’s housing mitigation plan included a mix of relocation assistance and replacement housing requirements for development projects on properties where lower-income housing is located.
An uncertain future
As for residents at the Aspen-Basalt and Mountain Valley parks, they are tired of experiencing uncertainty each time their community changes ownership.
“Tenemos la misma meta, el mismo ideal que es comprar nuestras propiedades, porque esto es nuestro hogar,” Carballo said. “Es donde nosotros vivimos, nuestros hijos y nuestros nietos.”
(“We all share the same goal and the same dream: to buy our properties — because this is our home,” Carballo said. “It’s where we live, where our children and our grandchildren live.”)
If residents aren’t able to buy their mobile home park and lot rents continue to go up, Murillo worries that his family won’t be able to stay in Carbondale.
“A lot of people that I grew up with here have moved downvalley, I mean, and not just to Glenwood, New Castle,” Murillo said. “I'm talking about Silt, Rifle, Parachute.”
Murillo, who coaches basketball at Roaring Fork High School and runs a fencing company with his dad, says moving further away from his work where prices are more affordable would mean less time at home.
“I have two little girls, if I commute four hours a day, what time am I going to be with my two little girls, with my family?” he said.
Murillo and Carballo agree that Colorado’s current laws are a good start, but they would like to see more being done to protect mobile home residents at the state and local level.
With about a month left to raise funds and convince the owner to sell to them, they’re not giving up.
“Tenemos 120 días que de eso, ya paso parte de este tiempo,” Carballo said. “Pero nosotros vamos a seguir luchando por el sostén de nuestra familias, por el sostén de nuestros hijos.”
(“We’ve been given 120 days, and some of that time has already passed,” Carballo said. “But we’re going to keep fighting for our families, for our children.”)
Editor’s note: The Spanish interviews and quotes for this story were transcribed in both Spanish and English with assistance from Convey Language Solutions.
This story is part of Aspen Public Radio's “Cost of Living” series, which is supported by a grant from United Way of Eagle River Valley.
