Oak Crest residents band together

COEUR d’ALENE — “Hope for $1.”

Those words are written on the outside of a binder, beside a map of Oak Crest, a mobile home community in Coeur d’Alene where almost half of the nearly 500 residents have agreed to form a cooperative in hopes of one day buying the park.

The initial joining fee is just $1.

“I think it’s started a movement,” said Michael Collum, an Oak Crest resident since 2019.

The movement began last August, when a Utah-based investment company called Havenpark Communities purchased Oak Crest. Since then, residents say rent has increased significantly and many are struggling to keep up.

“Everybody’s nervous,” said Marie Howell, a widow who has lived at Oak Crest for six years. “I love the park. It’s beautiful. I’m happy where I’m at. But it’s getting extremely hard.”

Howell lives off her Social Security benefit. Oak Crest is full of people like her, she said — widows and widowers, veterans, retired people on fixed incomes.

Forming a cooperative with her neighbors is an effort to secure their futures.

“It’s to protect all of us,” she said.

If 51% of residents agree to join, they can form an organization. Idaho law would then require the seller to notify the organization if the park goes up for sale in the future.

That’s where ROC Northwest comes in. It’s an affiliate of ROC USA, a nonprofit that helps residents purchase their manufactured home communities.

ROC Northwest has helped facilitate the purchase of more than 20 resident-owned communities in Washington and Idaho. More than 1,000 people live in those communities.

In this model, homeowners form a cooperative that collectively owns the manufactured home community. The cooperative is responsible for maintenance, oversight of the annual budget and managing vendors. Members continue to own their homes individually, as well as an equal share of the land.

Collum said neighbors aren’t forming a cooperative as a rebuke of Havenpark.

“We want to develop a positive relationship with the current owners,” he said, adding that the park’s management is aware of their efforts. “We want to be the best tenants ever.”

Since Oak Crest residents began to organize, residents from seven other local mobile home communities have reached out to Victoria O’Banion with ROC Northwest.

“They are very eager to become housing cooperatives,” O’Banion said. “Some of them have good relationships with their owners and see this as a real possibility.”

More than 100 area mobile home residents attended a resource fair Saturday at the Coeur d’Alene Public Library presented by ROC Northwest.

Among them was Heather Shirts. She lives in Mountain View, a 173-unit community in Rathdrum where residents recently received 90-day notice to remove any non-permitted structures or face possible eviction.

That included Shirts’ porch, which was built long before she bought the mobile home.

“I wasn’t planning to have to tear it down and start over,” she said, adding that many of her neighbors would be unable to comply within 90 days.

Commonwealth Real Estate Services has since granted residents a temporary reprieve, Shirts said, so they won’t be expected to tear down their porches in winter.

But the experience highlighted the precarious position many mobile home residents are in.

While apartment dwellers can pick up and move in the face of rent increases or other changes, it’s more complicated for those who live in manufactured homes.

“We can’t do that,” said a man named Turns to the East, another Oak Crest resident. “We have to leave our houses. We lose our homes.”

Manufactured homes built after 1976 are costly and difficult to move once placed. For that reason, many residents have no choice but to abandon their homes when rents climb too high or parks stop operating.

Shirts owns her home and can afford the monthly lot rent of $450. But she said neighbors recall a time, just a few years ago, when rent was $320 per month.

She’s heard about rising costs in communities like Oak Crest and wonders what the future might hold.

“This was an affordable way for me to continue to have my own home,” she said. “That’s why most of us are there — because it’s affordable.”

For now, Oak Crest needs fewer than 50 more residents to agree to join the housing cooperative. Collum is optimistic. His neighbors have been receptive.

“I think we’ll get there,” he said with a smile.

Info: Victoria O'Banion at 308-991-5663 or victoria@nwcdc.coop