Approve housing bill.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Imagine for a moment that you are a senior citizen whose fixed income and small savings allow you to purchase a modest double-wide in a mobile home park.

Less than a year after moving in, your landlord announces that he's selling his park to a developer who plans to build an upscale subdivision. You have one year to move your new home.

There's no way you and your neighbors, many of them low-income families and people with disabilities, can afford to buy the houses that will replace your mobile homes. So you scramble to find a site in another park, but can't find affordable locations. Shrinking land supplies have put the squeeze on mobile home parks and manufactured home communities. Meanwhile, the $5,000 you have left in your savings account is less than a third of what you'd need to have your home towed to a new site and set up again.

What do you do? Sell your car? Borrow from your kids? Or move into an apartment and abandon your mobile home, knowing the landlord will probably come after you for the $4,000 he has to spend to dispose of it?

The state House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a bill that would protect the increasing number of residents of mobile and manufactured home parks who find themselves displaced as Oregon land values rise and park owners sell their properties to developers.

Sponsored by Rep. Chris Edwards, D-Eugene, House Bill 2735 would require landlords who decide to sell their parks to provide up to $9,000 in compensation to evicted tenants, who would also be eligible for tax credits of $5,000. The bill would also prohibit landlords from charging tenants for disposing of abandoned homes, and would designate funding for local housing counselors to assist in relocations.

This commendable and overdue legislation was conceived by an unlikely coalition of manufactured home park tenants, landlords, low-income housing advocates and mobile home manufacturers. They spent months hammering out a proposal that would ease the plight of displaced tenants, while preserving the core rights of property owners.

Meanwhile, affordable housing advocates have been working, with mixed success, to pass bills to make it easier for state and county housing agencies, as well as tenant-formed nonprofit groups, to purchase and maintain the parks that provide an increasingly scarce source of affordable housing.

While lawmakers agreed on most provisions in Edwards' bill, there was sharp disagreement over whether the measure should pre-empt existing local ordinances that protect mobile home park tenants. They include a 1989 Eugene ordinance that is in the process of being updated.

Republicans argued for pre-emption of local laws - the recommendation of the coalition that drafted the bill. But Democrats prevailed with language that rightly grandfathers in local protections, as long as they're at least as tough as state law.

HB 2735 now goes to the Senate, where it should be swiftly passed out of committee and sent to the floor for final approval. The bill is a finely honed compromise that carefully balances the rights of park owners and tenants - and that should help preserve a rapidly disappearing species of affordable housing.