Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. In California, mobile homes make up, say, 6% of the state's housing stock. With as many as 300,000 homes and 5,000 mobile home parks in the state, these places are a crucial part of the state's affordable housing picture.

Though few have been built in recent decades, the mobile home parks that do exist are facing

pressure from private equity firms that have found ways to squeeze a few more dollars out of

people on the lower end of the income scale. But residents who've often been in a community for

years are fighting back to preserve their places in the Bay Area. Joining us to help us understand the

issues that mobile home park residents face, we've got Mariah Thompson, senior litigator

with the California Rural Law Center. Welcome.

Hi, good morning.

Yeah, thanks for joining us. We've got Bruce Stanton, General Counsel for the Golden State

Manufactured Homeowners League. Welcome.

Yes, good morning. Thanks. Good to be with you.

Good to have you. And we've got Randy Keller, who's with the manufactured home parks acquisition and advocacy manager with the California Center for Cooperation Development. Welcome, Randy.

Good morning. Thank you for having me on your show.

So, Mariah, let's go with you first. As a senior litigator there at the Rural Law Center, you've been working with mobile

home communities for quite some time over a decade. What are the kinds of communities that you end up

representing? Yeah, thank you. So California of Rural Legal Assistance is a statewide non-profit

legal aid. We've been around for about 60 years assisting rural Californians with all sorts of issues,

including housing. My clients tend to be on the margins of when it comes to homeownerships

in terms of economics. So we typically represent farm workers, residents with a fixed income, seniors,

folks that are at or below the 200% of the poverty line. And what are the kind of economics

of the communities that these folks are living in? Yeah. So traditionally, mobile home parks have been one of the last, you know,

kind of bastions of affordable housing throughout the country and across California.

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