Mobile Home Listings & News

Mobile home owners want to buy Hermosa Beach land


Residents of the park near Pier Avenue rally to buy beach-side property.
By Andrea Woodhouse
Staff Writer

When Ramona Birch first settled in what is now Hermosa Beach's Marineland Mobile Home Park, residents there lived in tents and buses scattered on a dirt lot full of eucalyptus trees.

Tenants paid $25 a month for a spot in 1957, and the park was more like a gypsy camp, the 78-year-old said.

"It wasn't really a park," Birch said. "It looked like a camping ground."

Fifty years later, residents pay more than $1,000 a month in rent, some live in two-story coaches and the park's homeowners association enjoys considerable clout in the city.

And even more is set to change in the coming months.

After enduring a string of owners through the years, residents are rallying together to purchase the property for an estimated $8million, a move that would turn many of them into first-time landowners - of beach-side property no less.

Janice Yates, president of the homeowners association, has lived in the park for 10 years. She owns her home, but not the land it sits on - the classic "mobile home conundrum," she called it.

"We're going to own our land," Yates said. "If we can put (our rent) into our property, it's the American dream. And it will increase in value."

State law allows mobile home park residents to subdivide the land and sell off the parcels, so long as the group has an OK from the landowner.

The 2004 sales agreement with park owner Millennium Housing gave Marineland residents a 10-year window to purchase the land for $8 million.

Yates figures that about 85 percent of residents are on board, but Birch and her 83-year-old husband aren't among them.

"We're getting at that age where we won't be here too much longer to enjoy it," Birch said.

After calling the tiny spot tucked away near Pier Avenue and Bard Street home for five decades, Birch isn't eager to leave Marineland.

Her children attended Hermosa schools, and she has held a weekly coffee get-together with her neighbors for nearly 50 years.

She and husband Earl never had the drive to own a home, she said, and they've spent much of their nearly 60-year marriage living in mobile homes.

So the couple will either find a way to continue renting their space or they'll move, Birch said.

But state law protects people like the Birches, so the sale will not put the couple on the street or subject them to skyrocketing rents, said Jon Rodrigue, an attorney assisting in the purchase.

The sale will likely be done in two parts, Rodrigue said.

The first stage - set to wrap by the end of the year - would help residents form a cooperative to purchase the property as a whole, he said.

A second, more complicated step would subdivide the property - about 50 mobile home owners occupy 60 spaces - and provide each resident a deed to his or her land, Rodrigue said.

The group has until June 15 to apply for about $2 million in assistance from a state program that helps mobile home park residents purchase the land where they live, Yates added.

The relative tranquility surrounding Marineland's proposed sale is in stark contrast to the atmosphere of other South Bay mobile home parks pursuing condominium conversion.

The owner of two Carson parks envisions conversion as a way to increase profits and battle rent control, drawing the ire of Colony Cove Mobile Estates and Carson Harbor Village residents.

But Marineland has not been devoid of controversy in recent years. Residents there fended off a pitch to raze the land in 2004 and turn it into a parking structure topped with housing.

In 2003, the Hermosa Beach City Council rejected a plan from the school district to purchase the property to aid a school expansion.

George Turk, president of the nonprofit Millennium Housing, didn't expect residents to launch a purchase so quickly, but he wasn't surprised that the tenants would aspire to landownership in Hermosa Beach.

"I didn't know there would be such a rush," he said. "I can understand wanting to own a piece of Hermosa Beach."


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