Court of Preference
Minnesota co-op helps manufactured home residents
avoid closures, evictions that plague other courts
By Angela Dawson,
Communications Director
Northcountry Cooperative
Development Fund
Center for Cooperative
Enterprise and Innovation
n manufactured
home park communities
in rural
Minnesota, it’s common
for residents to
own their homes but to rent the
lot on which their home is located.
The park owners usually don’t live
in the park, but still make the rules
for people who live there.
Eventually, an eager commercial
real estate developer approaches
the land owner with an attractive
bid to buy the park. Too often, the
story plays out with the eviction of
families from the homes they’ve lived
in for years, and a permanent loss of
affordable rural housing.
In the case of Sunrise Villa
Manufactured Home Park in Cannon
Falls, Minn., Rick and Becky Ruddy
had come to know Sunrise Villa as
home for 15 years. Then the
owner decided to sell the park.
Instead of packing up and
looking for another home, the
residents of Sunrise Villa —
with the help of Northcountry
Cooperative Development
Fund (NCDF) — got organized
and became Minnesota’s
first manufactured home park
cooperative.
The creation of Sunrise Villa
Cooperative goes against an
unfortunate trend of mobile
home park closings across the
state, a trend that NCDF
hopes to change for good. “The residents were enthusiastic from
the start,” says Warren Kramer, NCDF’s director of housing development.
“They demonstrated interest in exploring the co-op model
as a way to secure the future of their housing in the park.”
Now that residents own the park, they can begin to act on their
list of repairs, something over which they had no control last year.
Florence Pirrung, 66, who lives next to her three great-grandchildren,
is looking forward to the benefits of owning the park with her
neighbors.
“We need changes; we need speed bumps and the roads need to
be resurfaced,” she says. The resident board is also working on plans
to cap a well, overhaul the playground and replace the old rusty
mailboxes.
NCDF embraced the idea of helping mobile home park residents
become cooperative park owners after witnessing the success of similar
programs in California and New Hampshire. “In light of the
impact that a park closing has on residents, we definitely saw the
need,” explains NCDF Executive Director Margaret Lund. “The
cooperative ownership model has many applications in rural communities,
beyond its traditional uses in agriculture, and the benefits
— both financial and social — that the model brings to communities
are really compelling.”
City officials supported residents’ efforts to purchase the park.
Ultimately, the project delivers affordable homeownership to 47
households, with no public subsidy.
Cannon Falls Mayor Glen Weibel supported the project from the
very beginning. He attended some of the organizing meetings to
voice his support to the residents.
“I think it’s fantastic,” Weibel says, designating Sunrise Villa as
the town’s “Court of Preference.”
Manufactured home park cooperative conversions are one dimension
of NCDF’s housing development agenda. NCDF is also actively
pursuing the conversion of expiring Low Income Housing Tax
Credit projects and USDA Section 515 properties into residentowned
cooperatives and is actively involved in the adaptive reuse of
buildings as residential homeownership cooperatives in rural areas.
Find more information on other cooperative innovations at:
www.ncdf.coop
Co-op Living Web site brings
value to co-op housing market
NCDF recently launched www.coopliving.coop, an online
housing co-op listing service that adds value to the
co-op housing market. Until now, co-op housing residents
were forced to use conventional methods to list
and sell shares in their units, including listings in local
papers or multiple listing services.
Unfortunately, the listings compete with thousands of
conventional real estate listings, and sellers couldn’t target
the market of interested cooperative buyers. Not any
more! In an effort to make it easier to buy and sell a coop
housing share, the co-op listing service provides a
centralized location in which buyers and sellers of co-op
housing can connect.
NCDF has also published the Cooperative Housing
Toolbox: A Practical Guide for Cooperative Success.
This toolbox is a “best
practices” guide for housing
cooperative boards of
directors, committees and
members. For information
on ordering, contact:
(612) 331-9103, or
info@ncdf.coop.
NCDF is a cooperatively owned and operated financial
intermediary which acts as a catalyst for the development
and growth of cooperatives. NCDF embodies the
sixth Rochdale principle of “cooperation among cooperatives,”
offering co-ops and socially motivated institutions
and individuals a means to pool surplus funds and then
reinvest those funds in the community.
