Court of preference: Minnesota co-op helps manufactured home residents avoid closures, evictions that plague other courts

In 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 resident-owned 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

RELATED ARTICLE: 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 multi pie 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 morel 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 [email protected].

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.

Angela Dawson, Communications Director Northcountry Cooperative Development Fund Center for Cooperative Enterprise and Innovation

COPYRIGHT 2005 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rural Business - Cooperative Service
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