PORT TOWNSEND — Tenants at Olympic Village and B&R mobile park are worried about their housing situations after learning that the owner of both parks has entered into a contract to sell.
Olympic Village, south of Port Townsend, has 74 units, and B&R in Port Hadlock has 77, according to Olympic Village resident Kim Danner, a 70-year-old retired nurse.
“I knocked on every door at Olympic Village and told them what was happening and invited them to this meeting,” said River Ward, an Olympic Village resident, at Monday’s Board of Jefferson County commissioners’ meeting. “Most of these people were learning what was happening and seeing just the shock and fear in everybody’s face, seeing grown men instantly tear up and go, ‘What will we do, and what can the county do?’ My answer was, ‘I don’t know, but we need to be loud.’”
Tenants of both parks provided a surge of public comment during the commissioners’ meeting, with some attendees spilling out into the hallway of the Jefferson County courthouse.
Tenants are worried that the sold properties might be developed, that their rents will continue to rise, or that their homes will be lost — or lose value, Ward said.
“Given the size of the communities, I don’t think that they would change use to multi-family or anything like that,” said Victoria O’Banion, cooperative housing development manager of Northwest Cooperative Development Center (NWCDC). “However, I have no idea what the next buyer would do. Are the residents concerned about their unstable lot fee? Is that a valid concern? Absolutely it’s a valid concern, because there are no limitations, necessarily, on how high a landlord can charge.
“Manufactured housing community owners are actually trained. There’s training that talks about how to adjust lot fees and start passing some of what was expenses by the landlord on to tenants.”
At Monday’s meeting, commissioner Greg Brotherton said it is unlikely that the property would be rezoned. Commissioner Kate Dean said via email that the commissioners would seek to strengthen that assurance.
“The Commissioners are gravely concerned about this loss of affordable housing,” Dean said. “I want to also ensure that our zoning and comprehensive plan are protecting mobile home park land uses. For example, we can create a MHP (mobile home park) overlay that makes it very difficult to change the land use to another.”
In spring 2023, new Olympic Village leases came with a clause stating that the property could be sold by owner Don Tucker at any time. When tenants inquired if that meant the property was for sale, they were told the change was just a matter of bringing the lease into compliance, Ward said.
This past June, tenants received a notice of intent to sell. Park tenants Leigh Christianson and Carrie Lee said they made immediate contact with the NWCDC, a nonprofit which facilitates purchases for mobile home parks, allowing residents a chance to become cooperative owners.
“We have supported acquisition of 27 limited equity cooperatives in Washington state, representing about 1,400 households,” O’Banion said. “By establishing a limited equity cooperative, the residents achieve stability in their housing costs. The residents that are members of the cooperative continue to pay a lot fee after acquisition, but that lot fee is stable and predictable. The fee comes down to the equal share of the operating expense of the cooperative.”
Tenants showed interest in pursuing a cooperative purchase of the park at a park-wide meeting in late June, held in the park’s public space.
“There was a lot of hope,” Danner said.
Christianson, an Olympic Village resident and tenant contact with NWCDC, said Tucker came to her saying he was interested in working with NWCDC to buy the property.
“He came to my house and said he was interested in working with ROC (resident owned communities, an NWCDC program), shook my hand, and I said, ‘Well, Tucker, I’d rather work with you then against you.’ That’s how we left it,” Christianson said.
NWCDC made a fair market offer on the property, O’Banion said, but Tucker declined.
Tucker denied it was a fair market offer but said he would have preferred to sell to a nonprofit.
”At that point, thinking that the sale was going to go through, there’s things that the tenants have to do in order to manage the park,” Christianson said. “We would have to organize ourselves, form committees and form the board of directors. So we were right there, right there getting everything together.”
The tenants do not know what the asking price was, according to Danner, Ward and Christianson.
O’Banion declined to state the price. Tucker did not say his asking price.
Following the rejection, Christianson said the tenants received notice that their lot fees would increase from $590 to $790 in 2025.
Among the reasons noted was cost of maintenance.
“I was shocked because their rationale was maintenance,” said Olympic Village resident Carol Ferguson. “There isn’t any maintenance going on there. There are potholes, there’s poor lighting, there’s almost no safety entering the park off Highway 20, and I’m starting to smell the septic coming up out of my sink.”
In Olympic Village, tenants are responsible for maintenance on their lots, but the landlord is responsible for maintenance on septic.
After not hearing an answer from park management management about when the last performed maintenance was, Ferguson reached out to the county public health department, which said it had been five years and four months, 2 1/2 years out of compliance.
Danner, Ward and Christianson all added that their septic was not properly maintained.
“The comment about septic maintenance I reject outright,” Tucker said. “We are required to inspect our septics every three years. Sometimes during that three-year hiatus between inspections we’ll have an issue. For example, we had a drain field fail at Olympic Village. Once we learned it needed to be replaced, we ordered it replaced.”
The NWCDC put together a second offer, this time for both Olympic Village and B&R in Port Hadlock. The second offer also was declined, O’Banion said.
Tenants learned about the two properties being under contract along with the notice of the second rejection, Ward said.
“I decided to sell for several reasons,” Tucker said. “I decided to sell this property and others so I could semi-retire and move our holdings to red states where landlords are still appreciated. At the end of the day, there’s more tenants than landlords. For example, the 24 pages of new RCWs passed during COVID made it extremely expensive to continue operations in Washington state.”
Tucker also owned Rain Shadow Mobile Home Park in Forks, where rent was increased from $350 to $1000 early in 2023.
In the case that a future owner were to succeed in changing land use, they would be required to provide tenants with 24 months notice, according to RCW 59.20.080 (1) (e).
Manufactured homes, though often referred to as mobile homes, O’banion said, are not necessarily mobile, even if an owner has the $10,000 to move a single-wide, or $20,000 to move a double-wide. The two sides are not guaranteed to come back together after moving.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
