The Texas Squeeze: A series examining the high cost of high growth in North Texas.
Remedios Ruvalcaba, a 49-year-old mechanic, paid $250 a month to live in Ponderosa Mobile Home Park when he moved to Haltom City in 2004. In July, he says, rent and vehicle fees will cost him and his family $900 a month.
“We are between a rock and a hard place. We will be paying a big amount of money if we stay,” Ruvalcaba said.
Ponderosa residents say they’re being squeezed between mobile home park owners who are raising monthly rates, a city that wants to shut it down in five years and a still-hot housing market that’s pricing them out.
Located in an industrial zone just south of East Belknap Street in Haltom City, the park has operated as a legal nonconforming use since the city was incorporated in the 1950s, the city says.
Parkway Communities, the property management company that bought the park last summer, says the rental community was forced to become an industrial zone four years ago, but an occupancy permit form confirms that the nonconforming use dates back to at least 2006.
The new owners spent more than $60,000 on road repairs, tree cleanup and other improvements, set a uniform $600 rent and proposed further renovations. Parkway Communities chief operating officer Satish Atluri said the city was “happy” with the initial cleanup and improvements.
But when the company tried to replace an entrance sign and add units, it began to butt heads with Haltom City zoning code, which prohibits changes or expansions to nonconforming properties. A new sign requires a city permit.
“The city is not allowing us to place a brand new sign but allowed other changes,” Atluri said. “We cannot beautify the park. They’re so against this mobile home park.”
Parkway Communities is still trying to expand. “We plan to bring 29 more homes into the vacant lots, once we have the city approval,” Atluri said in an email.
The city said it won’t budge on adding new units to the park, which is valued for tax purposes at $2.2 million.
Ponderosa is “a nonconforming mobile home community,” Erik Smith, assistant director and planning project manager for Haltom City, wrote in an email to Parkway Communities acquisitions specialist Shawn Landa in June 2021. “There is a total of 73 homes in the community and that is all that will be allowed.”
Atluri said his company hired an attorney after the city “was not responding to our emails or calls about permits to bring new homes into the park.” Haltom City passed the case to its legal team to respond.
In legal negotiations in May, Haltom City’s lawyer proposed the park address several issues “in exchange” for five more years of operation.
An unsettling choice
Since 2016, Betsy Alcala has lived in Ponderosa, a location she chose for its proximity to job opportunities, doctor’s offices and stores. She said she’s worried about the park closing because she doesn’t know where her 3-year-old son Ektor Luna would go to school or where she can find affordable housing in the current market. The median rent for a one-bedroom in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington hit $1,543 in May.
“My son’s starting school in August. Changing your kid’s school is not an easy process. Having to find a home and having to find a job would be the most complicated thing to do,” she said. “Everything’s expensive right now. Apartments are expensive. Even duplexes are expensive.”
Housing costs aren’t the only thing on the rise. Inflation is hitting almost every corner of the grocery aisle and gas pumps everywhere, taking its biggest toll on low-income families.
“It wouldn’t even be just myself. It would be everyone else who lives here, too. Everybody will go through a very hard time,” Alcala said. “For low-income families, it’s hard.”
While she’s worried about the park closing, Alcala said rising rents and changes in park services are equally concerning.
“At first the park was stable, it was clean,” Alcala said. “Now rent is very high. They charge for everything. They charge extra for having a third car. They look for ways to charge extra for the smallest things.”
Before Parkway Communities bought Ponderosa, a trash service picked up garbage from each unit and there was no extra charge for water or third cars. Residents now take their own trash to two dumpsters that they say often overflow.
“At least four times out of the week that I go and take my trash over there, it’s so full that I don’t even throw my trash out,” Alcala said. “I have to come back home with it.”
Atluri said the trash service changed from curbside to dumpster pickup to prevent garbage trucks from damaging newly paved roads. He also said the previous owner did not charge for water and “decided to sell the park as water bills were high.”
Now, Atluri says, residents on the north side of the park pay for their water based on the Ratio Utility Billing System since the units don’t have water meters. Residents in the south portion of the park are charged by the city directly, he said.
The park has also asked tenants not to have more than two vehicles and charges a “nominal fee to discourage more vehicles in the park,” said Atluri, who added the fee to reduce clutter, traffic and the risk of accidents.
Alcala said she used to pay $500 a month to live in Ponderosa with her husband and two kids. Next month, she expects her family’s bill to be $800.
The average monthly cost for a two-bedroom or three-bedroom unit in Ponderosa is between $700 and $725 a month. These expenses will increase with inflation, but “we will always remain affordable,” Atluri said.
Some residents are considering moving because of Parkway’s price hikes.
Remedios Ruvalcaba, the mechanic who lives in a Ponderosa mobile home with his wife and granddaughter, paid a total of $250 a month when he first moved in 18 years ago. Rent then increased to $400 with the previous park owner. In summer 2021, when the new ownership took over, he said rent and water jumped to $700 plus an additional $25 for each of the four vehicles he owns. Next month, he said, his rent will increase to $800 before vehicle fees.
Ruvalcaba was not aware of the possibility of the park closing in the next five years before speaking with The Dallas Morning News. But he said he was already planning to move.
“I spoke with my wife and daughter about the possibility of leaving the park because $800 is too much,” Ruvalcaba said in Spanish. “Houses by where I work, near Fort Worth, cost about $1,000 a month, and what we need to do is … leave.”
For Ruvalcaba, that means leaving his home behind, or at best, selling it for parts.
“We can’t take the mobile home with us because it’s not in the best condition,” he said.
He also said he recalls two other times the city almost closed the park, once due to issues with a natural gas line and a second time because of sewer system issues.
Atluri said the park used to have 104 units, based on utility hookups, but occupied units have dwindled to only 75.
The city’s phase-out
Since the property is nonconforming, Haltom City code doesn’t allow Parkway to add new units or make renovations without extensive planning and approval.
“The city has not stepped in and tried to stop them from operating the property as it was when they purchased it,” said Erik Smith, Haltom City’s assistant director and planning projects manager. “If a unit is removed, we have not permitted new units to be added to the site. It will slowly over time become vacant with the removal of dilapidated units.”
Parkway is allowed to bring new tenants into existing manufactured homes if former tenants leave. However, no changes to the home are allowed, and the unit will be recognized as abandoned if utilities remain off for six months, Smith said.
City zoning law dictates that nonconforming uses can operate indefinitely without changes, but when Parkway tried to add units and renovate, code violations ensued.
“We tried to clean the park. We tried to make it better, but anything that happens today, the city gives us a citation,” park manager Victor Ajoleza said.
Ed McDonald, who owned the park through Westmere Holdings for more than a decade before selling it to Parkway, said Haltom City also blocked him from adding new units.
“They were trying to close it down basically, slowly but surely,” he said. “The city prevented us from expanding. If any trailers left, they wouldn’t let us replace them.”
Smith said the city warned Parkway before the purchase that no further permits would be issued. Atluri and the city disagree over whether site plans for new units were submitted and how many nonconforming units are currently allowed to operate.
In May, city attorney Wayne Olson proposed a settlement for the park to undergo improvements before ceasing operations in five years.
“Your clients purchased this property knowing that there were many unresolved issues with regard to the ability of the manufactured home park to continue to operate,” an email sent from Olson to Parkway lawyer Bill McLean states. “The city and I do not agree that the legal, nonconforming status of Ponderosa MHP and the right to continue operating is clearly established. That is a fundamental issue that has not yet been resolved to the satisfaction of the city.”
The same email included a laundry list of issues “that contribute to the degradable conditions in the park” and require improvement.
The city asked Parkway to submit detailed site plans from a licensed surveyor, inventory occupied manufactured homes, meet health and safety requirements for water and electrical hookups, remove RVs or travel trailers and more.
“In exchange for your client’s agreement to address the above issues, the city will allow Ponderosa to continue operating for another 5 years before ceasing operations as a manufactured home community,” Olson wrote.
In order to keep operating, city officials said Parkway would also need to apply for rezoning as a manufactured housing district. There is no guarantee City Council would approve the request.
Atluri said he was “flabbergasted” by the email, calling the proposed improvements “prohibitively expensive.”
“Where will all these families go?” Atluri said. “There are not many affordable communities.”
Ajoleza agrees that residents in the “99% Hispanic park” will face a dilemma if Ponderosa closes.
“If the people here have to move, they don’t have any place to go,” he said. “People living here don’t have the opportunity to get an apartment. It costs $1,500-$1,600 to get an apartment, and many people can’t afford it. The park is not expensive.”
But even Ponderosa is becoming too costly for residents. Monthly bills are approaching $1,000 — a price that’s double what longtime tenants paid when they moved in.
Harold Hunt, who researches manufactured housing at the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University, said he’s seen a trend of larger companies buying manufactured housing parks, improving them and raising the rent.
“As a rule, you’ll find a mom-and-pop that owns an old park, and they may not have the money to fix it up, so you’ll see people come in and buy the park and immediately fix up the streets and the landscaping … just really upgrade it,” he said. “But then they’ll also increase the rents, so higher amenities, higher rents.”
Ponderosa residents like Alcala and Ruvalcaba are facing higher rents but say they don’t see better amenities.
“They make you pay for the trash, but they’re not even handling the trash,” Alcala said.
Where does manufactured housing fit?
As housing costs rise, research economists say manufactured housing could help create more affordable options.
“Manufactured housing tends to be something that homebuyers turn to when they can’t necessarily afford other types of housing like single-family homes or duplexes,” said Clare Losey, a housing affordability research economist at the Texas Real Estate Research Center. “Given the very difficult climate, manufactured housing might experience a change in demand as households on the margins may actually look to manufactured housing as a viable option.”
Despite this possibility and Fannie Mae financing options designed to boost demand, Losey said negative perceptions of manufactured housing persist.
“There’s still a lot of people who associate manufactured housing with a specific type of household, which certainly is not the case, but that stigma still exists,” Losey said. “Unfortunately, it’s actually still banned within many city limits across the state.”
Manufactured housing isn’t outright banned in Haltom City, but is only permitted in one area zoned specifically for it. Ponderosa Mobile Home Park is not in that area.
Losey also said cities sometimes set codes with the specific goal of eliminating manufactured housing.
“Cities are concerned with a minimal level of quality, and it’s not necessarily that manufactured homes don’t meet that level of quality,” she said. “What cities are doing to get rid of those manufactured homes is setting codes that they can’t meet.”
Hunt agreed that cities don’t always have the best relationship with manufactured home parks, especially new ones trying to lay roots inside the city limits.
“It’s extremely hard to get a new manufactured home community inside the city limits of a city. They just don’t want them,” Hunt said.
DJ Pendleton, executive director of the Texas Manufactured Housing Association, echoed the researchers’ observations.
“Generally speaking, this is a bit of, traditionally, a strained relationship,” Pendleton said. “Many cities, or at least their local politicians and policymakers, have some antiquated views on what modern homes and products are.”
Pendleton’s association strives to improve manufactured home perceptions by pointing to newer models that include desirable features like granite countertops.
“We think we can help solve a much-needed and missing element of affordable or attainable housing in many Texas markets,” he said. “Our general approach to local resistance is more in line with a plea that they keep an open mind. Don’t malign us based on some really old, poorly kept properties.”
Manufactured housing can be a free market solution to affordable housing, Pendleton said.
“We also aren’t asking for special treatment or incentives or affordable housing set-asides,” Pendleton said. “We simply would like the opportunity to compete and present our homes.”
