Residents of two mobile home parks in Bellingham held separate meetings on Saturday, March 16 that couldn’t have been in sharper contrast.
More than a dozen people who live at Samish Mobile Home Park shared cake and pizza at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church in the Happy Valley neighborhood to celebrate their purchase of the 3-acre property at 119 N. Samish Way where their manufactured homes sit.
The $4.8 million sale closed Thursday, March 14. The property is now owned by the Samish Park Homeowners Cooperative, which has about 25 members living in the park’s 32 units, said Victoria O’Banion, who leads acquisitions for ROC Northwest, a program of the Northwest Cooperative Development Center that supports resident-owned communities.
Lot fees are going up 45% on average, O’Banion said, to enable the cooperative to make payments on the loan used to purchase the property.
The interim president of the cooperative’s board, Sharon Kirkman, gave a short speech to open Saturday’s meeting, before the resident-owners elected a new board.
“We’re just very lucky to be able to have this mobile home park for ourselves,” Kirkman said. “It can never be anything else but what it is right now.”
Residents of Lakeway Mobile Estates are less certain about their future.
Earlier on Saturday, at the manufactured home park at 1200 Lincoln St., residents confronted the reality that they won’t be able to purchase their site, despite a last-ditch effort.
Sam Sampson, chair of the Lakeway residents’ purchasing committee, which was created to look into acquiring Lakeway Mobile Estates, said the property’s owner sold to an unknown party in a deal that also closed on Thursday, for $41 million. The date of the sale and the dollar amount could not be confirmed. The owner, Follett USA, did not respond to requests for comment.
Lakeway Mobile Estates is much larger than Samish Mobile Home Park, at nearly 26 acres with 218 homes, according to city records.
The purchase price, if correct, didn’t seem justified, Sampson said, given that the property was assessed by the county at $12.6 million. For comparison, the Samish Way park that sold for $4.8 million was assessed in 2023 at $2.2 million.
Sampson worried the new owner would need to raise rents on the lots in the park by three- or fourfold, although that couldn’t be confirmed, either. Any significant rent increase would drive out a lot of the residents who make a fixed income in the 55-and-over community, Sampson said.
“The feeling among everyone is that we are being brutalized by runaway capitalism,” Sampson said in an interview Saturday after the resident meeting. “You got old people here that can barely walk. Some of them are deathly ill. A lot of them are alone. … They don’t even understand what’s going on.”
The purchasing committee sent a letter to city, state and federal officials, asking anyone who might be able to help to pause the pending sale of the Lincoln Street property to give residents enough time to come up with their own offer.
Bellingham attorney Alan Marriner wrote back, Sampson said, to say that the city would take no action because Follett USA didn’t break any laws. A March 14 closing date would be more than 70 days after residents were informed of Follett’s intent to sell, as required by state law. The city requires a 60-day period before the sale of a manufactured home park can close.
The city council passed an ordinance in 2022 protecting Bellingham’s 10 mobile home parks from redevelopment, but the protections aren’t guaranteed, Sampson noted. A property owner can request a special hearing and ask the city if it can build something else at the park site.
This story was updated at 3:42 p.m. March 18 with additional information about Lakeway Mobile Estates and Samish Mobile Home Park.
Ralph Schwartz is CDN’s local government reporter; reach him at ralphschwartz@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 107.
