Orange County Focus is dedicated on Monday to analysis of community news, a look atwhat’s ahead and the voices of local people. : PERSPECTIVE : ‘Free Market’ Mobile Home Initiative Scares Residents

HUNTINGTON BEACH — With a particularly wary eye, mobile home residents view a darkening horizon. Whether facing a heavy storm or a flood, they are more vulnerable than those who live in sturdier shelter.

A possible change in the regulatory climate is now giving rise to another sort of worry.

Huntington Beach mobile home resident Ron Laramie is among many who contend that an initiative set for the state ballot in March, 1996, would result in prohibitive rents and force thousands of mostly senior citizens from their mobile homes.

At issue is the Mobilehome Fairness and Rental Assistance Act, championed by mobile home park owners operating under the name Californians for Mobilehome Fairness and waving the banner of a free market.

Most controversial is the initiative’s power to take away a city’s ability to enact mobile home rent control in parks. Without the threat of local government interference, will park owners raise rates as high as they wish?

“It’s the most fraudulent thing I’ve ever seen,” said Laramie, 62, regional spokesman for the Golden State Mobile Home Owners League, which represents about 55,000 senior citizens statewide. “Park owners would no longer fear a city would adopt a rent-control ordinance, and rents would skyrocket.”

In Orange County, where there are an estimated 210 mobile home parks, sites that rented for $250 a month in the mid-1980s now range as high as $1,000 in coastal areas and average about $500 elsewhere.

The fear is that rapid escalation could push hundreds of the county’s 53,000 mobile home park residents out of their homes.

“This is the initiative from hell,” said Laramie, who notes that senior citizens living on fixed incomes would be hardest hit by higher rents. “We can’t withstand more increases.”

On the other side are those who put their faith in the free market.

“If park owners raised rents too high, they wouldn’t have any customers left,” said Vickie Talley, executive director of the Manufactured Housing Educational Trust, a trade group based in Orange County.

The initiative makes a bow, however, to concern for the poorest segment of mobile home residents. The neediest 10% of residents in a park would be subsidized to the tune of 10% of their rent, as long as they qualified under low-income guidelines in state health and safety codes.

“The 10% rental assistance is phony,” retorts Steve Hopcraft, a spokesman for the Golden State Mobile Home Owners League. The subsidy wouldn’t save many very much, he maintains, calling it a smoke screen for the park owners’ true goal of raising rents.

“The park residents need real help and government protection. . . . The free market should not be the god of all gods.”

One initiative provision, which would phase out rent control at mobile home parks, would have the least impact in Orange County. Only San Juan Capistrano currently regulates rents at mobile home parks. But statewide, about 90 cities have some form of rent control.

Contending they’ve been deprived of the rightful value of their property, park owners have been going to court to challenge city ordinances that control rents. With passage of the initiative, they note, they would stop suing and presumably save taxpayers millions of dollars spent by cities to defend themselves.

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Mobile home park owners and residents have been warring for years over escalating rents and how much money tenants should receive from landlords when a park closes. Such battles are still raging in Stanton and Westminster, and similar fights over park closures in Laguna Beach and Anaheim were only recently settled, albeit bitterly.

“Every time we hear the issue, we have to worry about the old folks crying in their seats,” Westminster City Manager Bill Smith said.

The wailing will only get louder before the vote on the ballot measure next March.