Home

Steamboat Springs — Walking through the Fish Creek Mobile Home Park in Steamboat Springs, the signs of recently completed remodels and ongoing renovations are hard to miss.

While some owners have been sprucing up their homes for quite some time, residents say the Yampa Valley Housing Authority's purchase of the 67-lot park last year - and the accompanying hope that park residents may one day own the land beneath their homes - has given the movement new steam.

"I don't see your for-sale sign," park resident and Manager Tom Palmer said to Joe Mansfield during a tour of the park Friday.

Mansfield had considered moving out of the park, but with the Housing Authority now in control, he's thinking much the opposite and asked Palmer questions about improvements he would like to make to his home. While past improvements were mostly made by people who bought a home in the park, fixed it up and flipped it for a profit, Mansfield said these days, the motivation is much different.

"People are definitely improving the look of their houses," Mansfield said. "I think it's ownership pride, not looking to sell out. They just want their neighborhood to look better, especially if they're going to own it."

Palmer, the park's manager since 2003, said owners have given several homes new life "out of what was an eyesore" or "a dump" before. He said Mansfield's for-sale sign isn't the only one that's come down in recent months.

"It's so cool after living here for so long and to see this happening," said Palmer, who noted the park's residents include young couples, larger families and retirees who have lived there for decades. "It's a good mix. It pretty much runs the gamut of Steamboat."

Boundary issues

The impacts of the Housing Authority's $3.2 million purchase of the park, finalized in August 2007, are being felt despite the fact that the Housing Authority has yet to define a plan for transitioning the park from its ownership to the residents'. Mansfield said he has heard no details about what it might cost him to buy the property his home sits on.

"We're still investigating the options," Housing Authority Project Manager Curtis Church said. "The hardest piece is the financing. We have to make it affordable for them to purchase."

Church said responses received thus far to an informal survey show that all respondents are interested in purchasing the land beneath their homes to some degree - depending on the terms of the transaction.

There will be other difficulties beyond the terms of the transaction when it comes to converting the park. One is the fact that the park itself is one large lot, and the boundaries between home spaces are informal and unwritten.

"The informal arrangements worked well enough for 32 years that I never saw any reason to change them," former owner Bob Enever wrote Church in an e-mail. "Generally, people have worked things out for themselves, without recourse to the manager or owner. : When the surveyors put pegs in lot corners, this could bring to the surface disputes and friction that have been quiescent because ownership was not involved."

Parceling up the property is not the only option, however. Church said the Housing Authority could take a co-op route that would see residents purchasing a share in a homeowner's association that owns the land.

"Those are the basic two options, and we're investigating others," Church said.

Despite these uncertainties, Palmer said morale in the park is much improved from the anxious state that existed before the Enevers' sale of the park to the Housing Authority.

"I think everybody feels more secure since the sale closed," Palmer said. "I haven't had anybody come to me with a negative response since closing. The Housing Authority is real supportive, and they're involved."

"We've created some stability in a governmental entity being the owner of the park," Church added. "But the greatest state of stability would be if the residents actually owned the land underneath them."