Months of advocacy efforts from senior mobile home residents are paying off as the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors voted to move forward with greater protections for some of the county’s most vulnerable residents.
“You really brought this forward,” 2nd District Supervisor Laura Capps told the senior residents who attended the Oct. 10 meeting. “I’m all for exploring this moratorium and overlay to make sure we protect these places that have been serving seniors successfully.”
Supervisors unanimously approved steps toward a moratorium that would prevent 55-and-older mobile home parks from being converted to all ages until the county can create an overlay—a countywide ordinance that would preserve existing senior parks.
The discussion came about after several senior park residents approached the supervisors, ringing the alarm bells after Del Cielo Mobile Home Estates—an Orcutt-based 55-and-older mobile home park—came under new ownership and management.
Harmony Communities, a Stockton-based mobile home property management company, took over in May and served residents with a six-month notice to convert Del Cielo to an all-ages community. Neighboring communities feared that other management companies would follow suit.
“I had some conversations with management from the new ownership and they argued that affordability should be available for all people, not just seniors,” 4th District Supervisor Bob Nelson said during the meeting.
Del Cielo is part of his district, and he spearheaded the work to manage the situation.
In early conversations with Del Cielo’s new property manager, Nelson said that Harmony Communities claimed there was only a “vocal minority” who were against the all-ages conversion. As a result, Nelson’s office mailed out ballots to all 185 units in the park and received 121 responses—of which 120 stated they wanted to stay senior-only and one was open to an all-ages park.
“My position on this would be that it’s all of the above. We shouldn’t find affordability for all ages at the expense of seniors who have an investment-backed expectation to be able to have a community that is like-minded, like-aged, like-demographics,” Nelson said.
Santa Barbara County’s unincorporated communities have 21 mobile home parks, with 11 providing the 55-and-older age restrictions (1,800 of the total 2,400 spaces), Planning and Development Department Assistant Director Jeffrey Wilson told supervisors. Orcutt is providing the greatest amount of age-restricted mobile homes at 62 percent of the county’s senior park inventory.
State law allows age restrictions as long as it’s 55 and older with the main condition that 80 percent of the owners are older than 55.
“We haven’t found any regulations as far as the conversion process,” Wilson said. “It really defaults to the owner-operator to make that business decision from seniors-only to all-age.”
Based on state and federal laws, Santa Barbara County can implement a moratorium if there’s “a current or immediate threat to public health, safety, or welfare,” he said.
County Planning Department staff still need to hash out moratorium details—which must come back to the board—and 5th District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino worried about the time crunch with only one month left on Del Cielo’s six-month notice.
“Any action we take generally takes a while for us to accomplish it. So what stops a conversion? Is it a moratorium that stops it from taking place while we go down the road of building an overlay and what does that look like?” he asked. “Obviously, what I’m talking about today you could have an operator change their mind tomorrow and it’ll take us months to get there.”
Planning and Development Director Lisa Plowman confirmed the moratorium’s role and said it wouldn’t take staff a “substantial amount of time” to develop a moratorium and the following overlay because there are good models out there, like neighboring Ventura County.
If a park went through a conversion process and the county applied its overlay later, the park would be “nonconforming” with the overlay, Plowman said.
Fourth District Supervisor Nelson added that this decision would also prevent other parks from converting.
“I’m all for going down the road of looking at a moratorium right now while we explore an overlay and examine that as quickly as possible and as much as we potentially can use some of our neighbors in Ventura and other neighbors,” Nelson said. “A lot of communities are having similar discussions, as much as we can dive into those and borrow some of the other ordinances and lessons learned so we can have a more expeditious process—all the better in my opinion.”
This article appears in Oct 10-20, 2024.