Changes in code enforcement for mobile homes in Albany County could spell disaster for mobile home parks in Laramie.
“Everything would become a ghost town,” said a representative of mobile home community Sunny Meadows Village, which wished to remain anonymous. “I disagree with them trying to enforce this.”
In 2010 the City of Laramie adopted the Unified Development Code, which disallows the sale or moving of non-conforming mobile homes. According to an article published by the Boomerang, LaramieangCity Council chose to implement a moratorium until sufficient metrics became available regarding housing in Laramie.
According to Senior City Planner Charles Bloom, that moratorium could be lifted.
“Right now what we’re doing is working on a housing study which will have different recommendations on how they will proceed,” Bloom said. “Currently they are in draft form and we haven’t seen the results yet.”
Because mobile homes built before 1976 were not subject to federal regulation, a prior housing study found that these homes are likely not to be in compliance.
“There were no standards, and you could construct whatever you wanted,” Bloom said.
The representative of Sunny Meadows Village also agreed that pre-regulation homes could be a hazard.
“They’re built with two by four walls, the wire is mostly aluminum and not copper. They could light up pretty easily,” the representative said.
An owner of a pre-1976 mobile that he personally fixed up and modernized, the representative feels that the city should not be able to tell him what to do with his property.
“You got to understand. A lot of people have bought these 1960s and 1970s mobile homes and put their life savings into them,”the representative said.
Fortunately for Sunny Meadows Village, the city currently relies wholly on complaints to enforce code, and the powers of enforcement are extremely limited.
“Planning staff doesn’t go out looking for non-compliant mobile homes,” Bloom said. “The only thing we could enforce would be a provision of the code, which would be a misdemeanor. Our courts are not powerful enough to break a contract and require a mobile home to be re-deeded or retitled.”
This lack of power extends to student renters, who might unknowingly rent a non-compliant home. Currently there is nothing on the books that requires landlords to inform tenants of the compliance status of their homes.
“We can’t reverse what was done,” Bloom said.
For the Sunny Meadows Village representative, changes in code enforcement could be costly. According to him, the last trailer he took to the dump cost him $1000 for the truck, and an additional $500 paid to the city dump. He believes a change to code enforcement would be the latest in what he sees as a series of missteps by the city.
“The city of Laramie needs to quit encouraging people to build apartments. We are overbuilt,” the representative said. “Right now, with the economy in the toilet as it is, it’s not fair to take away affordable homes.”
