To paraphrase Dustin Hoffman speaking about Peter Pan in the movie Hook, park owner John Saunders HATES, HATES, HATES Rancho La Paz Senior Mobile Home Park.

YOU WOULD TOO, if you were John Saunders. But therein lies a challenge – to imagine you are John Saunders, you first have to arm yourself with boundless greed, entitlement, and malevolence. Only THEN can you grasp how much he hates the plucky mobile home-owning seniors of Rancho La Paz, the ONLY park of the dozens he’s gobbled up to actually get STATE LEGISLATION (thanks to Sharon Quirk-Silva) to protect them from his insatiable rent-gouging. THE GALL!

So for the last three years since AB 978 passed, Saunders has passive-aggressively run the place like an absentee slumlord. Letting the roads devolve into potholes. Not replacing burned out lights, as outside criminals discover this treasure trove. Replacing security with a half-assed firm that drives through ONCE A NIGHT, at the exact same time, a time that the local looters have memorized. More that we may mention later.

But this year Saunders has really found a way to punish and drive out the few troublesome protected seniors that are left (100 of the original 400) – make Rancho La Paz an All-Age Park! Actually, a tried-and-true tactic he’s pulled at many other places, not always legal, and also something he’s repeatedly said he’d never do at Rancho. He and his flacks say he can do this legally, even though it’s written in everyone’s lease (below) that it’s a senior park. (But just because he says he can doesn’t make it so – we shall see soon!)

[from the lease signed by each tenant and the management.]

One thing Saunders WAS required to do, before making this change, was to HOLD A MEETING with the tenants. So first thing he tried was to call a ZOOM MEETING, with little notice, on the MORNING AFTER CHRISTMAS. Well, that didn’t fly – most of these seniors don’t Zoom, and Saunders was shamed out of that by Ashleigh Aitken and Ahmad Zahra.

So instead an in-person meeting was called for January 11 at Rancho’s Clubhouse, which a couple hundred tenants attended but, typically, Saunders didn’t bother coming, sending instead his long-suffering sidekick, Michael Cirillo of Star Management (who the moment I walked in was snapping, “YOU PEOPLE managed to get RENT CONTROL here!”)

Mike stayed for over an hour, dealing with seniors’ concerns and complaints stoically, defensively, angrily… but the only time he threatened to leave was when Lupe Ramirez stood and held up “an article by Robert Coldren explaining ‘How To Empty Out a Senior Park!'”

Hey *I* know that 2019 article – in fact I’ve written about Coldren, Saunders and Cirillo several times this past decade – they used to be quite the inseparable team. Coldren is an attorney specializing in fighting against mobile home tenants and rent control up and down California, and he and Saunders used to work hand in glove, until a few years ago. (As we so often see, there is a time limit on friendship between snakes.)

Coldren’s 2019 piece, which has been taken offline because maybe it’s embarrassing, was actually entitled “Positioning Your Mobile Home Park for the Future,” and we have it uploaded HERE, but it DOES have a section that COULD be entitled “How to Empty Out a Senior Park”…

If your park is designated as “senior”, consider changing the status to all-age. I know this is sacrilege and counter-intuitive, but consider:

Which tenant profile is more likely to generate income that grows, rather than is fixed. Senior or working family?

Who is more likely to have time to lobby for rent control? Senior or working family? etc. etc.

Yeah, “etc. etc.” Senior tenants, on a fixed income, who’d moved their “mobile” homes (generally representing their life savings) into a senior park believing that this would be their home for the rest of their lives, are obviously the enemy to both Saunders and Coldren, whether those two had a falling out or not. Another passage of Coldren’s piece that Saunders has lived by is this:

The “Renters”

Acquire homes when they come up for sale in your park. It is much easier to close a MHP, convert it to another use or sell it for a higher price to a developer when the park owns some or all of the units…

Ten years ago we wrote about Saunders doing exactly this in the parks he’d acquired in Huntington Beach, and apparently in dozens more parks including, now, Rancho. “When homes come up for sale” is a euphemism for “When your rent increases drive people out, and they can’t afford the high cost of moving their mobile home, and you offer them like $3000 for the home plus a storage space to get the hell out so you can rent out the home AND space to someone else for much more.”

Nothing has slowed down Saunders, on that front, in the past decade, and even Rancho La Paz now has about forty “renters,” who, according to the long-time senior dwellers, care a lot less about the place since it’s not “theirs,” and have changed the character of the park from one where everyone knew each other, and felt like they had an “investment” there.

But guess what, a lot of these “renters” were there at this Jan. 11 meeting, and THEY also don’t like the “rule change” to All-Age – they’d agreed to move in there under the assumption it would stay a “Senior Park,” and they also have “Senior Park” written into their lease agreements.

The Orphans of Local Government

Of course THERE COULD BE LAWS, state or city, putting a limit on excessive rent hikes AND preventing an owner from converting a senior park to an all-age park. Even Huntington Beach passed the latter law, after they saw what Saunders had done to Huntington Shorecliffs (as I described here.) Yes, EVEN HUNTINGTON BEACH has a law preventing the conversion of a Senior Park to All-Age.

But Anaheim has done nothing, not under Sidhu in 2019-21 while Saunders was jacking up seniors’ rent (until Sharon’s very limited 2021 state law slowed that down) and not since either during the Ashleigh years. Have I mentioned that Saunders has been an extremely generous campaign contributor throughout all those years, through various PAC’s, to all the candidates who also receive Disney money, i.e. the winners?

Also of concern to Anaheim should be this: we have a state requirement to provide a certain amount of Senior Housing, and we are only a quarter of the way to that goal – Saunders’ rule change to All-Age takes us even farther from that goal.

3/4 of Rancho La Paz is in Anaheim city limits, 1/4 is in Fullerton. And neither Anaheim nor Fullerton ever did anything to limit Saunders’ rent-gouging. But Fullerton did do one thing: they steered some federal subsidies (meant to help seniors pay rent) to help THOSE Rancho homeowners pay their burgeoning space-rent. But guess what? With the Rule Change to All-Age, those federal subsidies will disappear for those homeowners.

Mobile home owners are the Orphans of Government. Due to the great power of the park owners’ lobbying and campaign largesse, mobile home owners were left out of California’s landmark 2019 rent control bill AB 1482. And meanwhile that same Robert Coldren article remains Sacred Scripture for mobile home park speculators like John Saunders. One last passage from that:

Raise rents! If you keep your rents at market, the “cap rate” will generate a higher sales price with the higher NOI (net operating income). This seems obvious but I am continually surprised by the number of park owner clients and friends that do NOT reset target rents to market annually.

Raise rents! (Sound familiar?) Doing so also prevents old homes in your park from selling for amounts exceeding the homes’ value. This is important so your tenants do not feel “entitled” to that inflated sales price when you seek to relocate them or change the use. Paying “in-park” value for homes in your park is just “code” for buying your own land back if your rents are below market…

I should mention: a question Cirillo was asked repeatedly was, “Will this Rule Change to All-Age allow Saunders to raise our rents?” And he assured them that they are still protected by Sharon’s AB 978, at least until it “sunsets” in 2030… “after 2030, who knows?” But the seniors know that letting in all ages, teenagers, crying babies, working families, will forever change the character of their once peaceful “Rancho La PAZ” where everyone knew each other. And many of them even re-signed their leases recently under the assurance it’d remain a Senior Park.

That’s all for now, I could write a lot more, but that’s all for now. The clearing out of Rancho La Paz’ original Seniors, who’d thought they’d found a home for good (3/4 of them gone or dead now) proceeds, just a little slower than it would have without the heroic work of Lupe Ramirez and Sharon Quirk-Silva. And we still remember Kathleen Fabry: