A Maine bill would sweeten the deal for corporate mobile home park owners who sell to cooperatives
When Celeste Yakawonis was younger, she thought she would spend the rest of her life in her riverfront home on six acres of land in Turner.
But that was before Yakawonis's husband died, leaving her to live in the large farmhouse alone.
'Can you see how big that was, for me, one person rattling around?' she said, pointing to a framed photo of the home powdered with snow. 'I just couldn't take care of it.'
Without her husband, Yakawonis said she felt overwhelmed and isolated. But she was advised not to make big decisions too soon after the loss. She kept the home for a year before deciding to sell it. When she started house hunting in 2023, she had trouble finding anything in her budget.
Eventually, she chose an open-concept mobile home at Linnhaven Mobile Home Park in Brunswick. She purchased the home for $92,000, and paid $480 a month to rent the lot it sat on.
From the outside, it looks like any other double-wide, with a grey paneled exterior and a front porch. Inside, she has made it her own: her daughter draped ferns, pinecones, cranberries and warm white Christmas lights over the sleek white cupboards.
What changed her life more than the new home was the new community.
In 2024, after the owner announced that he was intending to sell the property, residents began working with the Cooperative Development Institute to learn more about purchasing the park themselves and becoming a resident-owned community. They created a resident board of directors and pooled together funds to submit a $27 million offer. It was accepted, making them the new owners of the park.
The co-op is now the largest of its kind in the state, with 278 homes. Twelve such resident-owned communities in the state have successfully purchased their manufactured home properties over the last fifteen years, from Arundel to Veazie, according to data provided by the Cooperative Development Institute, which has assisted with some of the deals.
As Maine grapples with a housing affordability crisis, advocates say these cooperatives offer lower-income residents more stability. State lawmakers are discussing a bill that would encourage the creation of resident-owned communities by providing tax incentives to businesses that sell to cooperatives.
The bill would provide a tax deduction of up to $750,000 on capital gains for owners who sell to cooperatives. The goal, according to bill sponsor Sen. Cameron Reny (D-Lincoln), is to preserve Maine's affordable housing units.
'Mobile homes and manufactured housing parks are some of the last truly affordable housing options in our state,' she said during a work session on the bill earlier this month.
Maine's housing crunch
The legislation fits into a broader effort to address the state's housing shortfalls, following a law passed in 2023 that required mobile home park owners to notify residents of their intent to sell and give them an opportunity to purchase the property.
In mobile home parks, owners typically own their units but rent the land, making them susceptible to unexpected rent hikes and fees when new buyers come in. These communities are often home to seniors who live on fixed incomes and are particularly vulnerable to rent changes.
Nationwide, investors have taken a keen interest in mobile home parks. In 2020 and 2021, private equity firms and other investors were behind nearly a quarter of all manufactured home purchases in the country, according to a report by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project and Manufactured Housing Action.
In Maine, many mobile home parks are owned and operated by families — but as some are aging out of the business, they are choosing to sell. As of last year, out-of-state investors owned more than a fifth of Maine's mobile home parks, according to the Bangor Daily News.
After such purchases take place, residents across the country have reported seeing their rents go up by as much as 60 percent, according to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. They have also seen ballooning maintenance issues, unexpected fees and even water shutoffs.
In 2021, Philips International bought Mountain View Estates Mobile Home Park in Bowdoin. By the spring of 2024, according to News Center Maine, the lot rent had increased four times, pushing residents' bills up by nearly $200 a month.
Negotiating a deal
While the 2023 law has made it easier for groups like the Blueberry Fields Cooperative to purchase their mobile home parks, sellers are still wary of selling to cooperatives, which are typically newly formed and often don't have the kind of longstanding reputation that an investor might, said Nora Gosselin with the Cooperative Development Institute.
'You have a group of residents who are forming a co-op who are stepping into the negotiating room with a large Wall Street company and a local family, and it's just — it's challenging,' Gosselin said.
While sellers might still choose other buyers, the tax incentive in the proposed legislation could give residents a leg up without forcing them to pay more during the negotiation, she said.
The Genesis Fund, a community lender, has funded every resident-owned manufactured community in the state, according to the group's executive director, Liza Fleming-Ives. She said they combine their resources with other lenders and provide a framework to groups interested in financing the projects.
'The demand for our role is huge right now,' she said. 'We are very aware — and very focused — on the need that we have in the state to build our new supply of affordable housing.'
A 2023 report by the Maine Housing Authority found that the state needs to build approximately 84,000 new homes by 2030 to meet its expected population growth and account for historic underproduction.
Manufactured homes are a key part of the solution to the housing crisis because they provide permanent, lower-cost options for residents in different income brackets through housing that's already readily available, said Erik Jorgensen, director of government relations at MaineHousing. The agency helped fund the Blueberry Fields Cooperative's purchase in Brunswick, along with the recent purchase of the Cedar Falls Mobile Home Park in Bangor, through the state's mobile home park preservation fund.
'What's different about a co-op is that future cost increases are in the hands of a board of residents and not dictated by investors,' Jorgensen said during the work session. 'The question really does become, how do you motivate sellers to choose the option with greater public purpose?'
Yet not everyone supports the push to create more resident-owned communities.
The CEO of the Manufactured Housing Institute, Lesli Gooch, said she feels that the incentives in the proposed legislation could have unintended consequences in the long run.
She said there are real benefits that come from having an experienced property manager, rather than residents, run a mobile home park, noting that residents might not be as well positioned to support upgrades to water, electricity and waste management.
'Some people call (mobile home parks) a postage stamp plot of land that the house sits on. That's absolutely not true,' Gooch said. 'It does take someone who understands infrastructure to make sure that these communities are preserved over time.'
To Yakawonis, who moved to the Brunswick mobile home park after her husband died, the advantages of the new resident ownership structure are clear: stable lot rent prices, leadership opportunities and a strong sense of community. As a board member, she's become involved in everything from park maintenance to updating the park rules, keeping residents informed and even a game night.
The biggest change is a sense of stability — unlike in other mobile home parks.
'If their rent goes up, their rent goes up, and there's nothing they can do about it. It's just a horrible powerless feeling and we did not want that,' Yakawonis said. 'We wanted to be in control of our destiny.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Insider
a day ago
- Business Insider
Love, money, and yarn balls
Crystal Sloane is a pro at turning spun cotton into intricate, handmade figurines. There are seasonally themed ornaments like Santas and snowmen at Christmas, or radishes and turnips that can be personalized with the face of a loved one printed on them to celebrate spring. Crystal has been selling her work on Etsy since the dawn of the site 20 years ago. She got successful enough at dreaming up and making the quirky, vintage-inspired, custom items to quit her graphic design job in 2009 and pursue her artistic career full time. Two years later, and pregnant with her first child, she realized she needed to hire help. Instead of finding someone to pack orders and send emails and paying them out of her then $75,000 earnings, Crystal looked to her husband, Ben. He wasn't as happy with his job as a therapist at that point, and Crystal needed the help; so he quit to work for her — or, as they would debate and determine, with her. They started juggling the business baby and a new baby, but now, what was once Crystal's handmade hobby business has been supporting their family for 14 years. In a survey by Etsy in 2024, 83% of US sellers identified as women. Thirty percent of sellers said they did their work full time, rather than as an Etsy side hustle. More than half said that they sold their first goods on Etsy and that they started the business to make money while doing something they enjoy. The average Etsy seller said they spent just over half their time making and designing items, while the rest was eaten up by administrative work. Nearly 80% said they wanted to grow their businesses, but more than half said they didn't want to have to hire someone else to help. For some, there's no need to put out an ad on Craigslist or Indeed. Enter: the husband helper. Move over, Instagram boyfriend — this is a promotion that involves more work behind the scenes than just finding the perfect photo angle. Some successful shops run by women are doing so well that they can turn into not just full-time jobs, but careers stable enough to support spouses and families, too. It's a trend that also lives outside Etsy: More women are starting businesses, and more people want to work for themselves. These artists are living new twists on the family-run business, one that often involves a side-hustle turned career in crafting, an area dominated by women. Etsy has emerged as a place that, for those who hit it big, can bring life-changing money. Working with a spouse isn't all smooth sailing. At first, Crystal says, she had some trouble giving up her full autonomy over her shop, Vintage by Crystal, and Ben asked many detailed questions as she delegated. Over time, it became not just Crystal's project, but a company fully run by the couple, and Ben's name now appears alongside hers in the online shop. She still manages the artistic vision and works with her hands to make teeny tiny details for the ornaments, but he now manages the business side. "It was just a learning curve," Ben tells me. That also meant managing expectations and the work style of his wife. "I was so used to doing everything and being in charge of everything and having it all done my way," Crystal says. "We argued for a second about which kind of packing tape we should get, but then I was like, wait, that, that's his business." Etsy couples are a niche of a larger trend: 2021 data from the Census Bureau's Annual Business Survey indicated 10% of US businesses were owned and operated by spouses — and another 11% were jointly owned by couples but operated separately, with men more likely to be the main person operating the business, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. In 2023, McKinsey found that family-owned businesses generated higher profits (an average of $77 million between 2017 and 2022, compared with $66 million for other companies). Family-owned businesses that are less than 25 years old also grow twice as fast as other ownership structures, as founder entrepreneurial energy can lead to more aggressive growth that slows over time. Kathy Marshack, a psychologist who's the author of "Entrepreneurial Couples: Making It Work at Work and at Home," says much research on family businesses largely focuses on the economics and business side, but less on the effects on the family. "There's still a difference between romance and work partnership," Marshack tells me. "I have plenty of those couples who come in and say: 'What are we doing? Our marriage is falling apart, and our business is successful.' And it's because it gets hard; those boundaries are hard. Am I your lover right now, or am I your boss?" But relationships and business partnerships do have threads in common: "One of the greatest preventers of burnout is feeling connected to your colleagues," says Karen Bridbord, an organizational psychologist who specializes in executive coaching for company founders and is a certified therapist with The Gottman Institute. "I would argue that is important in a marriage as well." When people feel that they're carrying their weight and their spouse or coworkers are doing the same, satisfaction increases. For some couples, spreadsheets and brainstorming are all part of the romance. Gabriela Baiter and Drew Downie saw a matched ambition in one another — for them, a romantic getaway was a weekend coming up with business ideas on the Oregon coast. In 2017, they found their big break in an eyesore in their small apartment: an ugly dog bed for their 13-year-old black Labrador, Gable. The two turned a cobbled-together prototype into a scaled-up business and now run Lay Lo Pets, designing stylish dog beds from Palm Springs. Baiter quit her marketing career to go full time for Lay Lo in 2023, and Downie followed, leaving behind his work as a creative director in 2024. "We had this moment and this realization of like, is this a hobby or is this a business?" Baiter says. Since they both started working on Lay Lo full time and launched a virtual dog training component, their gross revenue from the business has more than doubled, they tell me. Being in business together means the meeting day never really ends, but Baiter and Downie see that as a perk. "I could not imagine building a business any other way," she tells me. Ideas come to them early in the morning, when they're making pancakes for their kids, or when they're on vacation in tiny hotel rooms (their pet company came to be over shared frustrations in their tiny apartment, after all). The push behind Etsy is that anyone, even a novice crafter, can make it big. Sarah Cambio bought a used sewing machine off Facebook Marketplace in 2020 and taught herself to make doll and baby clothes. She figured she might sell some stuff on Etsy while taking care of her three kids full time, using the money for little expenses or as fun spending money. She tried out a few items, but her shop started to boom when she listed six fabric crowns for children that sold out immediately. Sarah called her husband, Brent, from the crafts chain Joann, unsure how much fabric to buy with the new interest. It was the turning point of a business that's since ballooned. Brent started helping her to set financial goals or find new ways to source materials, so they wouldn't have to drive an hour from their Maryland home to buy what she needed. Brent, Sarah says, sees the big picture of the businesses, leaving her to handle the creative details, such as intricate embroidery, small pom-poms, and ribbons. "I tone him down, and he tries to hype me up a little bit," Sarah says. The shop, Flower Lane, made its first $100,000 in less than a year, the couple tells me. That rapid jump meant a shift in focusing on Sarah's career after moving around for Brent's — earlier in their marriage, Sarah took care of the kids primarily while Brent was in the Air Force, but her success on Etsy let her art become a focus for the family. "She didn't really have time to really set down and establish a career," Brent says. "I was just happy to see her get back into her artistic self, and it made her happy, so I was happy if she made $5 million or $5." On their first date, Adrian Krawiec told his now wife, Emily Phillippy, that he believed she would one day own her own jewelry store; he says he wanted to flatter her, but he also saw her dedication to her art, as she showed up an hour late, held up working in her studio. Over the next decade, she slowly went out on her own as a designer, and Krawiec pushed her to join Etsy, though she's left the site since to focus on her store. Her business grew, and when Phillippy went to open her storefront for Emily Chelsea Jewelry in Philadelphia in 2021, Krawiec quit his job at corporate Ikea after 18 years with the company and started working for Phillippy — just as the two had their first child. They draw clear lines about the business; they avoid talking work at home, and it's distinctly Phillippy's. "Her name is on the building," says Krawiec, who works as the senior director. "I've always looked at it like it's hers, and largely speaking, my job description has always been to make her job as easy as possible." It's easy to blur those boundaries accidentally, either by bringing work home or slipping out of boss mode. "Adrian helps the business so much in making it so much more profitable, so much more organized, and so he still is involved a lot in the decision-making, and I still will be like, 'Should I do this?' And he'll be like, 'I don't know, you're the owner.'" Krawiec plans to start working at the shop less and become more of an advisor, the couple tells me. It will mean more autonomy over the business again for Phillippy and a chance for Krawiec to explore other parts of his life. "I'm such an independent person, and we did it for four years, but that was not my vision," Phillippy says of working closely together. Marriage vows are forever; business plans are not.
New York Post
3 days ago
- New York Post
Sit pretty (for less): This outdoor sectional is 40% off for early Prime Day
It may not be Christmas, but it's the best time of the year for folks who like to save big. Yes, I'm talking Prime Day. Did you forget? According to the mega-retailer's recent announcement, the event will be from July 8 through July 11. Prime members will enjoy two extra days of savings on major brands, including Samsung, Kiehl's, and Levi's. Although the major shopping event is a few weeks away, there are already early Prime Day deals available, and in our experience, sometimes they're just as good (if not better) than the ones available during the official sale. Case in point: This 7-Seat Wicker Conversation Set Sectional from Best Choice Products, currently discounted nearly 40% off. Advertisement The modular sofa can be customized to match your deck, features oversized cushions, and offers the type of comfort that makes it a little too easy to spend the entire day dozing in the sun. Amazon Pros: Can be arranged in multiple ways to fit your patio or deck exactly how you need it Throw pillows and coffee table with a tempered glass top included Easy setup Cons: Not the best option for those who dislike wicker Allow the Best Choice 7-Seat Wicker Conversation Set Sectional to be the star of your next BBQ. Thousands of Amazon shoppers have! The sectional offers extra-large, overly stuffed cushioned seats, each with a protective, water-resistant cover. The wicker is tightly woven and reinforced with powder-coated steel for durability and longevity, so you and your family can fully enjoy the comfy seating without worry about it getting bent out of shape before summer's end. Available in 28 styles, two decorative pillows are included, as well as a coffee table to rest your feet (or cocktails) on. While the sectional typically retails for $800, it's currently only $500 as an early Prime Day deal. If you're not convinced that this is the right sectional for you, check out the different ways it can be arranged. RELATED: Best places to buy outdoor patio furniture Amazon Amazon See? I rest my case. Hundreds of Amazon shoppers have given the conversation set a five-star review, resulting in more than 3,000 star ratings. Many praise it for its durability, easy setup and quality, which is exceptionally high, considering its low price. 'Different brands use cheap cushion fabric,' wrote one reviewer. 'This company does not. The cushions are top quality.' 'This is a solid set for a great price,' shared another happy customer, who included a photo of his dog on the couch in his review. The 7-Seat Wicker Conversation Set Sectional ships directly from Best Choice Products, and can be at your home long before official Prime Day kicks off. However, I can't promise its 40% off sale tag will last, so this is the time to grab. Looking for a headline-worthy haul? Keep shopping Post Wanted. For over 200 years, the New York Post has been America's go-to source for bold news, engaging stories, in-depth reporting, and now, insightful shopping guidance. We're not just thorough reporters – we sift through mountains of information, test and compare products, and consult experts on any topics we aren't already schooled specialists in to deliver useful, realistic product recommendations based on our extensive and hands-on analysis. Here at The Post, we're known for being brutally honest – we clearly label partnership content, and whether we receive anything from affiliate links, so you always know where we stand. We routinely update content to reflect current research and expert advice, provide context (and wit) and ensure our links work. Please note that deals can expire, and all prices are subject to change.
Business Insider
5 days ago
- Business Insider
Uber is getting advertisers to pay for your next ride
Uber has a new ad type, paid for by brands, that gives users money off their next rides. Uber execs spoke with BI at the Cannes Lions ad festival as it pitched marketers on its ad business. This article is part of " CMO Insider," a series on marketing leadership and innovation. Need a cab? This ad's got you covered. Uber this week said it's launching a new ad format that lets brands offer its users cash off their next rides. Beverage company Molson Coors is the launch advertiser for Ride Offers. Brands like Coors Light will show up with ads in the Uber app as users check their phones to see where their driver is, offering users an Uber discount. Uber also pitched its newly launched Creative Studio to advertisers attending meetings at its villa set-up in Cannes. This team works on more bespoke offerings for advertisers, like offering rides to Miami F1 Grand Prix attendees in a luxury vehicle sponsored by La Mer, packed with freebie skincare products. In another example, Uber Eats users could order Christmas carolers to their doors, sponsored by the alcohol company Diageo. "Our audience is always looking for an opportunity to drive savings and get affordable things, but also get messages that are personalized and relevant for them," Kristi Argyilan, the global head of Uber Advertising, told Business Insider at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in France on Wednesday. Uber said in May of this year that its ad business, which launched in 2022, had reached a $1.5 billion revenue run rate — the number it expects to achieve by the end of 2025 — which was up 60% versus last year. The company does not break out a more specific ad revenue figure in its financial filings. It serves ads on the Uber app, on in-car screens, in emails to its users, and on car tops. Argylian said Uber is looking at ways to ramp up its ad business outside its cars and apps. It's working on letting advertisers use its data and context about how users have been recently using Uber and Uber Eats to target ads on other websites and apps. An Uber user might be viewing the app to check the arrival of their car, then flip to scrolling on TikTok once they get inside, where Uber can serve an ad specific to that user. It's a similar context to the Meta Audience Network. "Purchase-based data and the location-based data is what's really fueling the experience," said Megan Ramm, global head of sales at Uber Advertising. Paul Frampton-Calero, chief executive of the digital marketing company Goodway Group, said Uber's challenge in capturing ad budgets is that it's operating in a crowded market. It's not just fighting for attention with the likes of Google, Meta, and Amazon. It's also competing with the retail media networks from supermarkets and other companies that already have long-standing brand relationships. "Uber isn't naturally somebody most brands are going to build those strong top-to-top relationships with," Frampton-Calero said. "It's hard enough building a relationship with Google, Meta, Spotify, TikTok, and then having to work out where to put Google in that mix." Still, he added, Uber's advantage is its mix of data. "Uber knows a lot about the type of people that like Mexican food who spend time at a particular part of town and visit the airport four times a quarter," Frampton-Calero said. "Then you can make some assumptions about what a high net income audience looks like and how to market to them."
