Proposed Rent Hike Nixed By Rent Control Board, Offer To Sell To Tenants Rejected; Landlord Left With No Choice But To Announce Shutdown Of Mobile Home Park, Giving Residents 2-Year Notice To Pack Their Bags & Take A Hike

In Easton, Massachusetts, The Enterprise reports:

• Morgan Management has notified the town and its tenants that it plans to discontinue the Easton Mobile Home Park by the end of August 2019.
  
  This latest action follows several years of dispute among the Turnpike Street park’s owners, the tenants and the town over rent costs and park improvements.
  
  Robert Kraus, the attorney representing park owner Morgan Management, said at the end of June that his client had three options: raise the rent, sell the park to the residents, or discontinue the park.
  
  The management company has been unsuccessful with the first two options, and has now decided to move forward with the third.
  
  “We extended an offer (to sell the park to the tenants) and that offer was rejected,” Kraus said Monday. “My clients can no longer operate or maintain this community.”
  
  The letter announcing the park discontinuance, written by Kraus, was issued July 20.
  
  “The owner/operator has determined that it no longer is financially able to maintain the Park given the current rents,” the letter said, “despite repeated efforts to work not only with the Rent Control Board of Easton but also with the residents.”
  
  In 2011, Morgan Management raised the monthly rent from $358 to $468 per unit to cover infrastructure improvements, they said.
  
  In 2015, the Easton Board of Selectmen, acting as the town’s Rent Control Board, cut rents to $200 a month after Morgan Management failed to fix a sewerage treatment, water and drainage systems, pave roads and remove abandoned trailers.
  
  The Rent Control Board rejected a rent increase request in February and again on Monday, July 24.
  
  Mobile Home Park resident Beth Blair said she and other residents who attended the July 24 meeting “thought we’d won,” before hearing about the discontinuance letter.
  
  “I didn’t expect (the letter) at all,” Blair said.
  
  The discontinuance letter stated Morgan Management is in the process of selling all of its “manufactured housing assets” in Massachusetts, and attempted multiple times to sell the Easton park to a third party or the residents “without success or interest.”
  
  According to the Attorney General’s office, each park resident is entitled to at least two years’ written notice before a discontinuance or change of use for a park will occur.
  
  Morgan Management’s discontinuance will be effective Aug. 31, 2019.
  
  Blair said Tuesday that “there are still a lot of questions to be answered” about whether the management company is within their rights to dissolve the park.
  
  According to the Massachusetts General Law, the discontinuance process also requires the park owner give notice to tenants of all manufactured housing communities within a 100-mile radius. The owner is also required to pay tenants relocation costs or appraised value of their home.

Source: Unable to raise rent, owners plan to close Easton mobile home park.