‘San Lazaro is not temporary housing’: Residents organize to buy their Boulder County mobile home park

When residents of San Lazaro mobile home park learned the property was up for sale, many shared the same fear as resident Lety Garcia: displacement. 

“We are afraid that new owners will raise rent or close the park, and many families will be displaced from their homes,” she said.

Residents say San Lazaro, located in unincorporated Boulder County near Boulder, is more than just housing for its 800-plus residents. It is a diverse, close-knit community where people know and rely on their neighbors. Many have called the park home for decades, some for more than 40 years. Unwilling to risk that community on an unknown buyer, residents are organizing to purchase the park themselves. 

If successful, San Lazaro will become the fourth resident-owned mobile home park in Boulder County, empowering residents to set their own lot rents and address the park’s undrinkable water. But they only have about two more months to raise the money.

Read: Boulder’s San Lazaro mobile home park has undrinkable water. Fixing it has stalled for years.

Park management delivered a notice of intent to sell to residents’ doors March 20. Under a state law, residents must be given the opportunity to purchase their park if it is listed for sale. Residents have 120 days from the time they’re notified of the sale to make an offer. That gives them until July 18 to secure financing for the park’s $42.5 million asking price.

San Lazaro was established in 1966, and its current owners — San Lazaro Park Properties LLP, which is based in Minnesota — have owned the park for more than 40 years.

“No other parks in Boulder County that were able to form a cooperative have had that high of a price tag,” said Julie Heins, a San Lazaro resident for over 26 years and a member of its newly formed steering committee.

San Lazaro is by far the largest resident-purchase effort attempted locally. Residents of Sans Souci, just south of Boulder, for example, bought their roughly 85-resident mobile home park in 2021 for $3.3 million.

Residents are looking to Boulder County and nonprofits for help.

Over 80% of residents have signed on in support of the plan to form a cooperative to purchase the park, a requirement for financing through ROC (Resident Owned Communities) USA, which is typically willing to loan mobile home communities up to $15 million, according to Heins. 

“So, our focus is on addressing a $27.5 million gap,” Jon Bellos, another member of the steering committee, told the Boulder County Board of County Commissioners at the board’s May 7 meeting. 

“We are pursuing every state, foundation and private source available to us,” Bellos said. “But the Colorado precedent is consistent. In every successful resident purchase of significant scale, local government commitment has been the catalytic capital that unlocks the rest.”

Gloria Handyside, a county commissioners spokesperson, told Boulder Reporting Lab that Boulder County recognizes the importance of the community as a source of affordable housing. The county is “looking into the situation regarding the potential sale of the property and is gathering information to determine how we can best support the process and the residents of San Lazaro,” she said.

What’s at stake

Nearly all San Lazaro residents own their homes but rent the land they sit on. Rent is about $1,000 a month, and in 2024 a Boulder Watershed Collective study found that 51% of residents are housing cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on rent.

Significant rent increases could threaten San Lazaro’s housing stability. Mobile homes represent a significant portion of affordable housing in Boulder County, and several residents said they would not be able to find other homes in the area if they were displaced.

“Across Colorado and the Front Range, we’ve already seen what happens when mobile home parks are purchased by large or outside investment groups,” Damien Teague, a San Lazaro resident for 18 years and a member of the steering committee, told county commissioners. 

“Lot rents rise dramatically. Families become unstable. Long-standing communities begin to disappear, and once these communities are lost, they’re almost never replaced.”

In the last few decades, mobile home parks have become a popular investment for hedge funds and real estate investors, in part because many residents cannot afford to move their homes to a different location if rent rises significantly. Frank Rolfe, who owns over 30,000 mobile home parks and runs a Mobile Home Park University for investors, said owning a mobile home park is like running a “Waffle House where everyone is chained to the booths.”

Journalists have documented cases where hedge funds raised lot rents by 50-60% in one year. Evictions are common in those cases.

Among the firms that have drawn scrutiny is Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund known for buying and cutting local newspapers across the country, which NPR reported has also acquired mobile home parks through an affiliate called Homes of America. Residents in several states told NPR that conditions deteriorated after the purchases, including disputes over repairs, utility shutoffs and eviction notices. 

Nationally, mobile home park lot rents increase by an average of 7% a year, according to a 2024 report by Mobile Home Insider magazine. In contrast, while lot rents for resident-owned communities often rise considerably in the first year of ownership due to new management expenses, they tend to level off afterward. ROC USA reports that lot rents at the resident-owned communities they finance rise by about 1% a year.

“While lot rents will increase on a regular basis, the community gets to vote on how much it increases and why, and understand why,” Heins said. “So it’s a lot more empowering.”

San Lazaro residents also hope that owning their park will make it easier to improve the community’s long-troubled water system. Residents say the water has smelled like bleach or a murky pond for decades. Efforts to connect the park to Boulder city water have stalled for years amid failed annexation talks and concerns among some residents about higher costs, while regulatory gaps left them with few other paths forward. Recent testing detected PFAS levels above EPA drinking water standards scheduled to take effect later this decade.

“It’s been a problem for a lot of years. So that would be a goal that we would want to move toward,” Heins said.

‘That is San Lazaro’

In comments to county commissioners, residents consistently emphasized how much the community at San Lazaro meant to them.

“This has been the safest community I have ever lived in, and amidst this soul-crushing housing crisis, I have found my faith in humanity restored consistently in this community,” said Hannah Craven, a resident of seven years. 

Bellos described San Lazaro as “a diverse community of Latinx, Bosnian, retirees, veterans, refugees, people with disabilities and essential workers,” with more than 140 children. San Lazaro residents’ new website, created to organize their cooperative, is available in Spanish, English and Bosnian. 

“People here share food, transportation, childcare, translation, tools, repairs, care for elderly neighbors,” Teague said. “There are deep social networks and informal systems here that many communities no longer have. What exists at San Lazaro is not temporary housing. It is an interdependent community that has evolved over decades.”

Susana Rodriguez, speaking with a interpreter, described how quickly the community comes together to support each other.

“One very cold night a five-year-old boy with autism went missing. His mother was desperate,” she said. 

After looking for the boy for half an hour, they shared the news in San Lazaro’s community group.

“Within minutes, neighbors began coming out of their homes carrying flashlights,” she said. “Children on bicycles and scooters also joined the search, riding through the streets and calling out his name.” 

“The sheriff’s deputies who responded that night told us something I will never forget: that it was beautiful to witness a community so united and so committed to one another,” she said.

“That is San Lazaro.”