Plan to Buy Mobile-Home Park, Ease Rent Fears Advances

The City Council has given preliminary approval to a request for $500,000 from a nonprofit group trying to buy a mobile-home park so that its residents, most of them senior citizens, will no longer face rent increases.

Costa Mesa-based Caritas Corp. is proposing to buy Meadows Mobile Home Park for $28 million after the residents sought the organization’s help.

The nonprofit group then asked the city for financial assistance.

Caritas Corp. asked for $500,000 from an affordable-housing fund and requested that the city issue municipal bonds to fund the rest of the purchase. The City Council voted this week to grant the $500,000 but not to distribute the funds until Caritas presents a detailed plan.

The council also said it could not agree to issue bonds until the city staff could consult with financial advisors for assurance that Irvine would not be liable if Caritas were to default.

“Our decision gives the process the jump-start it needs to move forward. It’s not like we’re saying, ‘Here’s the money and we can’t get it back,’ ” Mayor Christina L. Shea said.

The council will review the proposal in June.

The park has nearly 500 senior residents, most of whom live on pensions and Social Security. They have complained that rising rents are driving them out of the park and that many of them have nowhere else to go.

“In the 1990s, even in the midst of a deep real estate recession, rents in the Meadows were going up, up, up,” resident B.J. Lusk said.

She said the residents last fall were able to negotiate a three-year lease with the park’s owner, the Hexberg Family Trust, in some cases freezing or rolling back rents.

But “we knew this was just a temporary respite,” Lusk said. “We needed to find a way to have more say over our future. . . . It is not an overstatement to say Caritas is our lifeboat.”