ROC movement has preserved more than 20,000 homes
by News
on March 14, 2022
Resident-owned manufactured-home communities (ROCs) were born in 1984, when 14 homes were saved in a little park in Meredith, N.H.
These communities now contain more than 20,000 homes in 20 states, with more on the way.
When the homeowners in Spruce Valley Mobile Home Park in Danville purchased their 35-unit manufactured-home park March 1, not only did they become the Granite State’s 141st ROC, they also pushed the movement past a significant milestone.
Since the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund spun off ROC USA® in 2008 to scale its successful model nationally, the growth of permanently preserved, safe, affordable, communities has boomed. There are now 291 ROCs in states stretching from Maine to Washington.
“20,000 homes is an impressive number, and one that’s only going to continue to grow,” said ROC USA President Paul Bradley, who served for years as a co-op developer and eventually vice president at the Community Loan Fund.
“We went from 14 homes in ROCs to 10,000 in a little more than 30 years. The second 10,000 took just shy of seven, and we’re not slowing down,” Bradley said.
In recent years, resident cooperatives have had to fight off the desire of private equity firms to buy manufactured-home parks. These firms offer above-market prices because they can achieve exorbitant profits by increasing the rents homeowners—many of them with low incomes—in parks pay for the use of the land.
That was the case in the Spruce Valley purchase. An out-of-state company had offered $1.7 million for the park last summer. Using training and technical assistance from the Community Loan Fund’s ROC-NH™ team, the homeowners organized Spruce Valley Cooperative, matched the offer, and purchased the park with mortgages from the Community Loan Fund.
“The equity firms competing to buy these parks view them as profit centers,” says Tara Reardon, the Vice President of ROC-NH. “The residents there view them as homes and as neighborhoods, and any money the co-op earns from rents improves the community and is circulated locally.”
See a list of ROCs in N.H.