The Senior Scene

By Michael Weinreb

Atop a mountain thousands of miles from home, Gretchen Kunigk Fraser eased into the starting gate, set into a crouch, and awaited the signal to start the biggest ski race of her life.

The odds against Fraser were already long. The fact she had even made it to this point—competing in the 1948 Olympics slalom event in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and clinging to a narrow one-tenth of a second lead as she began her second and final run in the competition—felt like something of a miracle. And now, as the brand-new timing system malfunctioned, Fraser learned she would have to wait to begin her race.

The Olympics weren’t yet televised live in America, so halfway around the world, in Vancouver, Wash., Fraser’s husband, Don, a former Olympic skier himself who couldn’t break away from the family gas and home heating oil business to get to Europe with Gretchen, eagerly waited for news. In Sun Valley, Idaho, a burgeoning ski resort town frequented by Hollywood celebrities where Don and Gretchen had come of age as competitive skiers, residents awaited word of the results. In Tacoma, where Fraser had grown up and attended University of Puget Sound, her parents eagerly anticipated a telegram or call from their daughter.

The American media in St. Moritz had arrived considering Fraser and her fellow members of the U.S. ski team an afterthought, the first post-war representatives of a sport that had only just begun to catch on in the country. For female skiers, it was even more difficult: They had no coach until the final weeks before the Olympics, and many people still debated whether skiing was “ladylike” enough for women to participate. As a full slate of alpine skiing events made its Olympic debut in the first winter games since 1936 (1940 and 1944 had been canceled due to World War II), nobody expected much of anything from the United States—and particularly from Fraser, who, at 28 years old, was the oldest member of the team.

Atop the mountain, the wait continued for Fraser. Two minutes. Five minutes. At 10 minutes, the starter allowed Fraser out of the gate to stretch her legs. She wore her hair in long braids, since between training and traveling she had no time to get it styled. Her goggles fogged up, so she pushed them up.

Seventeen minutes after Fraser first stepped into the starting gate, the clock malfunction was fixed. Fraser, the first skier out of the gate that day, was unruffled. She plunged down the hill into virgin snow, goggles clinging to her forehead as she maneuvered her way down the mountain at 60 miles per hour and weaved through the slalom gates in 57.5 seconds. She had bested her first run. Now she had to wait for 45 other competitors to ski the course and see if they could beat her.

No one did.

“A pretty western housewife, her pigtails flying,” read one newspaper article, “accomplished something no American had done before—win an Olympic medal for skiing.” Before the Games were over, she would go on to add a silver in alpine combined.

Seventy-five years after Gretchen Fraser became the first American woman to win a medal in Olympic skiing, her legacy endures in Sun Valley, where they named a restaurant after her, as well as a ski run, and erected a pair of statues in her honor. But as John Bechtholt soon discovered, outside of Sun Valley—and even in Bechtholt’s hometown of Tacoma—Fraser’s legacy had largely been forgotten.

Bechtholt, a frequent visitor to Sun Valley, picked up a copy of Luane Pfeifer’s book “Gretchen’s Gold” at a Starbucks and soon became obsessed with Fraser’s story. He went to the archival room of Tacoma Public Library to read more, but found no information about her. So he began collecting memorabilia and archiving articles about Fraser on his own. What he discovered was that, for a brief moment in the wake of her triumph in St. Moritz, Fraser was hailed as an American hero, her iconic pigtails depicted in advertisements and popular comic strips, adored for her All-American looks and her cheery demeanor, as well as her brilliance on the slopes.

But by 1982, a Washington Post article about America’s first Olympic medalists in skiing, it didn’t even mention Fraser.

Over time, Bechtholt discovered there was a lot more to Fraser’s story than a single gold medal. Beyond her brief dalliance with fame, she engaged in the kind of quiet heroism that Bechtholt and many others believe shouldn’t be forgotten—and, in fact, should earn her an enduring legacy in America’s Olympic history.

Gretchen Kunigk was born in Tacoma on Feb. 11, 1919, to a Norwegian mother and a German father who was the longtime head of the city’s water utility. Her mother, Clara, had grown up skiing in Norway, and gave Gretchen her first pair of skis when she was 13, taking her to Mount Rainier’s Paradise Valley for her first ski trip. In the 1930s, skiing in America was still in its nascent stages; without even a rope tow to get up the hill, Gretchen and her brother would hike up, ski down, and hike back up. Soon after, Mount Rainier began to host races. Among the winners was Don Fraser, a University of Washington student who worked at Boeing and would be selected to compete in the 1936 Olympics in Germany, assuming he paid his own way there. (He made the money by working on a freighter, then injured his hip in practice and was unable to race.)

In the wake of those Olympics, skiing began to take hold in the Pacific Northwest and beyond—including at Puget Sound (UPS), where Kunigk joined the school’s ski team as a student from 1937 to 1939. At the same time, Mount Rainier attracted a key visitor–Otto Lang, an instructor at a prestigious ski school in Austria who came to film an instructional movie and was so taken by Rainier  that he opened a ski school. And then he discovered his star pupil: Gretchen Kunigk. “In a very short time, I detected that this young lady had the determination and the doggedness to go places,” Lang would say.

In 1937, the 18-year-old Kunigk got her first big break. 20th Century Fox wanted to film a movie with the actress and former figure skater Sonja Henie that featured the hot new sport of downhill skiing. But they needed a double and contacted Lang, who suggested Gretchen. The movie, starring Henie and Tyrone Power, was called “Thin Ice,” and it was enough of a hit that it helped promote skiing to Americans who were just becoming acquainted with it and began to view it as a destination sport.

Among the epicenters of that ski boom in America was Sun Valley, which began to attract a crowd of movers and shakers from business, politics, and Hollywood. In 1938, Gretchen and Don Fraser—who had been competing side-by side in Pacific Northwest ski races for a couple of years—rode the train from Seattle to Idaho for the Harriman Cup, a relatively new competition that gathered some of the best ski racers in America at Sun Valley. Neither of them won any events, but a year later, they got married.

In Sun Valley, Fraser was Henie’s double in another ski movie, “Sun Valley Serenade”. She and Don moved to Denver, where, after the 1940 Olympics were canceled due to the war in Europe, Gretchen won the national championship in two events in 1941. When Don went off to serve in the Navy, Gretchen took flying lessons and earned her pilot’s license. Lang began making a series of patriotic films and asked Gretchen to ski for Henie in Utah, where she saw something that would change the course of her life. After meeting amputees returning from the war at a nearby hospital, Fraser became determined to teach them to ski.

“I had no idea how to do it,” she later admitted. “I just figured there must be a way to help them enjoy life again and show them confidence.”

As the war ended and the 1948 Olympics approached, Fraser figured her competitive skiing career was probably over. But Don urged her to attend the tryouts in Sun Valley. She referred to herself, only half-jokingly, as a “retread.” Still, she managed to beat out 14-year-old phenom Andrea Mead and win a place on the team. She boarded a train from Seattle to New York, sailed across the Atlantic, took a train to Paris, and spent two days on a train riding up the mountain to St. Moritz. “She is blonde, pretty, proficient, and strangely inclined to humbleness,” one reporter wrote of Fraser after she won the gold medal, and when she made it back to the United States after her victory, she was feted as an All-American hero.

In New York, Sonja Henie threw a party celebrating America’s two newest gold medalists–Fraser and ice skater Dick Button. When Fraser returned home, she was honored in Portland and Tacoma. Vancouver held a parade for their newest local hero, with dozens of local girls doing their hair in pigtails like Fraser’s. Advertisers jockeyed for her endorsements. In addition to promoting the Union Pacific resort in Sun Valley, Fraser signed deals with Wheaties, appeareing on trading cards and cereal boxes, and the sportswear company Jantzen. She appeared in dozens of comic books and traveled to Norway to visit her mother’s relatives and meet the prince.

One of Fraser’s first stops upon her return home set the tone for how she viewed her obligations, both as an Olympic medalist and able-bodied athlete. She went to Barnes General Hospital in Vancouver and visited injured veterans. Eventually, she started a program for disabled skiers in Portland called the Flying Outriggers and became an honorary chairwoman of the Special Olympics. When 16-year-old Sun Valley racer Muffy Davis was paralyzed in a training accident in 1989, Fraser showered Davis with gifts and encouragement, including a four-leaf clover pin that the founder of Sun Valley, Averell Harriman, had given to Fraser before the 1948 Olympics.

In an interview with Ski magazine, Davis said Fraser told her the pin brought her good fortune and she wanted to pass the luck on. And apparently it worked, as Davis won seven Paralympic medals in skiing and cycling and later served in the Idaho Legislature.

“If you accept and take advantages offered by a community or country,” Fraser wrote to herself in papers found after her death, “you give of volunteer time and money in return for that privilege.”

Fraser spent four years after the 1948 Olympics as an ambassador and endorser. Then she gave up that public profile in order to raise her family and pursue the causes she was passionate about.

“I did what I could to help out our business,” she later told the Columbian newspaper in Vancouver. “I had a contract [for endorsements], but I had to be an All-American girl. I never smoked, anyway, but that was one of the things the contract didn’t allow.”

As she retreated from the public eye, Fraser’s fame began to dim. She joked that one magazine article about her “said something like, ‘I won the first American medals, had a child, and went back home to oblivion.’” Her life may have quieted, but it was anything but pedestrian: After serving as manager of the Olympic ski team in 1952, she continued to fly (famed pilot Chuck Yeager was among her mentors), work with disabled skiers, indulge her passion for horses by serving on the Olympic equestrian committee, and promote skiing at home and abroad. She was inducted into the UPS Athletic Hall of Fame in 1989. She died in Sun Valley at the age of 75 in 1994, just a few weeks after her husband.

Bechholt presumes—as many others have—that Fraser was overlooked for decades in large part because of her gender. He’s given away some of his materials about her to Tacoma Public Library and Tacoma Historical Society, and as he seeks a home for the remainder of his collection, he’s hoping Fraser’s story will be told over and over.

“It was just shocking to me. She’s the most celebrated and achieved athlete to come out of Tacoma,” Bechtholt said. “And no one had heard about her.”

Reprinted from University of Puget Sound’s Arches, a publicatioin which chronicles UPS alumni.

Because she wants people to treat each other humanely, Maralise Hood Quan will find herself in December at one of the epicenters of efforts for a more harmonious world.

The Tacoma woman will attend this year’s Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony and related events in Oslo, Norway as the guest of Greater Tacoma Peace Prize. The latter organization annually honors a local community member who promotes peace at home and abroad, and then sends them to the Nobel festivities as part of its Laureate award. While in Norway, Quan will also visit and meet with several peace-related organizations, including the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the Nansen Center for Peace and Dialogue (located in Lillehammer), and the Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights.

It’s fitting company for Quan. Greater Tacoma Peace Prize leaders noted, in announcing her award, that in a career spanning four decades, she “has dedicated herself both within her community and abroad to developing tools and systems for bringing people together to resolve conflict,” starting with coordinating the Conflict Resolution Program at the United Nations University of Peace in Costa Rica and now as executive director of the Tacoma-based Center for Dialog and Resolution.

The center (CDR) was founded in 1994 by community members seeking low-cost ways to resolve differences. Originally named the Pierce County Center for Dispute Resolution, CDR receives more than 20,000 requests per year from people looking for help handling a conflict in their lives.

In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic and ongoing local and national racial injustices, Hood began “Refresh Friday,” going live on Facebook once a week to discuss opportunities for achieving peace. And as the pandemic eviction moratorium began to be lifted across Washington, she joined with other dispute resolution centers across the state to develop the Eviction Resolution Pilot Program to reduce the financial burden faced by landlords and keep financially strapped tenants off the streets.

The board of directors for Greater Tacoma Peace Prize hailed Quan’s dedication to “open conversation about conflict in the community.” They praised her efforts to increase the public’s access to CDR’s services, which often are a diversion from the legal system, and to build a diverse corps of mediators who reflect and understand communities. Christine Gleason, who nominated her, wrote Quan “is guided by a key principle: She wants people to learn how to treat each other more humanely.”

Quan, writing on CDR’s website, said, “When we look around at a society rife with conflict and division, I believe the best gift we can give ourselves and others is the ability and willingness to listen.”

The Greater Tacoma Peace Prize, a non-profit organization that has been honoring its Laureates since 2005, is rooted in Norwegian-American culture and the Norwegian dedication to peace processes. Modeled after the Nobel Prize for Peace, it was founded by Tom Heavey Sr., a longtime Pierce County resident who is retired from the Coast Guard Reserve and is a former AmeriCorps program manager, and was established by a committee representing the three largest Norwegian-American institutions in Pierce County (Sons of Norway, Daughters of Norway, and Pacific Lutheran University).

Along with giving its Laureates a trip for two to Oslo, the Tacoma group awards them with a perpetual plaque and glass artwork created especially for the honor by the Hilltop Artists in Residence of Tacoma.

Winter means cold and dark days for everyone and, for some folks, a dose of SAD.

People suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) as a result of the lack of sunshine that is thought to trigger a chemical change in the brain, leading to a type of depression that medical and behavioral experts say can be offset by light therapy, psychotherapy, antidepressants, and simply talking about it with a friend.

SAD usually starts during adulthood, gets worse with age, and affects women more often than men. And it abounds in Washington. Compared to the rest of the states, Washington has the third-highest rate, due to temperatures averaging in the 40s, persistent rain and grayness, and a grand total of about 400 hours of sunlight during winter, according to a national study by Mattress Next Day.

“Unfortunately, some people with SAD can have symptoms up to five months of the year,” said Dr. Jeff Eisen, chief medical officer of MultiCare Health System’s Behavioral Health Network. “This condition can affect all aspects of someone’s life, including their ability to work productively or socialize with their loved ones.”

Experts at Johns Hopkins Medicine say the most common symptoms of SAD include:

• Increased sleep and daytime drowsiness.
• Loss of interest and pleasure in favorite activities.
• Social withdrawal and increased sensitivity to rejection.
• Irritability, anxiety, and feelings of guilt and hopelessness.
• Fatigue or low energy.
• Decreased sex drive.
• Decreased ability to focus, concentrate, or think clearly.
• Increased appetite, especially for sweets and carbohydrates, and weight gain.
• Physical problems, such as headaches.

According to the American Psychiatric Association, SAD sufferers experience mood changes and symptoms similar to depression. The most difficult months tend to be January and February. While much less common, some people experience SAD in the summer. About 5 percent of adults in the U.S. experience SAD for about 40 percent of the year.

SAD is more than just “winter blues.” The symptoms can be distressing, overwhelming, and can interfere with day-to-day functioning.

As seasons change, people experience a shift in their biological internal clock or circadian rhythm that can cause them to be out of step with their daily schedule. SAD is more common in people living far from the equator where there are fewer daylight hours in the winter.

SAD can’t be prevented, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to suffer through symptoms that are life-threatening or disruptive, Eisen said. He said a good first step is having a primary-care physician assess the symptoms and refer a patient to a mental health specialist, if needed. Connecting with family or friends can also be helpful.

“One of the most important things people can do is talk about their concerns and feelings with someone they trust,” Eisen said. “Sometimes people who experience SAD or other forms of depression may be hesitant to reach out. If we could talk about mental health concerns as openly as we talk about diabetes or high blood pressure, then we could erase some of that stigma and create more opportunities for people to get the help they need.”

The Mattress Next Day study ranked the five states where SAD is most prevalent. At the top is Alaska (not surprising given its scarcity of sunshine and temperatures as low as minus-2), followed by New York, Washington, Vermont, and Michigan. Oregon, among others, was high on the SAD register, too.

At the other end of the spectrum, people in Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico are the least likely to suffer from SAD, due largely to milder temperatures.

By Farah Eltohamy and Mai Hoang

Crosscut.com

From her pristine garden to her punchy graphic t-shirts, 78-year-old Judie Short emanates a great warmth and appreciation for everything around her.

Upon entering her home in Aberdeen’s Leisure Manor Estates, guests find an office nook lined with vintage knickknacks and Seattle Seahawks memorabilia. Her kitchen shines in a resplendent shade of cherry red, and its many windows let in sunlight that carries on to the rest of the house. It’s a three-bedroom home, but she has converted the second and third bedrooms into a cat-themed craft room and a playroom for when her grandchildren come to visit.

“When we moved in five years ago, it was going to be an affordable place to live and everybody here got along so well,” she said. “We had activities and you could go out and walk and visit with people, and it’s just a good community – and now everybody’s nervous and nobody knows what’s going to happen next.”

In late 2021, a Port Orchard-based mobile home management company, Hurst and Son LLC, acquired Leisure Manor in a string of pandemic-era purchases – and since then, its tenants have faced steep rent increases, threatening them with “economic eviction,” along with new alleged problems with upkeep and maintenance that did not exist before.

Hurst and Son’s growing presence in Washington reflects a broader pattern in which investors increasingly purchase and centralize such communities, making one of the last reliable options for lower-income housing less and less affordable. Lawmakers opened the door this year to expanding resident-led ownerships of park communities, but other proposals to regulate the industry and cap rising rents stalled. Leisure Manor has since become an example of how mobile park residents can band together with other communities to push back and defend their homes. 

“This is not trailer trash,” longtime tenant Bill Hardy said during a recent tour of the park. His wife, Caroline, helped found a new tenants association and has rallied neighbors to organize in opposition – from filing complaints to the state attorney general’s office to coming out in support of a rent notice ordinance at their local city council. 

“We’re hoping to get all these people together,” Caroline Hardy said, “so that we can fight.”

Leisure Manor Estates – a lush, idyllic community tucked off Highway 105 — has long served as a retreat for seniors away from some of the surrounding small-town dreariness. Pastel homes line the streets, front lawns lovingly adorned with kitschy lawn gnomes and wooden figurines. An average day is quite still – save for the occasional dog bark or cheerful greeting between neighbors on their morning walks. 

In this community, everybody knows everybody – and despite the supposed impermanence of these homes, many of Leisure Manor’s tenants have settled into this steady way of life for decades. When Hurst and Son took over the park in late 2021, their lives were upended – and many “For Sale” signs have since gone up throughout the nearly 200 lots. 

“I came home from my walk this morning, seeing those other for-sale signs, and just wanted to throw a sign on the front of our place,” Short said. “I just wanted to get the hell out of here.”

Residents said they paid around $485 in rent and utilities under the previous management. Now, with Hurst and Son’s most recent rent proposals, residents will be expected to pay closer to $750 – an increase of approximately 55 percent. Residents also told Crosscut that Hurst and Son introduced separate charges for garbage and sewer services, costing community members close to an additional $100 a month. 

They said Hurst and Son also cut landscaping service, leaving residents to mow their own lawns and maintain common areas. Older residents, some in their 90s with limited mobility, now pay additional costs to hire lawn services. If residents don’tt comply with Hurst and Son’s rules on mowing or parking, they risk a $65 fee per violation. 

“It’s a real racket. Maybe I’m just jealous that I didn’t think of it,” Short quipped.

Run by husband and wife Caleb and Kristina Romack, Hurst and Son has acquired 60 mobile home parks since 2017, according to the company’s website, with many purchased during the pandemic. The company now lists 73 manufactured home communities across five states, including 56 in 21 Washington counties. The company also owns several commercial properties. 

Records from several county assessor offices indicate Hurst and Son spent at least $116 million on 35 parks in Washington in the past six years. Many were purchased well above assessed value, including Leisure Manor Estates, which was purchased for $11 million, close to double the county’s assessment value of $5.6 million. (Federal data shows the company also received approximately $200,000 in pandemic economic aid in 2020.)

The company continues to expand into other parts of the Northwest with purchases in Idaho and Montana and even has gone as far as North Dakota, where it owns three parks. 

Caleb Romack declined to comment when Crosscut reached him on his cell phone. The Romacks didn’t respond to multiple e-mails or voicemails requesting response to complaints in this story. The couple have pledged to address complaints or park damage in previous news stories. In e-mails to state officials, Hurst and Son contends it is following relevant laws. 

Earlier this year, the Yakima Herald-Republic detailed rent hikes at Hurst and Son communities in Yakima e.coli contamination in the water at one of those parks. The Moscow-Pullman Daily News covered a meeting in March when residents from Hurst and Son communities in Moscow, Idaho in light of rent raises and limits on selling their homes. 

Bellingham tenants shared similar complaints last year.

For this story, Crosscut spoke with dozens of Hurst and Son community residents across the state, housing advocates, and lawmakers. Crosscut also obtained lease records, e-mails between the company and residents, property sale records, and consumer-complaint data from the state attorney general. 

In recent years, many mobile-home community landlords have grown rapidly, acquiring and consolidating management over parks amid an explosion of investor interest. Residents say new owners often implement steep rent increases and cut services that reduce property values and quality of life.

Management companies have argued that rent increases are necessary to keep up with market rates and to make improvements to communities.  Some sell potential investors on purchasing manufactured-home communities by saying such homes add to a region’s housing stock and help improve housing affordability. 

However, Victoria O’Banion, who works with manufactured-home owners in Washington and Idaho to form ownership cooperatives to buy their communities, argues such rent increases are part of a multi-year “gentrification cycle.” She said the end game is to move residents to higher rents and flip the park for many times the purchase price. In other words, the communities become another housing option for higher-income earners, while those with tighter incomes are left with fewer choices. Seniors and other fixed-income residents increasingly get priced out of one of the last accessible housing options. 

“Eventually,” she said, “’grandma Sally’ is economically evicted.” 

Deb Wilson and Caroline Hardy, long-term residents of Leisure Manor, said they had no experience organizing or networking before Hurst and Son took over the Aberdeen park. Now, they feel like it might be their best chance to save the community they love. 

Shortly after the Hurst and Son acquisition, the women began to notice how deeply the rest of their community bore the weight of management. They said tenants confided their fears of no longer being able to afford to live there and of speaking up about any other inconveniences within the park.

The women contacted Anne Sadler, a longtime mobile-home owner in Mount Vernon and president of the Washington Association of Manufactured Homeowners. Sadler had kept an eye on Hurst and Son and said their practices have become increasingly predatory in recent years.

“They’re all about the money, that’s all they care about. They care nothing about these people,” she said. “Another little, frail, elderly woman who could barely struggle out of her unit came up to me and said, ‘I’m not going to be able to pay my rent. I’m not going to be able to live here. I have nowhere else to go.’”

With few options for legal recourse, Sadler has advised tenants to take up their concerns with the state attorney general, whose office oversees a manufactured-housing dispute resolution program for helping negotiate conflicts between residents and landlords. Hardy and Wilson said they’ve helped several neighbors submit complaints.

“The attorney general – we’ve got people filing complaints, but they don’t do much,” Hardy said recently. “You know, the system is there, but it’s functioning against these people.”

The state attorney general’s (AG) office has received at least 102 consumer complaints filed against mobile home parks owned by Hurst and Son since 2016, 82 of which are closed. The office declined to answer questions about its handling of them or interactions with Hurst and Son managers.

In e-mails between the AG and the company, regional managers said they followed all provisions of the Manufactured/Mobile Home Landlord-Tenant Act (RCW 59.20) in raising rents and notifying tenants.

Ishbel Dickens, a retired attorney with experience working in manufactured-housing tenant rights, said the act prevents homeowners from being evicted without any cause but doesn’t limit how far a landlord can raise a tenant’s rent, which has been the case with landlords such as Hurst and Son, who could evict residents “just by making it too expensive to stay there.”

In what they hope can serve as a template for other communities, Hardy and Wilson helped establish the Aberdeen Tenant Association in 2022 to collectively push for new protections, including a City Council-approved ordinance requiring more notice of rent increases at Aberdeen parks so residents have more time to adjust their finances or find new housing. 

Wilson and Hardy said they’ll seek solidarity among other parks for a potential class-action lawsuit by meeting with other Hurst and Son residents in the Puget Sound area.

The manufactured-home industry often highlights its role in providing affordable housing, especially as home prices have spiked during the pandemic. In 2022, the average sales price for all new manufactured homes in the U.S. was $123,300 (not including the cost of renting underlying property), compared to $540,000 for a conventional-built home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Most residents who own manufactured homes must still lease the lot it sits on. Paying off their home doesn’t guarantee stability, since they still remain subject to the rental rates of the lot owner. 

Many residents own homes that have become too old to move. They may be called “mobile” homes, but more often they are functionally anchored to their lots.

Washington’s Department of Commerce reports about 30 communities with a combined 582 lots have closed statewide since 2017. The agency offers a relocation program with technical and financial assistance to eligible residents — based on income — who are impacted by a community closure. However, there’s a limit to the amount of financial assistance — up to $11,000 for a single-wide home and $17,000 for a double-wide. 

In some scenarios, owners may still have to sign over their home to the community owner because even with cash assistance, it might not be financially or practically feasible to move their home. The assistance might instead go toward finding other housing rather than preserving their home.  

One resident who lived in the Hideaway community in Spokane for nearly 24 years said Hurst and Son had promised improvements to the park when they purchased it in 2015. They repaved the roads but have done little work since. Residents also complained about a new water fee policy that they said split water charges evenly across tenants each month instead of tracking use with individual meters, meaning a single retiree pays for consuming as much water as a large family household regardless of actual usage.

The Washington Legislature passed a new law this year requiring the state’s Department of Commerce to provide notifications when a mobile-home community goes up for sale, allowing residents a chance to band together to purchase them. Sen. Noel Frame, a Democrat representing Seattle’s 36th Legislative District, said she authored the bill after growing concerns over the “broader trend of displacement for low-income folks and seniors.” Frame said they “weren’t even getting an opportunity to compete or to purchase, and now they have that opportunity.”

The bill also builds in a penalty of $10,000 if landlords willingly fail to comply with notifying the state of a pending purchase. If the problem continues, Frame said, the attorney general’s office will get involved.

Commerce officials started listing community sales on the market in July. O’Banion and ROC Northwest has worked with two dozen owner-cooperatives to purchase communities in Washington and Idaho. O’Banion noted the average annual rent increase for resident-owned communities across the U.S. is just under 1 percent, well below the double-digit increases seen at Hurst and Son communities. 

When a community goes up for sale, O’Banion said, ROC Northwest starts meeting with resident homeowners to assess the feasibility of a cooperative and vote on the matter. She said a successful cooperative generally needs the support of 57 percent of the residents and a strong commitment to collective ownership. 

Given the upfront cost, the owners might still have to weather an increase, she explained, but the hope is that the lot rent will eventually stabilize. 

O’Banion and other housing advocates argued mobile-home park residents still need additional help from state and federal agencies to compete with the deep pockets and aggressive management of investors looking to take advantage of these communities. 

State Sen. Kevin Van de Wege, who’s from Sequim, introduced Senate Bill 5697 this year to prohibit mobile-home community rent increases larger than the rate of inflation, give the state Utilities and Transportation Commission new authority to regulate rates and services in those communities, and fine landlords up to $100,000 for violating the limits. The proposed legislation didn’t pass. 

O’Banion said her organization and other advocates will continue working with legislators to push for additional policies, such as rent stabilization, to ensure continued affordability for manufactured-home owners.

“Manufactured homes must be preserved, maintained, and developed as part of the landscape of affordable housing,” she said.  

Source: Crosscut.com, a non-profit Pacific Northwest news site. It’s part of Cascade Public Media.

HURST AND SON-OWNED COMMUNITIES IN PIERCE, KING AND KITSAP COUNTIES

Of the 56 mobile home communities in Washington owned by Hurst and Son, six are in Pierce and King counties:

• Sunrise Terrace Community, on Chambers Creek Road West in University Place.
• Seacoma Community, on outh 268^th Street in Des Moines.
• Maple Lane Community, on Maple Lane South in Kent.
• Laurel Lane Community, on 96^th Street South in Tacoma.
• Northwest Community, on San Francisco Avenue Southwest in Lakewood.
• Cottonwood Community, on 80^th Avenue East in Puyallup.

Four more are in Kitsap County—Olympic View Community in Olalla and, in Bremerton, Rocky Point Community, Pinewood Park, and Aero Community. The 56 total locations are about evenly divided between the state’s west and east sides.

The company also own communities in Idaho, Oregon, Montana, and North Dakota.