File photo by Andrew Goff.



PREVIOUSLY

Negotiations over Fortuna’s efforts to cap mobile home rent increases might be ending soon, but some advocates say the protections don’t go far enough.

Since mid-2025, mobile home owners in the Royal Crest mobile home park have been fighting for regulations that would limit how much and how often the park owner can raise their rents. (The owners of mobile homes don’t usually own the land in the park it sits on.) Fortuna’s city council declared a moratorium on rent increases in September, and floated a draft Rent Stabilization Ordinance (RSO) at a recent city council meeting. It offers many asked-for guardrails, like annual rent increases hitched to inflation and limiting when landlords can void their tenant’s leases. But some members of the advocacy group Save Our Seniors (SOS) are criticizing the draft for leaving open some loopholes. 

“A weak ordinance would fail the very mobile home owners it is meant to protect,” reads an SOS statement sent to the Outpost. “There are critical deficiencies in the draft language that could allow park owners to bypass protections, impose excessive increases, or retaliate through service reductions.”

The RSO tethers the amount the owners of Royal Crest can raise the rent to the Consumer Price Index, a handy shorthand for inflation. If the CPI rises 2% in a year, then the landlord can raise their monthly rent 2% at the start of the next year. However, if inflation rises drastically, so could the rent. In 2022, for instance, the dollar inflated over 8%. The SOS wants the law to cap annual increases at 3% or at the amount the CPI rose, whichever was lower. 

The RSO that governs mobile home rent in unincorporated Humboldt County allows park owners to increase their rents annually at the rate of the CPI. Currently in Fortuna, park owners can raise the rent as much as they like every 90 days.

Another point of contention is allowing park owners to raise rents whenever the houses are sold; there’s currently not a provision stopping landlords from jacking up rents on the next home owner whenever someone moves. The SOS prefers that landlords be banned from raising the rent more than 3% on the next owner every time a home is sold.

Turnover rates at the park aren’t steady. SOS spokesman Ricardo Tallamente, 71, told the Outpost that houses mainly turned over when residents died or couldn’t afford the rent any longer. 

If a park owner sinks money into improving their park’s infrastructure, they’re allowed to petition Fortuna for permission to raise the rent. The SOS also quibbles with Fortuna’s plan to appoint someone to determine when that’s OK and say someone from California’s Office of Administrative Hearings should do the work. (Check out the SOS’s other complaints here.)

Tallamente and his wife moved to Royal Crest in 2021 after long careers in Bay Area tech.  They’re insulated from the monetary pressures squeezing out other residents, but have seen plenty of other residents move.

In 2015, residents were charged about $450 monthly. It’s now $875. For some of the seniors living on pensions or fixed incomes, who have to plan their budgets years in advance, slowing the increases is crucial. The rent freeze ends in late April, and park residents are eager to get the RSO enacted before then. 

Fortuna City Manager Amy Nilsen told the Outpost she couldn’t comment on the proposed changes until the public comment period closes on Jan. 30, and said that they’d be “reviewed and considered with attention to legal requirements and Fortuna’s administrative capacity to implement them.”

Much of the existing laws on RSOs focus on making sure property owners are fairly compensated for their work, but Tallamente said he wasn’t interested in prioritizing that.

“It’s all about affordability,” Tallamente said. “We don’t really care what the property owner thinks at this point.”

SOS leader Hilary Mosher was unavailable for comment. A request for comment from a lawyer representing the owners of Royal Crest was not returned. We’ll update this article when it is.