Dear Friends,

Here is Mardi’s Story (Mardi-Story) – A Cautionary Tale about manufactured housing living – please read Mardi’s Story, sign the on-line petition, and then forward this email to as many people as you can and encourage them to sign the on-line petition too – they do not need to be a manufactured home owner, they just need to be outraged that seniors living in manufactured housing communities are being treated like Mardi.

Here are some of the highlights:

·         Mardi is a widow living in DeAnza Manufactured Housing Community – a 55+ community in Santa Cruz, CA

·         Mardi owns her home and pays a monthly fee for the land under her home

·         The City of Santa Cruz has spent $700,000 in legal expenses defending its rent control ordinance from challenges brought by Equity Life Style (ELS) the largest corporate own of manufactured housing communities in the country

·         Santa Cruz can no longer afford to defend its ordinance and so agreed to allow ELS to raise rents to “fair market value” for any new households who moves into DeAnza.

·         ELS set the new rents at anywhere from $1,700 – $5,000/month depending on where the home might be situated in the community.

·         This means that no homes are being sold (nobody can afford a rent of $60,000/annum) and seniors like Mardi have lost all their equity and have no inheritance to pass on to their families and/or no money to pay for assisted living should they require it in later life.

·         To add insult to injury, the largest shareholder in ELS – Sam Zell – uses some of his personal wealth (estimated at $4.9 billion – he is 1% of the 1%) to support candidates and positions that would decimate Social Security and Medicare.

If you think people like Mardi deserve better – the opportunity to live out their lives with reassurance that rents will be reasonable and with confidence that retirement security and health care will be available to them – the please sign the petition – click on the link below.  Please forward this to as many people as you can and urge them to sign the on-line petition too.

Click here to sign the petition: http://bit.ly/IWGgB5

Ishbel Dickens

Executive Director

Manufactured Home Owners Association of America (MHOAA)

PO Box 22346

Seattle WA 98112