Having toiled in machine shops during World War II and worked for decades in other manual jobs, 84-year-old Mary Kubancik felt entitled to live out her years in a pleasant mobile home park in Sylmar.
Instead, the frail Kubancik is preparing to move out after 19 years. Her $919 monthly Social Security check won't cover her essentials and the $702 that her mobile home space will cost when the latest double-digit increase takes effect in April.
"I worked since I was 14 years old, and this is all I have," she said, tears vying with anger in her eyes. "I had to sell. And this was supposed to be my golden years."
Six rows away, Elisena Thompson, 86, doesn't worry about making ends meet, thanks to rent control rules that have kept her space at $385 a month. In a quirk of geography, the 186-unit Blue Star Mobile Home Park, where both women live, is partly in the city of Los Angeles, which has a rent control law, and partly in an unincorporated area, which has none.
Across town is Robert Kubota, 66, a pharmacist and chief executive of a family firm that operated a mobile home park in Chula Vista for 44 years. He blames rent control laws for six years of financial losses on the park. A Bankruptcy Court judge agreed that the business was not sustainable and approved a plan that led to the closure of Jade Bay Mobile Lodge last year.
"With rent control, you couldn't make any money," Kubota said. "The social problem of helping the poor should not be thrown on one industry."
In the spring, voters will decide whose interests prevail. More than 100 owners and operators of apartment buildings and mobile home parks spent nearly $2 million to put an initiative on the June 3 ballot to phase out California's rent control laws. About 1.2 million people statewide are covered by such laws.
Los Angeles, which has 626,600 rent-controlled residential units, could be affected more than any other city if the measure passes.
Big financial backers of the California Property Owners and Farmland Protection Act include the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., which gave $100,000 to the effort and lent the campaign $200,000; the Western Manufactured Housing Communities Issues political action committee, which contributed $150,000; and the Apartment Owners Assn. PAC, which put in $100,000.
Among the donations is $50,000 from Equity Lifestyle Properties Inc., which owns 27 mobile home parks in California and many more in other states. Equity Lifestyle's chairman is Sam Zell, chairman and chief executive of Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times.
