Residents fear a new park owner could make more steep lot rent increases or even demolish the park to build more lucrative housing, erasing 40 affordable units dominated by Steamboat workers.
Caption: Misty Carter and her partner of 13 years Chad King pose for a photo in front of their home in Milner Mobile Home Park on Thursday, Aug. 9. (Dylan Anderson/The Yampa Valley Bugle)
Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:38 a.m. to include comment from the City of Steamboat Springs on whether someone could apply for short-term rental tax revenues to buy the Mobile Home Park. City Principal Planner Brad Calvert said the current process is limited to projects in the city limits or urban growth boundary, so a project proposal in Milner would not be eligible for funding in the current request for proposal process.
Sixteen days ago, homeowners at Milner Mobile Home Park learned the ground under their homes is for sale.
A July 24 letter sent to residents informing them of the park owner’s intent to list the property started a 120-day clock where residents have the opportunity to make an offer to buy the park. But with a list price of $8 million — $200,000 each when split across the 40 lots — some residents told The Yampa Valley Bugle on Thursday evening that they are ‘terrified’ for what the future holds.
“We are living here for a reason, because we could afford it — this is our stepping stone,” said Misty Carter, who has lived in the park since 2014 and has become one of the residents working to organize and share information around a potential sale.
The $8 million listing price is more than double the $3.7 million that the park sold for in 2021, according to Routt County property records. Since ownership shifted from an onsite owner to one based in Texas that year, the lot rent for where her family lives has nearly doubled, said Carter, who works for the Steamboat Springs School District.
Residents fear a sale for such a high asking price would force whoever buys the park to push lot rents even higher, making it even harder to make ends meet and near impossible to sell their homes to move elsewhere.
Alternatively, new park owners could decide to redevelop the nine-acre property to a type of housing with a higher resale value in an effort to recoup their investment, forcing residents to relocate or abandon their homes. A 1,600 square-foot single family home a block away from the park is currently listed for $949,000.
Residents are in contact with the Yampa Valley Housing Authority, which was able to buy Whitehaven Mobile Home Park in Steamboat Springs two years ago with a combination of donations and low-interest loans. Executive Director Jason Peasley said Thursday that the Housing Authority does not have the money to buy the park. Still, Peasley said he has reached out to groups that may be interested, though no funding has surfaced so far.
Neighbors held their first broad community meeting about the looming for sale listing on Wednesday evening, where they agreed that they wanted to learn more about options available to them as part of Colorado’s Mobile Home Park Act. They plan to meet again in two weeks, as 120 days doesn’t feel like a lot of time to many.
“Everybody has a say right now,” Carter said. “In 105 days, we don’t.”
Friday marks 104 days.
Day 0 is Nov. 21.
‘Where do you go?’
Photo: All 40 mobile homes at Milner Mobile Home Park are owner occupied. (Dylan Anderson/The Yampa Valley Bugle)
The Milner park is just the latest of Routt County’s mobile home parks to entertain changing hands, with parks selling in each of the last three years. Each sale has had varying outcomes for the people who call these community’s their home.
Willow Hill in Oak Creek sold for $8.4 million in 2023, and with new out-of-town owners came steep lot rent increases. In 2022, the Yampa Valley Housing Authority bought Whitehaven Mobile Home Park in Steamboat with the combination of anonymous donations and loans with favorable interest rates. Lot rents are currently $685 a month and YVHA has plans to eventually turn ownership over to the park’s residents.
The 2021 Milner sale largely caught residents off guard. The near doubling in lot rents since the sale — from $500 to $1,000 in three years — is making it harder to get by in this pocket of relative housing affordability just down valley from housing-starved Steamboat Springs.
Kari Rideout has lived in the Milner park since 2013 after growing up in Steamboat II. She supports her single income family as an optometric tech at Mountain Eyeworks in Steamboat, and recent increases have been particularly difficult to weather.
“We just want to be able to live,” Rideout said. “Steamboat is already very expensive, so we moved out a little bit further. Then this becomes too expensive — Where do you go from there?”
The July 24 letter has versions of the information in both English and Spanish. It includes multiple bolded sentences declaring the notice of intent to list the park and other contents of the letter are “confidential,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Yampa Valley Bugle.
Peasley said the housing authority learned of the park being put up for sale late last week, before residents reached out to him on Thursday morning. Peasley said he ran an initial financial analysis on the park and reached out to groups that are typically interested in mobile home park preservation, but hasn’t heard back yet in terms of funding.
The Milner park is similar to Whitehaven in Steamboat because it is a “naturally occurring affordable housing property,” Peasley said. Milner does have 13 more units, but the $3.125 million YVHA paid at Whitehaven amounts to $115,000 per unit, well below the $200,000 per unit for the current asking price in Milner.
Brad Calvert, Principal Planner with the City of Steamboat Springs said a proposal for short-term rental tax dollars to support the purchase of the Milner park would not be eligible based on the request for proposals that is currently circulating.
"The current RFP establishes eligible locations as within the City of Steamboat Springs or within the city’s Urban Growth Boundary. So, a Milner application for this solicitation is not eligible" Calvert said, in an email. "Future solicitations for STR Tax investment are likely to have different eligibility provisions."
Another difference is that Milner is not in Steamboat and is just beyond the boundaries of YVHA’s taxing district, but Peasley said he didn’t think that mean much in this case.
“That is one of the places that people have moved up and out of some of our apartment places to,” Peasley said, saying he remembers when Carter lived at YVHA’s Hillside Village Apartments. “She’s owns her own place, but it’s still not secure.”
In addition to building low-income housing, YVHA has worked to build housing for a broad range of incomes, a strategy they hope will eventually lead to more housing mobility in the Yampa Valley. Peasley said places like Milner Mobile Home Park are an important rung on the Steamboat housing ladder.
“It’s no good climbing the ladder when each of the rungs keep snapping as you step on it,” Peasley said.
‘Not a trailer park’
Caption: Keilty Briggs poses for a photo with her dog Captain in front of her home in Milner Mobile Home Park. (Dylan Anderson/The Yampa Valley Bugle)
Melanie Stewart moved into the Milner Mobile Home Park in the summer of 2000 when she was 23. She initially lived in one of the small houses that flank the neighborhood’s main road by the entrance on U.S. Highway 40.
Built by the Camilletti Family roughly a century ago, Stewart said calling it a two-bedroom house is a generous description — “You have to walk through one bedroom to get to the other.”
After a while, Stewart moved into the other single-family home on the property, a true two-bedroom home that even has a basement. In preparation of a growing family, she later bought one of the park’s 40 mobile homes and has lived there ever since, spending all of her 24 years in the Yampa Valley as a resident of Milner.
“Our kids were born here. … I’d hear ‘Ready or not, here I come’ and I’m like, awesome, kids play outside here,” said Stewart, who works for Steamboat Ski & Resort Corp. “And it’s stayed the same. 24 years later, kids are playing outside. … It’s not a trailer park, it’s a neighborhood.”
While the park is becoming less affordable because of steep increases, Stewart said she thought the parks owners were following the Mobile Home Park Act. While being drafted the bill had such a cap, but it was taken out after Gov. Jared Polis threatened to veto it in 2022 if rent caps remained.
"I would love at a state level to have a cap on the increases," Stewart said. "Everywhere across the state needs protection to have a cap on what that increase can be. It's not just our community. ... They can increase as much as they want and they can increase it again 12 months later."
Keilty Briggs, who lives at the end of the street in what was once the park owner’s home, has one of the best views in the park overlooking fields surrounding Milner. She’s been in the valley for 30 years and owns a cleaning business that primarily cleans short-term rental units in Steamboat.
“I didn’t even know this park existed,” Briggs said, saying she is a newer resident in the park. “I love mine… It’s been a super cool, vibey community.”
Briggs and Carter have taken on a leadership role in organizing the community to respond to the park being for sale. Carter says she isn’t entirely sure how she ended up leading, but felt like she had to do something to save her home — a home that has grown as her family has.
Chad King, Carter’s partner of 13 years, has lived in the park since 2002. When the two were expecting in 2013, he hauled away the old home on their lot and bought a new one. King said the purchase included service to move the home one more time, though he hopes it doesn’t come to that. Most homes at the park likely can't be moved.
“You think about buying the park as just a community and you look at that $8 million price tag — there’s just no way we’re going to be able to do that,” Carter said. “Right now, we have an opportunity to at least try.”