LIBERTY TOWNSHIP — When Bobbie Miller and her husband Steven bought their mobile home in rural Centre County 25 years ago, it seemed like the perfect place to grow older.
The new home on Dogwood Circle was affordable, part of a community owned by a local couple, and right next to Bald Eagle State Park. They have good neighbors.
Miller likes where she lives. But she wants to leave — and isn’t sure she can.
They own the home, but not the land beneath it. In the past, the couple planned for a $10 hike to their monthly lot fees every other year. Since a private company purchased the property last fall, fees have gone up three times, including a $45 base rent increase and new charges for trash and sewer. They were paying $405 per month when the property switched hands.
Now the Millers pay $535 per month, and they’re bracing for another increase later this year.
Miller isn’t sure they can keep up with rising costs; however, moving a mobile home isn’t as simple — or as cheap — as packing up and leaving. She was quoted $6,000 to move the place less than a mile away to land she owns.
The “lucky” ones have sold their home, though that’s getting harder, Miller told Spotlight PA.
“No one wants to move in with the increased lot rent,” she said. “People are stuck.”
Pennsylvania has an estimated 2,288 mobile home communities, and roughly 55,900 households within them, per a 2023 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, which conducts economic research.
“Manufactured housing is widely considered an important contributor to the unsubsidized affordable housing stock,” according to the report.
But many residents say that affordability is undermined by steep lot fee increases, as private equity firms buy these communities. That tension inspired the formation of the Coalition of Manufactured Home Communities of Pennsylvania, which has pushed back against rising lot fees.
“We are homeowners in all respects, and the only thing that we’re paying for is the postage stamp piece of land that our home sits on,” Bob Besecker, who founded the coalition, told Spotlight PA.
A bill awaiting consideration in the state Senate would limit lot rent increases by tying hikes to the Consumer Price Index while allowing exceptions for “extraordinary increases in operating expenses.” It would also require owners to disclose and justify increases in rents and fees, and allow residents and associations to meet on-site without limiting the time or number of attendees, among other things.
The legislation isn’t about limiting an owner’s ability to make money, said state Rep. Liz Hanbidge (D., Montgomery), the bill’s prime sponsor. Instead, it aims to increase transparency and ensure fair lot fee increases.
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro has said he’d sign the measure, even calling on lawmakers to pass the proposal while delivering his last budget address.
“Owning your own home is the American dream, but in recent years, we’ve seen greedy out-of-state corporations buy up our communities, increase costs to unaffordable levels, and take advantage of Pennsylvanians, especially our seniors,” Shapiro said in March while visiting a mobile home community in Berks County.
The legislation passed the state House 144-59 in June 2025 and has sat in a state Senate committee since. With the two-year session winding down, there’s no guarantee it will cross the finish line before the process has to start over again.
While state Senate Democrats have voiced their support for the legislation, Republicans who control the chamber haven’t committed to calling it up for a vote.
Community owners and other industry officials have pushed back against the legislation, arguing it caps revenue without cutting expenses necessary to operate these properties.
“They keep talking about these greedy community owners,” Mary Gaiski, executive vice president of the Pennsylvania Manufactured Housing Association, told Spotlight PA.
But it’s not greedy to keep up with rising costs, she added.
Landowners must make upgrades to these properties, and the cost of maintaining things like utility infrastructure and roads has gone up, Gaiski said. If they can’t make a profit, cutting costs or closing altogether are their options.
“Whenever you control the income and not the cost that they have to operate under, you’re setting them up for failure,” she said. “Are there a few bad apples or actors out there, whatever you want to call them? I’m sure there is because every business has that.”
While the terms mobile homes and manufactured homes are often used interchangeably, the latter refers to dwellings built according to standards established by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1976. The shift came after more people started living in these structures permanently. Ultimately, the difference comes down to when the home was built.
Most people who live in mobile home communities have been there for decades and are happy with their housing, according to a 2009 study supported by the General Assembly’s Center for Rural Pennsylvania. These residents tend to be older, with many being retired married couples or widowed individuals living on a small pension.
Under the proposal, lot rent increases in these communities would be based on the average Consumer Price Index — which measures the average change over time in prices of everyday goods and services — for the most recent year. The bill allows for increases of no less than 2% and no more than 4%, but makes exceptions for “extraordinary increases in operating expenses” to help landowners “get a fair return on their investment,” per the legislation.
Nathan Jameson, founder and managing partner of private equity firm Arx Capital, said that the costs of operating mobile home parks don’t move with the Consumer Price Index.
“If you look at what CPI is made up of, it’s made up of a basket of goods, like how much did your jeans cost, and how much are eggs,” he told Spotlight PA. “Whereas what we experience as landlords and operators in these mobile home parks is: What is fuel? What is insurance? What are property taxes? And those are increases that are on an annual basis.”
Additionally, legacy owners — people who’ve had a property for years or maybe inherited land — acquired it at a much lower price and “did what they thought was the right thing by not increasing rents with inflation,” Jameson said.
“As a result, and because they relied on it for their income solely, they didn’t have the income to invest in the property — to improve roads when they fail, to fix utilities when they don’t work, to remove a dangerous, vacant home, or bring a home in on a vacant spot,” he added.
In turn, those properties “fall into disrepair,” he said.
“We’re in the job of improving them and making sure they can hopefully be housing for far beyond my lifetime,” Jameson said.
Arx owns mobile home communities in Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The firm used to own Red Maple Acres in Lehigh County and faced criticism from residents over rate hikes.
Peggy Hoffman’s lot rent there has nearly doubled in the past few years, and now costs almost $900 per month. She’s in her 60s and raising her granddaughter alone, worrying that an unexpected bill would set her back even more. Hoffman told Spotlight PA these higher fees have also meant putting off things for herself like new dentures and hearing aids.
She and her neighbors don’t want a handout, she said.
“What we want is reasonable rent,” Hoffman said.
Jameson defended how his firm handled Red Maple Acres. The other bidder, he said, planned to tell everyone to leave and build industrial and retail space.
“That would’ve been 272 homes that are pretty affordable gone from the Lehigh Valley market that desperately needs it,” Jameson said.
He added that lot fees should reflect the market, noting that Arx considers a county’s median income and thinks about someone making 65%, among other things, to decide what’s affordable. Ideally, they get to that rate over time, but Jameson said the “rent control, sabre-rattling” is “forcing landlords and fiduciaries to move faster than they otherwise would.”
Another private equity firm bought Red Maple Acres for $30.5 million over the summer.
One mobile home community owner told Spotlight PA he thinks purchases like that are exploitative.
That owner, state Rep. Dan Moul (R., Adams), thinks private equity companies are taking advantage of older people.
“And that, to me, that’s just as bad as a scammer calling and scamming them out of their money,” Moul said. “It’s no different. These guys are just legally doing it.”
It’s up to lawmakers to ensure protections, he said.
“These people are trapped,” he told Spotlight PA. “People who rent apartments, they can always say, ‘Hey, he raised my rent too high. I’m going to look for another place.’ And they can look for another place.”
Hanbidge’s proposed legislation has been sitting in the state Senate Urban Affairs and Housing Committee for more than a year. State Sen. Joe Picozzi (R., Philadelphia), the committee chair with the power to bring it up for a vote, did not respond to interview requests for this story.
The clock is ticking for lawmakers to act. The state Senate returns to Harrisburg on Sept. 28, with only 11 voting days before the two-year session ends in November. Any bill that hasn’t passed the legislature and been signed into law by then must be reintroduced in 2027.
Linda Carranza, who lives in a mobile home community in Butler County, said she and her neighbors are “stubborn enough to wait.” However, she isn’t sure they’ll get to reap the benefits of any legislation enacting protections.
“Some of us are old enough we may not be here in two years, but hopefully, it helps the other seniors, the other vets,” she told Spotlight PA. “That’s what we want to do. We’re not doing this just for us.”
State Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) told Spotlight PA in a statement that Republican lawmakers have advanced a number of bills targeting housing supply and affordability.
Those measures include legislation to simplify the permitting and municipal approval processes for housing plans, create a savings account for first-time homebuyers with tax benefits, and support housing construction near job centers through local partnerships with developers.
He did not answer specific questions about Hanbidge’s bill.
“Balancing the property interests of community owners and residents is a critical part of this ongoing discussion to enable continued accessibility and development of affordable housing, including manufactured housing,” Pittman said. “Housing affordability is an important issue across the state, and it’s affecting everyone from those looking to buy their first house to seniors who want to remain in their homes.”
He also praised Shapiro’s Housing Action Plan, saying it reflects shared goals of expanding housing opportunities, modernizing regulations, and improving relationships between government and industry groups.
“We’re optimistic that we can work with the House to send truly significant housing bills to the governor’s desk this fall,” Pittman said.
The Coalition of Manufactured Home Communities of Pennsylvania isn’t as hopeful that those efforts will include Hanbidge’s bill, but the advocacy group hasn’t given up on the issue, Besecker told Spotlight PA.
Advocates from the coalition met with Pittman last week, but Besecker said the lawmaker didn’t commit to taking action on the legislation. A spokesperson for Pittman confirmed the meeting and referred Spotlight PA to the senator’s previous statement on the matter when asked whether there are plans to move the bill when lawmakers return to Harrisburg.
Besecker said that if lawmakers don’t move the bill early, advocates see the midterms as their next opportunity to push for action.
“If the Senate Republicans think we’re going to ignore this, we are not. We can’t. We have no option. Residents of manufactured housing have now been backed into a corner,” Besecker said. “It’s either flight or fight, and we can’t flee. Our homes are here. This is where they are, and they can’t be moved.”