Life at troubled Johnson mobile home park 'is what it is'

Anthony Williams has a simple way of summing up life in Regency Mobile Home Park.

“It is what it is,” the 42-year-old said.

It's a sense of resignation that has settled over the park, located south of Iowa City near Highway 218, after regularly attracting attention in recent years for issues like abandoned trailers, poor water quality and questionable business practices.

Last year, the Iowa Attorney General's Office and the Johnson County Sheriff's Office opened investigations into consumer-fraud allegations. The Johnson County Board of Supervisors debated mobile home regulations. And the Legislature considered giving mobile home park tenants statewide more rights.

A year later, all but the state investigation have fizzled.

Mark Patton, who takes interest in affordable housing issues as executive director of Iowa Valley Habitat for Humanity, did not mince words on what he thought of the lack of action.

“I would say it's a missed opportunity, and the reason it's a missed opportunity is that they are, from my vantage point, putting people's lives in jeopardy,” he said.

Officials for years have failed to resolve complaints about Regency, which has about 230 lots. The park sits just outside Iowa City, and the county does not have the necessary codes to give it the power to force improvements.

Last summer came reports that some residents were sold homes without clear titles and without being told back taxes were owed. Others were threatened with eviction for supposedly not paying their rent, even though some of them had receipts proving they had.

Regency is run by Regency of Iowa Inc., whose corporate owner is the Churchill Group, based in Carbondale, Colo.

Assistant Attorney General Ben Bellus said the company has addressed the problems with people not being credited for paying rent. He's still investigating the other items, like the problems with titles to the homes, and said he can't comment on them.

Williams said last summer he never received the titles to the three homes in Regency he bought and later found out they had $8,000 in unpaid back taxes.

Now he has the titles and did not have to pay the back taxes. He assumes park ownership resolved the matter.

Johnson County Treasurer Tom Kriz said the problems with titles and back taxes have improved.

Johnson County Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek said his department had trouble finding reliable and cooperative witnesses and did not turn up enough evidence to seek criminal charges.

Bellus said the Attorney General's Office made a big push for proposed state legislation that would have given more information to people buying mobile homes and required landlords to show good cause for evictions, something they don't have to do in mobile home parks now.

That bill was defeated in the Iowa Senate by two votes on a mostly party-line vote. Wally Horn of Cedar Rapids and Dennis Black of Grinnell were the only Democrats to vote against it. Another Democrat, Swati Dandekar, skipped the vote.

The Iowa Manufactured Housing Association was the only organization to have a lobbyist oppose the proposal.

In Johnson County, hundreds of rural residents voiced concerns at a meeting last December over a proposed property maintenance code that they felt encroached on their rights as landowners.

In response, a majority of county supervisors wanted to exempt owner-occupied homes. But most mobile home residents own the home and rent lot space, so the revised code wouldn't do much at Regency.

Supervisors Rod Sullivan and Janelle Rettig were in the minority, and Rettig said she was frustrated by the lack of action.

“I find the current direction we're going to be worthless,” she said.

Supervisors Chairman Pat Harney said he still gets complaints about abandoned trailers at Regency and is hopeful the county will do something. But it's a matter of working with the concerns of farmers, he said.

He may put the issue on the agenda for an upcoming meeting to see if there's interest in doing something.

“And if not, I guess it's a dead issue,” he said.

Water quality is a long-standing issue at the park, with residents complaining of bad taste, odor and color.

Regency was fined $7,000 by the state last summer for water violations dating to 2005. Iowa Department of Natural Resources officials report Regency is now in compliance, with the caveat that the DNR does not regulate iisues like water that is discolored or contains sediment.

“If I had that kind of water coming out of my tap, I'm sure I wouldn't like it either,” said Dennis Ostwinkle, supervisor of the DNR's Washington, Iowa, office. “But we can't force that trailer court to do any further treatment.”

Marc Johnson, a 40-year-old who grew up in Regency and has lived there the past five years, said he's seen little progress.

“It smells like sewage every time I brush my teeth,” he said.

Other residents reported improvements in the water, although they said they still don't drink it.

As for Regency's appearance, it in some regards looks better than in recent years. Gone are the lots with large piles of debris or rotting homes on them.

But Regency could hardly be called attractive. There are easily more than a dozen homes with boarded up windows that appear to be empty. Several are missing bottom panels, exposing the concrete blocks the homes rest upon.

Johnson County's Board of Health recently gave its nuisance regulations more teeth on things like abandoned properties. They require properties to be safe and free of vermin, but they do not allow the county to act if a place is simply an eyesore, Public Health Director Doug Beardsley said.

St. Joseph's Catholic Church in the nearby town of Hills filled four large trash bins in a cleanup at Regency last summer, the Rev. Bill Kneemiller said. Volunteers also have helped repair the outside of four mobile homes, most recently this past weekend.

Kneemiller said the park's current manager seems to be “making a real attempt to keep the park up to standards.”

Phone messages left at the local Regency office and the corporate office in Colorado were not returned for this story. News reports from the past year show that Regency's owner has faced similar accusations of shady business practices and poor upkeep in several parks in the Midwest.

Williams, the Regency of Iowa City resident, said he wouldn't call himself happy at the park, but he said he's content.

“You have to make do with what you got,” he said.