Nonprofit acquires mobile home parks near Vancouver to preserve affordable housing

**A Nonprofit Steps In Where Corporate Investors Have Moved**

Manufactured home parks occupy a peculiar and precarious corner of the American housing market: residents own their homes but rent the ground beneath them, leaving them vulnerable to rent increases imposed by whoever controls the land. In recent years, private equity firms and for-profit investors have recognized this vulnerability as opportunity, systematically acquiring mobile home parks and raising lot rents — sometimes dramatically — knowing that tenants face enormous logistical and financial barriers to relocating their homes. In Clark County, Washington, some park residents have seen lot rents more than double in a short span, a particularly brutal squeeze for the many residents who live in 55-and-older communities and depend on fixed incomes.

Evergreen Habitat for Humanity, a Southwest Washington nonprofit best known for building and selling affordable homes, is now attempting something different: buying the land itself to permanently remove it from speculative market pressure. The organization is expected to close this month on the purchase of two adjacent manufactured home parks in the Hazel Dell neighborhood north of Vancouver — Hidden Village 1 and Hidden Village 2 — for a combined price of $12 million. The deal represents both the largest project in the organization's history and its first venture into preserving existing affordable housing rather than building new units.

**How the $12 Million Deal Comes Together**

The financing structure behind the Hidden Village acquisition illustrates how affordable housing preservation increasingly requires layered public and private capital. Of the $12 million purchase price, $8 million comes from Washington State — split evenly between the state Department of Commerce's Housing Trust Fund grant program and a dedicated 2026 legislative budget appropriation. The remaining $4 million was assembled through private donations.

Together, the two parks contain roughly 60 mobile homes sitting on 19 acres wedged between Interstate 5 and State Route 99. That undeveloped land surrounding the existing homes matters strategically: Evergreen intends not just to renovate many of the current units but potentially to build additional affordable housing on the open acreage, compounding the project's long-term impact in a region where Vancouver city officials say developers must produce more than 500 new affordable units annually just to keep pace with population growth.

Heather Cochrun, Evergreen Habitat's director of community engagement and impact, described the organization's core commitment as ensuring permanently affordable homeownership. Residents would hold 99-year land leases — the same structure the nonprofit uses across its other projects — meaning that when a current owner eventually sells or moves out, the unit would be reserved for the next income-qualified buyer rather than returning to the open market. Lot rents at the two Hidden Village parks will be set significantly below market rate, though the precise figures were still being finalized. Cochrun said the reception from current residents has been strikingly warm, with some expressing relief simply at having an owner who is engaged with their wellbeing.

**Policy Pressure Mounting at City and County Level**

The Evergreen acquisition is landing at a moment when both Vancouver city government and the Clark County Council are separately constructing policy frameworks to keep manufactured home parks from disappearing entirely. Vancouver moved first, embedding zoning protections into its comprehensive plan — which took effect in August — that prevent mobile home parks from being redeveloped into other uses. It is a notable land-use tool: by making it legally difficult to convert a park into apartments, retail, or industrial space, the city reduces the financial upside for speculative buyers and softens the pressure to displace residents.

Clark County, which governs unincorporated areas outside Vancouver city limits, is working through a parallel process tied to its 20-year growth plan revision. A public meeting scheduled for September 14 will focus specifically on preservation strategies for manufactured home parks on unincorporated county land, with potential zoning changes under discussion. The timing is deliberate — county officials are aware that without complementary protections in unincorporated areas, policy pressure could simply push the displacement problem across jurisdictional lines.

The broader context makes these protections urgent. Vancouver's 2025 Housing Report documented a structural gap between the affordable units the region needs and the pace at which they are actually being built. Manufactured home parks, long dismissed as a transitional or lower-status form of housing, now represent one of the last significant reservoirs of unsubsidized affordable homeownership in many Pacific Northwest communities. Once those parks are sold to investors who raise rents aggressively, or redeveloped into higher-value uses, the affordable units they contained are effectively gone — residents who own their homes but cannot afford the lot rent have few places to go, and relocating a manufactured home is expensive enough to be effectively impossible for many.

Evergreen Habitat's move into park acquisition signals a recognition that preserving this housing stock requires controlling the land, not just the structures on it — a lesson that aligns with how community land trusts have long approached single-family affordability, now applied to the distinctive challenges of manufactured housing communities.