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Comment

To The Members of the Federal Housing Authority:

I would like to relate my circumstances to you regarding the mobile home park that I live in. I purchased my mobile home 10 years ago in August. I retired six and a half years ago. I am a divorced, single woman who raised four children and worked full time. My husband decided he wanted a divorce after 43 years of marriage. I was 62 at the time. Needless to say, he committed financial suicide for the both of us. We had to sell our home that we lived in for 28 years and downsize into our own residences.

The choice I made for me was a mobile home in Western Family Mobile Home Park in Tumwater, Washington. At the time, the lot rent was $485 per month. Each year our rent spaces went up at the most $15 per month each year. I now am paying $570 per month. This park requires us to own our mobile homes, so I purchased it from the previous owner for $25,000. This to me was "affordable housing" for me in my retirement years that were fast approaching. I was happy and comfortable and felt stable in my new home until June 1, 2022. That is when we all here in the park learned that it had been sold secretly to a large corporation by the name of Legacy Communities, LLC.

Several months after Legacy taking over, we all began getting notices that our rents would increase $100 per month beginning on our anniversary date that we signed our lease with the previous owner. We also were told that we had to sign a new lease that were being sent out to individuals sporadically. They are very hard to understand and are 15 pages long, compared to our previous lease that was two pages! We found many inconsistencies and complained to the Property Manager. In turn, the residents started up a group called Resident Action that was designed for us to get together and try and make sense of what was going on and look into what our rights as tenants were. We were involved in contacting our local legislators in Olympia, Washington and were asking for their help to some how stop the rent gouging by the greedy new landlord, Legacy. We asked them to support four different House Bills with regard to rent stabilization that were being voted on last year and some did, but none of them passed. We will try again this legislative session. Anyway, come to find out, Legacy, LLC and other big corporations are doing this all over the U.S. and causing many elders/seniors to live in fear of either losing their home or become homeless. This is very stressful and unnerving to people in their 70s, 80s and 90s!

After doing research on Legacy, LLC we find that they paid $9,000,000 for this property and obtained a low interest government loan from Fanny Mae or Freddie Mac to fund "affordable housing" for seniors. But what did they do? Turn around and up our rent $100 per month for existing residents and for new residents buying a home after June 1, 2022, their space rent would be $950 per month. This is no longer "affordable housing"! Some here live on Social Security of $1,000 or $1,100 per month. They are not able to make it. They are going to be put out of their homes. There are several here for sale now and when people learn of the space rent they laugh and say "no way that is not affordable housing". We are being trapped in homes now too, because no one is going to want to purchase them because they cannot afford the space rent. Several parks in the area are renting spaces for $650 per month and $750 per month. All of the homes here are about 50 years old and cannot be moved out of this park. We fear that Legacy, LLC will just continue to raise our monthly lot rent spaces a $100 each year until we are all paying $1,000 or more a month. This is just not fair. What we get in a raise in Social Security, Legacy, LLC will take from us by increasing our rent each year. Not to mention the fact that food, gasoline, electricity and everything else under the sun is increasing too. What do we seniors need to do, go back to work? Some of us are not able to even think about that due to health reasons.

PLEASE DO SOMETHING NOW TO STOP THESE BIG CORPORATIONS FROM BEING ABLE TO GET LOW INTEREST LOANS FROM THE GOVERNMENT TO BUY UP SENIOR MOBILE HOME PARKS AND DISPLACE SENIORS OR WORSE YET, MAKE THEM HOMELESS. WE DO NOT WANT THIS TO HAPPEN TO ANYMORE SENIORS.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this and your kind consideration to my request. Everyone will have elderly parents one day, you would not want this to happen to your loved ones, would you? I didn't think so.

Respectfully yours,
Linda Wagner