I Can't Move My House

Ashland Planning Commission · April 28, 2026 · 1h 28m · study session · five of seven commissioners present · two members of the public testified.

The draft manufactured home park ordinance came back for comment before its public hearing. Most of it is competent, careful work by staff and a consultant, and this file will summarise it below. But two people came to the podium, and one of them said the thing the whole exercise is about.

What A Resident Owns

Dolores Nims lives at 321 Clay Street, space 109 — Wingspread, 116 homes, opened in the 1960s. She has been there 25 years.

“If I put my double wide home up for sale, I’d price it about 200,000. I can’t move my house. It is not mobile. If a developer came in and bought that property, we are just out of luck.”

That is the position, stated in four sentences by somebody in it: a two-hundred-thousand-dollar asset sitting on ground she does not own, which cannot be relocated, and whose value depends entirely on a decision she has no part in.

She described the park — four ponds, geese, ducks, goslings, “everything from young families to old people like me” — and said what she came for: “we need some protection, and that’s why we’ve come to the city.”

The chair asked whether the 120 days the draft ordinance gives residents to organise a purchase is enough time.

“I’d like to have six months.”

She was followed by Rich Roadie, formerly of the Housing and Human Services Advisory Committee and now with Southern Oregon Housing for All, who supported the ordinance and gave it its context: he helped organise in four mobile home parks closed in Ashland over the last decade or so, “and I watched as great communities were destroyed by being bought out and set up for other things.”

Neither speaker said anything the commission did not already broadly know. What they did was put a number on it — 200,000 dollars, 25 years, four parks — and that is what public testimony is for.

The 120 Days

The mechanics matter here, so this desk will set them out.

Oregon law already requires a park owner to notify residents before selling, with a 60-day notice period, and gives residents 30 days to respond. Everyone involved agrees 30 days is not enough time to form a resident-owned community and raise money. The draft extends the response window to 120 days, measured from receipt of the owner’s notice of sale.

Where 120 came from: CASA — the nonprofit that runs the Manufactured Housing Cooperative Development Center and helped organise a resident-owned park in Talent — told staff 120 days is sufficient. It is the only such organisation the city has heard from, and staff conceded the point: “we don’t have any models to look at other than Bellingham. No city in Oregon currently implements anything along these lines.”

A commissioner argued for more, on plain grounds: a well-funded buyer against “a bunch of homeowners,” and “I just went through a traditional mortgage process and I own multiple properties, and it still took me 60 days.” The chair agreed and said 180 might be better.

The most useful correction came from the commissioner who does this for a living. The 120 days is to deliver a signed purchase and sale agreement, not to close. Commercial agreements typically run another 90 days after that; residential 30. Push the offer window to 180 and the closing lands near a year out, “and the buyer is probably going to leave at that point.”

What has to happen inside the window is not small: organise, get 51 percent of residents to agree, do enough due diligence on infrastructure to know what the new space rents would be, and confirm the residents can afford them.

The consultant was listening on Zoom. The chair’s summary was that if enough commissioners say 180, good consultants will bring back 180.

Two structural notes staff added, and both are worth more than the day count. First, nothing prevents residents from organising a cooperative before a park is ever for sale — the ordinance only guarantees a window, not a starting gun — and the Housing and Human Services committee has offered to do outreach so residents know what a resident-owned community is before they need one. Second, and this is the limit of the whole project: zoning can keep a park a park. It cannot touch space rents. Only ownership does that.

What The Ordinance Does

The draft, in brief:

• Density rises from 8 units an acre to 18, matching what an R-2 property reaches with affordable-housing and conservation bonuses.
• The minimum space dimensions — 35 feet wide, 40 deep — go, along with interior setbacks, with separation left to building and fire code. Perimeter setbacks from neighbouring properties stay.
• The 650-square-foot minimum unit size and 12-foot width requirement go entirely. State law now requires parks to allow prefabricated units and recreational vehicles, and a 650-square-foot floor would rule most RVs out. Units under 500 square feet count as half a unit for density — which staff noted is inconsistent with the three-quarters used elsewhere in the code, and should probably be reconciled.
• Metal skirting, currently prohibited, is to be encouraged. In January this commission heard that Ashland’s code defines wood siding as “superior to metal,” and that wildfire standards say the reverse. This is the fix.
• Landscaping: the draft proposed 50 percent of unbuilt area; staff recommended 65 percent lot coverage and 35 percent landscaping instead, to match R-2. The commission agreed without dissent.
• Community-serving commercial inside a park — daycare, an office, a café, a clubhouse, resident storage — capped at 2,500 square feet plus 100 square feet per unit.
• Non-conformity: a conditional use permit allowing phased compliance and a hardship exception, so an owner can fix one thing without being forced to rebuild the park. After the January session staff consulted the fire marshal and added a criterion: a hardship exception must still address fire apparatus access and staging.
• Annexation: parks coming into the city would be exempt from the 25 percent affordability requirement and the 90 percent minimum density requirement, both of which currently discourage annexation by parks that may need city water and sewer.

Seven parks are now identified rather than the six named in January. The addition is 270 Idaho Street, 28 units of mixed type — prefabricated, stick-built, and recreational vehicles used as permanent dwellings.

Two Catches

A commissioner who had read the draft properly found two things, and staff accepted both.

The first: the criteria use “demonstrable financial hardship” in one place and “documented financial burden” in another, and neither is defined. He asked whether the difference was intentional. It was not. His suggested remedy — use one phrase, and define it in the glossary — he justified in the right language: “so there’s fair notice, for due process purposes.”

The second is better. A limitation in the draft says phased compliance “shall not allow an increase in the number of manufactured housing spaces beyond what legally existed at the time the development became non-conforming.”

He asked what happens when the extra units are what pays for the compliance. A park needing a wider road may only be able to finance widening it by adding spaces; the draft forbids exactly that combination, forcing an owner through two separate processes or neither.

Staff: “I think that’s a good catch.”

Worth noting: the Housing and Human Services Advisory Committee had already reviewed this draft and recommended it forward without changes. This provision was not discussed there.

Upper Pines

The hard case, and the commission was honest about it.

Upper Pines — 51 units behind the shops on Siskiyou, plus commercial buildings — is zoned C-1 and sits inside the Climate Friendly Area. Staff recommends it not be rezoned to the manufactured home park zone, because C-1 permits five storeys with commercial below and housing above, and the zone change would foreclose that.

A commissioner put the consequence plainly: without the zone, the residents get two of the new protections — the notice of sale and opportunity to purchase, and the non-conformity permit — but not the one that keeps the land a park. Could residents buy it? “Theoretically.” Could they afford it, against C-1 development value? No.

Another commissioner traced the arithmetic to its end: eventually the cost of vacating the pads and relocating residents will be less than the value of redeveloping, “and that will be up to” the owner, “when he so chooses.”

And a third said the part that ought to be in the record: “There is a horizon for them, that’s all. And it’s kind of unavoidable. And this code change doesn’t help, it actually makes it worse.”

Staff’s answer was fair — the development pressure exists today because of the zoning that already applies, and the ordinance adds two protections that do not currently exist. Both things are true. Fifty-one households live at the intersection of them.

The commission also agreed that Jackson Wellsprings should come off the comprehensive plan map: 12 to 16 permanent units among some thirty campsites on 25 acres of largely commercial operation is not, by consensus, a manufactured home park.

The Docket

The public hearing on the manufactured home park ordinance is May 26, before this commission. Notice is going to every park owner and every park resident, which answers the question the chair asked in January about whether anybody had talked to the people who live there.

Three ordinances are expected: the land use code, a zoning map amendment establishing the zone, and a comprehensive plan map amendment anticipating annexations.

The city’s own strategic planning survey is open through early June.

And the Transportation System Plan is still waiting. A commissioner asked again whether ODOT has executed the contract. Staff had no update and made a note to chase it.

“I’ll just keep squeaking over that,” the commissioner said.

---

Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the April 28, 2026 Ashland Planning Commission study session. Quotations appear as transcribed, lightly conformed to natural speech, with bracketed interpolations where the repair is interpretive; the caption software recycles and garbles speaker labels, so commissioners are identified by role except where the chair’s own words confirm them; members of the public identified themselves at the podium. Park unit counts, densities, code provisions and notice periods are as stated by staff in open session; the draft ordinance is the controlling document. A study session takes no action.