The owner of Buena Vista Mobile Home Park in Nipomo isn’t ready to back down despite the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors and the Mobilehome Rent Review Board twice rejecting its rent increase requests.
On July 31, Buena Vista Mobile Home Park LLC filed a petition with the SLO Superior Court asking it to command the supervisors and the rent review board to set aside its rejections. The petition takes issue with the way the boards interpreted the county’s mobile home rent stabilization ordinance and could affect dozens of tenants living at the mobile home park who were named as parties in interest.
“The [rent review board] further found that the proposed monthly rent increase of $99.53 per space, averaging approximately 22.2 percent, conflicted with the ordinance’s purpose of protecting tenants from unreasonable rent increases,” the petition said. “The [review board] further concluded that, because the application lacked a valid hardship basis and proposed a rent increase of significant magnitude without tenant majority approval or incurred qualifying costs, the application failed to satisfy the standards of the ordinance.”
The rent increase requests came from mobile home park management company Harmony Communities. The review board and the supervisors shot down the first request in 2025.
The review board turned down the second request in January 2026, leading to Stockton-based Buena Vista LLC’s appeal to the Board of Supervisors. Supervisors upheld the review board’s rejection in May.
Like Buena Vista’s original argument before county officials, its petition challenges how the county applied its 40-year-old mobile home rent stabilization ordinance called Title 25.
That ordinance allows mobile home park owners to increase rents to an annual inflation adjustment up to 60 percent of the consumer price index for that year. Title 25 also provides park owners with a hardship option, though it’s limited to justifying extraordinary expenses or unavoidable cost increases that block a fair return on the park.
Buena Vista’s petition claims the ordinance “contemplated” that the annual increase capped by the consumer price index may not be enough to produce a fair return.
Buena Vista LLC bought the park in 2011, according to the petition, and has allegedly experienced a drop in net operating income since 2012.
“Despite taking the maximum annual rent increases permitted by [the ordinance], the park’s operating results reflected a sustained erosion of net operating income when measured against inflation,” the petition said. “Based on the financial information submitted with the [rent increase] application, the park’s 2024 net operating income was lower than its 2012 net operating income even before accounting for the additional erosion in purchasing power caused by inflation.”
Previously, county Deputy Auditor-Controller Michael Stevens told supervisors that the LLC believed the county misrepresented the ordinance, claiming it prevented additional inflation adjustments under hardship.
Multiple inflation adjustments aren’t authorized in the ordinance, and adding an increase inside the hardship provision could result in two inflation adjustments instead of one, Stevens explained.
County Counsel Jon Ansolabehere declined to comment on the petition.
Harmony Communities spokesperson Nick Ubaldi signed the petition verifying it. He previously told New Times that Harmony doesn’t own any mobile home parks and is a third-party property management company hired by his family to handle daily operations.
“A judicial declaration concerning the proper interpretation of the ordinance will resolve the parties’ present controversy and guide respondents [county officials] in the performance of their duties,” the petition said. ∆
This article appears in 40th anniversary edition.
Mobile Home Park owners have a tendency of suing Counties to enforce imaginary rent increases. And usually they also underpay their hired park management.
My girlfriend and I managed a mobilehome park on the edge of Santa Cruz and Capitola for a couple years, in the late 1980s.
After working there, we felt like the park owners were ripping us off.
After a year we talked with an attorney, and they said we had been underpaid substantially.
We confronted the owners with the information, and had to sue them to get the back pay.
The mobilehome park owners paid us the settlement, then fired us. We were kind of happy about that. At lease we were able to collected what had been stolen from us.
Buena Vista LLC and Harmony Communities look like they are playing that kind of shell game too, with their petitions under multiple company names.
Buena Vista LLC and Harmony Communities should just accept the County’s findings.
They knew what kind of property they bought, a mobilehome park, which always have rent restrictions.
Maybe they didn’t do their due diligence when they were in the process of buying the mobilehome park.
As the old saying goes, “Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result, is the definition of insanity.”
Buena Vista LLC and Harmony Communities should just accept the decisions of the County Board of Supervisors and the Mobilehome Rent Review Board.
Just to add, after we won that settlement from that company, which had multiple mobilehome parks in Santa Cruz County; another couple we knew began working at one of their mobilehome parks.
When we talked with them, they said they were being paid what Labor Law required for residential mobilehome park managers.
By setting that precedent through our settlement, it made sure that future mobilehome park managers in the Santa Cruz County were paid fairly, under CA Labor Law.