On Tuesday, I joined Senate Democratic Leader Jay Costa and residents from manufactured housing communities across Pennsylvania to call on the Senate to finally move forward House Bill 1250, legislation I introduced to protect homeowners from excessive rent increases on the land beneath their homes.
Tuesday marked 364 days since the House passed HB 1250 with strong bipartisan support and 356 days since the bill was referred to the Senate Urban Affairs and Housing Committee without receiving a vote.
As I have discussed previously, nearly 55,000 Pennsylvania families live in manufactured housing communities. These are not temporary residences. They are homes where people have raised families, retired, served their country, and built their lives. Yet while residents own their homes, they often do not own the land underneath them. That leaves them vulnerable when corporate landlords and private equity firms impose steep rent increases.
Unlike most renters, manufactured homeowners cannot simply move when costs become unaffordable. Relocating a manufactured home can cost thousands of dollars and, in many cases, is physically impossible. As a result, residents are often left with an impossible choice: pay whatever increase is demanded or risk losing the home they worked their entire lives to afford.
This problem has become even more acute as large investment firms have purchased manufactured housing communities across the country. National reporting has described these communities as “cash cows” for investors because residents have so few alternatives. Investors don’t seek this communities as neighborhoods full of homes and people; they consider them cash cows. And some corporate owners have taken advantage of that reality by imposing significant rent increases on seniors, veterans, and working families living on fixed incomes because they know they have to pay or lose everything.
Over the past year, my office has heard from residents across the Commonwealth, including in our district, who have been forced to make heartbreaking decisions between paying lot rent and paying for necessities such as medication, food, and utilities. For many of them, lot rent increases have significantly outpaced inflation over the last as well.
After nearly a year of inaction, residents finally appeared poised to receive a last-minute committee vote. Earlier this week, the Senate Urban Affairs and Housing Committee scheduled HB 1250 and SB 748 for consideration. The Committee on June 8 unanimously approved SB 746, introduced by Sen. Judy Schwank (D-Berks), which gives manufactured home residents the right of first refusal.
However, rather than advancing the bipartisan bill that passed the House, HB 1250, republican committee leadership circulated amendments with little notice that would have fundamentally rewritten the legislation and substantially weakened the protections that homeowners fought for and the House approved.
The proposed changes would have stripped away key safeguards against excessive rent increases and replaced the carefully negotiated House bill with a far weaker version. Residents and advocates who traveled to Harrisburg hoping for action instead found themselves once again fighting to preserve the basic protections already approved by a bipartisan majority of House members nearly a year ago.
When it became clear that the effort to weaken the bill was facing significant opposition from homeowners, advocates and legislators, no further action was taken. Rather than bringing the original House-passed bill up for a vote, the committee simply chose not to run the bill at all.
That decision means manufactured homeowners remain exactly where they have been for the past 364 days: waiting.
I was inspired by the residents who traveled to Harrisburg and refused to be ignored. Many spent the day meeting directly with senators, urging them to either vote the House bill out of committee as written or support efforts to force a vote on the Senate floor. Their message was simple: homeowners deserve stability, fairness and protection from predatory rent increases.
If you are concerned about these residents, please reach out to your Senator here and consider sharing this email with your friends asking them to contact their Senators too.
I remain committed to fighting for Pennsylvania's manufactured homeowners and will continue to keep you updated on HB 1250 and other legislation moving through the General Assembly. You can view my remarks from the press conference here.
I will continue to update you on the status of bills that I have introduced and are moving along the legislative process.