Park closures give residents 12 months max to move an immovable asset

When a mobile home park owner decides to close the park — often to sell the land for higher-value development — residents typically get 6 to 12 months' notice depending on the state (some states require as little as 30 days). In that window, they must find a new lot that accepts their home (increasingly scarce due to 94.9% occupancy across parks nationally), hire a licensed transporter (wait times of 4-8 weeks in peak seasons), obtain multiple permits from origin and destination jurisdictions, disconnect and reconnect all utilities, and potentially bring their home up to the destination jurisdiction's code requirements. A double-wide move costs $11,500 on average, and many homes — especially older units — are structurally unable to survive transport, meaning the resident loses their home entirely. Relocation assistance varies wildly: California requires it, most states don't. The structural reason this persists is that land-use law treats the park owner's right to develop their property as superior to the residents' ownership of the homes sitting on it, even though the residents' homes are functionally immovable and represent their entire net worth.