Mobile home residents see trouble down the road

Just a stroll from Google, LinkedIn and the NASA Ames Research Center, the mobile-home park tucked at the end of Space Park Way might be the true marvel of Mountain View’s North Bayshore neighborhood. For years, Santiago Villa has offered a sanctuary of cheaper housing in the epicenter of the city’s tech hub.

Over the decades, through the rise and fall of countless Silicon Valley tech firms, life at the Santiago Villa Park has remained remarkably unchanged. Most residents, many of whom have lived in the park for decades, rent their home’s space for $800 to $900 a month, remarkably low for the local rental market.

“You just have to explain to folks that, yes, there is actually a housing community tucked back in North Bayshore,” joked Lanlande Stokke, a Safeway employee living with her family at Santiago Villa.

But the high-price of living in Mountain View appears to be catching up to the factory-built community and its more than 350 households. Residents say they are seeing troubling signs — rents for spaces bought by new residents have doubled just over the recent months. Meanwhile, the owner of the park, VG Investments, is buying mobile homes and leasing them out at much higher prices.

Marcos Vasquez, a seven-year resident at the park, says he has been hammered by rent increases in recent months as he has been trying to sell his mobile home. He owns two homes at the park, including one previously owned by his mother-in-law, so it made sense to sell one of them, he said.

After he put one of his homes on the market in June, VG Investments management indicated that any new buyer would have to pay a space rent of $1,800 per month — about twice what Vasquez is currently paying. Earlier this month, that number climbed to $2,000 per month.

“Clearly they’re taking advantage because of all the high-tech companies and workers around,” Vasquez said. “We get a lot of guys that come in and look at the house and they like it. But when they learn they’re going to have to pay $24,000 a year to live here, they get scared away.”

VG Investments did not return the Voice’s calls seeking comment.

It should be noted that mobile home parks operate differently than other types of housing. Typically, a prospective resident must purchase a mobile home, much like a traditional house mortgage. However, the new homeowner must also pay a monthly rent for the space, facilities and maintenance provided by the park management.

Vasquez said he ended up lowering the asking price for his mobile home to $249,000. As VG Investments was notching up the new rent on his space — deterring other buyers, Vasquez adds — the park management approached him with their own purchase offer of $200,000, which outraged Vasquez because he felt like he was being pressured to take their deal.

“(The owners) must feel like this is a goldmine for them, and I want the rest of the community to realize what they’re doing,” Vasquez said.

Residents like Vasquez are forbidden from subletting homes — only park management may rent out homes it owns. Right next door to Vasquez, VG Investments is renting out a similar home for $4,000 per month to a group of Google employees, he said. Other residents at the park estimate as many as 60 homes at Santiago Villa are currently being rented out by park owners rather than being put back on the market.

Santiago Villa owner John Vidovich has had a rocky history with the longtime tenants at the park. The park previously served only tenants who were over 55 years old. But Vidovich changed that policy about 15 years ago at Santiago Villa as well as at Sahara Mobile Village, another Mountain View mobile-home park he owned. Much like today, long-time residents at the park grumbled at the time about younger professionals moving in with no qualms about paying rents twice the former going rate.

Many credit Vidovich and his park management for keeping rent increases modest around 3 to 5 percent per year. But the park owner has also weathered allegations over the years that his practices have amounted to harassing residents to move elsewhere.

Mara Salomon, a real estate agent who regularly brokers sales at Santiago Villa, suspects the park management has aspirations to transform the park into an upscale community. Up until recently, the park consisted almost entirely of retirees and blue-collar workers, she said. But in the last three years, home sales have been almost exclusively to the high-tech crowd from the neighboring office campuses.

“It’s like two different worlds — the two groups don’t intermingle very much,” she said. “Places are renting for $3,500, $4,000, even as high as $4,500.”

Google software engineer Adam Zimmerman, 26, and his fiance found the mobile home they rent at Santiago Villa from a Craigslist ad. The two-bedroom home is costing them about $2,700 a month — quite a bargain compared to the price of apartments in Mountain View, he pointed out.

He estimates about two dozen Google employees live at the park, but workers from plenty of other tech companies are also in the neighborhood. In fact, his subset of co-worker-neighbors dub themselves the “Santi-ooglers” on a company email list used to trade neighborhood tips.

Zimmerman expressed amazement that more tech workers aren’t rushing to live at the park. Santiago Villa is so close to work that even biking doesn’t make sense, he said.

“When I describe this neighborhood to people, they keep asking, ‘What’s the catch?” he said. “I have to tell them: There is no catch!”