Mat-Su Assembly will consider repeal of mobile home park rules

What you need to know:

• A proposal headed before the Matanuska-Susitna Borough Assembly would repeal the borough’s mobile home park rules, clearing the way for developers to open parks with little oversight.
• The proposal is designed to bring more affordable housing to the borough, a memo accompanying it states. Members of the borough’s planning commission worry that removing the rules will result in parks packed with subpar housing that can’t withstand Alaska’s extreme weather. The planning commission voted to reject the proposal.
• The measure was proposed by Assembly Member Rob Yundt. It will be considered by the Assembly during an Aug. 6 meeting.

PALMER – A proposed ordinance headed before the Mat-Su Assembly next week would eliminate a decades-old borough law governing mobile home parks and clear the way for developers to create such housing with minimal oversight.

If approved, the ordinance would repeal all borough permitting and approval requirements for mobile home parks, including design, home spacing, and utility standards in the current law.

The proposal is designed to "promote affordable housing options for low- and moderate-income individuals and families," according to a memo accompanying the ordinance.

The ordinance will be considered by the assembly on Aug. 6. It was proposed by Assembly Member Robert Yundt, whose district includes Wasilla. Yundt co-owns Robert Yundt Homes LLC, a general contractor that builds homes and apartments in Mat-Su. Yundt did not respond to a request for comment.

Matanuska-Susitna Borough mobile home park rules require developers to obtain a special permit from the borough planning department and follow strict design guidelines before placing and renting more than one mobile home on a parcel. Applications also are subject to a public hearing and approval by the borough planning commission.

Parcels with more than one mobile home leased out for more than 30 days are considered "mobile home parks" under the law. The law does not regulate mobile home parks within Palmer, Houston or Wasilla city limits.

A housing shortage has led to increased rental costs statewide, according to a 2022 report by the Association of Alaska Housing Authorities. Average rental rates in Mat-Su increased 9% from 2022 to 2023, according to state data.

Mat-Su is the only area of the state projected to grow in population over the next several decades, according to state demographers.

Repealing the current mobile home park regulations could help residents access affordable housing, according to the proposal memo.

“Repealing regulations could potentially increase the availability of this type of housing, making it more accessible to those in need of affordable housing,” the memo states. “The burdensome nature of the existing regulations has hindered the expansion of affordable housing options and constrained the growth of mobile home park communities."

The proposed repeal was unanimously rejected by the borough planning commission during a June 17 meeting. The commission instead recommended updating the ordinance to streamline the park application process while still requiring developers to receive approval from the planning commission during a public hearing.

The memo accompanying the proposed ordinance provides no specific examples of developers who have abandoned mobile home park plans because of the borough's laws.

The official information packet given to the borough planning commission with the proposal did not include any comments supporting the repeal. A comment from the Meadow Lakes Community Council suggested the ordinance be updated instead.

The borough has received no recent complaints or questions about the current rules from housing industry officials or prospective mobile home park developers, Alex Strawn, the borough's director of planning and land use, said during the planning commission meeting. No mobile home park applications have been filed in at least 15 years, he said.

Planning Commission Vice Chair Rick Allen criticized the proposal, saying it seeks changes without evidence of a community-requested need.

“This looks like another one of these proposals from the assembly that are a solution in search of a problem,” Allen said during the meeting.

Some commission members also worried that allowing unfettered mobile home development in the region would create a safety hazard because of designs that can't withstand the region's harsh weather conditions, combined with age and poor maintenance.

“This really needs to be very well thought out because those things are a blowtorch when they catch on fire,” commission member Doug Glenn said during the meeting. “There’s manufactured homes that are first class and there’s junk, and I just as soon we avoided the junk and figure out how to do that appropriately.”

In 2017, Jaelynn Flores, 3, Sofia Flores, 6, Lilyanna Flores, 7, Nevaeh Flores, 8, and Alexis Quackenbush, 12, died of smoke inhalation when their mobile home in Butte caught fire as some of the girls were getting ready to go to school.

Allen, who has worked in the Alaska Department of Law for decades and is currently a supervising attorney for the state, said the crime rate in trailer parks throughout Mat-Su is also a concern, citing his personal experience working on related cases.

“As a prosecutor, there was this outsized portion of people who had come out of the bigger trailer parks, mostly toward Wasilla,” he said in an interview. “They were victimizing and burglarizing other trailers in those trailer parks.”

Whether mobile home parks regularly play host to outsized crime rates has been questioned by public policy experts in the Lower 48. For example, a 2010 study conducted for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that examined crime rates in mobile home parks in Omaha, Nebraska, found no significant difference between neighborhoods with mobile home communities and adjacent or other residential blocks in the area.

Data on whether mobile home parks in Mat-Su have higher crime rates than other neighborhoods was not immediately available.

The borough's mobile home park regulations were originally passed by the assembly in 1983 and updated in 1996.

Mat-Su is currently home to about two dozen mobile home parks, not including those within Palmer, Houston and Wasilla city limits, Strawn said. About 10 mobile home park permits were approved in the borough after the 1983 rules, with most of those applications processed in the 1980s and 1990s, he said. As many as 10 parks were operating in the borough before the 1983 regulations and were grandfathered into compliance.

-- Amy Bushatz can be contacted at abushatz@matsusentinel.com.