To the west, tree-dotted open space rolls uninterrupted toward picturesque peaks veiled in a spring morning mist. To the east, the intermittent whine of traffic reminds that a thread of busy state highway connects the Sans Souci Cooperative mobile home park to nearby Boulder.
This community of 62 households, largely older and low-income, offers proximity to both nature and convenience — and that, coupled with manageable lot rents, has long made the park a refuge befitting its French translation, “without worry.”
It has been nearly three years since the park’s residents, bolstered by statewide legislation aimed at preserving such affordable housing options, organized and purchased their community — at once a giddy and anxious moment when the co-op took control of its destiny. With the sale came relief from what some felt to be the tyranny of corporate greed and governance, but also uncertainty — and worry — that comes with day-to-day operational challenges.
Now, the euphoria has given way to some daunting financial calculations as the community confronts its need for a new wastewater system that could bump rents to untenable levels for some residents. And the early exhilaration over self-governance has triggered familiar squabbles over park rules and enforcement — all issues reflecting a new phase as resident-owned communities chart a new course in Colorado.
“I think it was bound to happen,” says Michael Peirce, president of the co-op board and Sans Souci resident since 1995. “In the beginning, everybody tends to be working largely with a common goal with mutual understanding. And then, after the initial excitement, you have some board turnover. And the initial excitement goes away because it’s not this new project you’re working on.”
When residents closed the $3.3 million purchase from Strive Communities in June 2021, it marked the culmination of a two-year effort to gain control of the bucolic landscape that covers nearly 11 acres in the shadow of the Flatirons. Sans Souci became Colorado’s first mobile home park — along with the River View park in Durango, which closed its sale on the same day — to take advantage of a recently enacted “opportunity to purchase” provision in state law.
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Since then, several others have followed suit, preserving patches of a mobile home landscape — or manufactured home, as it’s also called — that ranks as the nation’s largest inventory of nonsubsidized affordable housing. In Colorado, it shelters an estimated 100,000 residents. Statewide, there are now nine resident-owned communities — commonly called ROCs — with several more potential sales in the pipeline.
Even as their deal finally came together, Peirce described a kind of “nervous excitement.” Now, well into the everyday business of running their park, residents have been buffeted by a variety of challenges that have tempered the early adrenaline rush of ownership.
“It’s been mixed,” Chuck Patterson, vice president of the current board, says of the co-op venture. “I mean, it’s good that we bought it. But a number of other corporate buyers looked at it and turned it down. And we walked into a circumstance where there were some big liabilities that were lurking. And now they have come back to bite us.”
Grappling with wastewater issues
Initially, it didn’t seem like the wastewater treatment plant would take that big a bite out of the budget.
An early estimate for the work came in at just over $1 million. Unfortunately, Peirce says, that projection was based on an earlier discharge permit. Since then, the requirements surrounding what can be discharged have been upgraded and tightened, and plans to replace the current plant with a new one on the same site had to be abandoned because of its proximity to South Boulder Creek, smack in the floodplain.
Revised estimates, depending on the option Sans Souci chooses, run anywhere from just shy of $3 million to $4.7 million.
For close to a year, Sans Souci sought an alternative solution — consolidating its system with the city of Boulder by running a mile-long sewer line into the city’s system via horizontal drilling and creating a lift station to pump the waste uphill from the park.
Unfortunately, Peirce says, the city cited stringent rules against extending utilities into its greenbelt zone — a prohibition dating back to the late 1960s that has helped curb development in Boulder.
“So that route was out and now we’re having to go for a route that’s looking like two to three times the cost,” Peirce says. “And we’re struggling mightily to figure out how we’re going to fund it.”
Patterson figures the park missed an important window of opportunity due to the 2021 Marshall fire, which narrowly missed Sans Souci. But the damaging winds that fanned the wildfire led to repairs and cleanup measures that deflected energy and put the co-op two years behind on coming up with a wastewater plan.
The co-op board is still exploring avenues of financial assistance to help cover the rebuild. Without additional help, and depending on the project’s final price tag, residents could be looking at an increase of anywhere from $150 to $250 to their lot rent, board members say.
About half of the park’s roughly 85 residents are seniors. Many live on fixed incomes — at the time residents purchased Sans Souci, more than half lived on less than $25,000 per year and already stretched to afford the current $720 per month lot rent. Peggy Kuhn, a resident and previous co-op board member, fears as many as a quarter of the residents could be forced out of their homes if the park can’t solve the financial riddle of the wastewater facility.
Although an initial rent increase followed the transition to a co-op and strained the finances of some residents, Peirce says he doesn’t know of anyone who moved out as a result. The turnover that followed the purchase — about a half-dozen residents by his count — either had unrelated reasons for leaving, lacked confidence in a resident-run operation facing the looming expense of a new wastewater system or disagreed with the park’s new direction.
But since then the community has stabilized, and even attracted potential buyers for individual homes. Zoe Quaintance, a current board member who has worked as a cook and more recently in a landscaping job since buying in Sans Souci seven years ago, says she was approached by interested buyers — not corporate investors, but 20-something locals — who were attracted not only by the location, but by the idea of a co-op. She’s not looking to sell.
“It’s exciting being one of the first to do something, but it’s also — oh my goodness — so much work,” she says, describing her efforts to help set up a community garden, plant new trees in the park and a number of other tasks. “It’s not all wastewater treatment.”
Quaintance paid $88,000 for her 850-square-foot home, and loves that she’s been able to remain fairly close to the Lakewood area where she grew up. But still, the uncertainty surrounding Sans Souci’s ability to finance a new system looms over the park that — so far, at least — remains an island of affordability in a metro real estate market run amok.
And that possibility has residents on edge.
“If rents go up, I’ve heard it said amongst people that, well, it’ll just get us up where Boulder is,” Patterson says, referring to market-priced properties. “And I say that’s not why we’re here. That’s not a good answer. That’s no solace at all.”
Derailed by Marshall fire winds
Sans Souci was only a little more than six months into its reincarnation as a resident-owned community when late on the morning of Dec. 30 the Marshall fire sparked to life just about 30 feet up a hill across from the park’s entrance. Only the direction of the wind spared the community from disaster.
But the same destructive wind that sent the flames in another direction still took a toll. Residents evacuated for a day, but wind damage left them without power for four days — and also without water or heat, which in turn led to a huge run of burst pipes. Peirce oversaw administration of a FEMA grant as well as other grants to work on various repairs.
It took most of a year to work through all the projects made necessary by the winds that stoked the Marshall fire, including repair of three homes that lost their roofs and others that lost skirting, siding or had roof damage of their own. The good news: Using disaster funds from a variety of sources and donated labor through the Mennonite Disaster Service, Sans Souci turned that misfortune into a community improvement project that reskirted the homes of just about everyone in the park and performed various other repairs.
But the attention devoted to damage response also distracted from other issues that festered among some residents.
“That was tough,” Peirce recalls, “and also created friction in the park because the board was less focused on rule enforcement, so some of the people who wanted to see the rules enforced started losing more of their patience.”
Part of the difficulty for Sans Souci, Peirce says, has been finding a property management company that “has more experience under their belt and has already developed standard operating procedures versus making them up from scratch.” He describes co-ops like Sans Souci as a kind of hybrid — a type of community with which neither HOA management companies nor traditional mobile home management companies are completely comfortable.
Every community has its own set of challenges, says Tim Townsend, program manager for Thistle, the Boulder-based nonprofit that offers coaching and assistance aimed at preserving affordable housing. Choosing the right property management company to handle day-to-day tasks like rent collection and rule enforcement can be a tricky — but critical — proposition.
“Sometimes it’s a big win in a relationship,” Townsend says, “and sometimes it’s just not. What I’ve seen from our current communities is that those who have a strong property management presence that’s incredibly supportive don’t experience as many of the hiccups or challenges as the ones who do not.”
Townsend also echoes Peirce’s observation that there’s a shortage of property management companies skilled in supporting a ROC. He cites Golden Hills, a Jefferson County mobile home park that purchased its community last summer, as an example of the difficulty finding the right fit. Thistle vetted or fielded initial interest from 34 property management companies in the Denver metro area to pass on to the Golden Hills board.
“Only one was really equipped to end up working with them,” he says, “and so they kind of got put into a tough spot, because that’s who they had to go with. So we need more options.”
Townsend points out that parks that haven’t connected with the right management company tend to struggle more because they have more on their plate in comparison to other ROCs.
Peirce, who gained valuable experience first as a volunteer and now as the leader of the Colorado Coalition of Manufactured Home Owners, just got elected to a second term as Sans Souci board president. He’s term-limited in that position but says he may not be able to finish the current term for economic reasons.
“It’s been a labor of love for too long,” he says. “I’m not retired yet — I need to get into an income earning position, so I’m very much trying to find how to pass the torch.”
The period one to five years out from first becoming a resident-owned community often proves difficult, says Mike Bullard, vice president of communications for ROC USA, the Concord, New Hampshire-based nonprofit that helps manufactured home residents purchase their communities across the country.
“They’re trying to implement the goals that they set out at the purchase and then right afterwards to make their community really sing,” Bullard explains. “But at this point sometimes they’re working through some infrastructure issues that came up during the purchase, so that can be a challenge.”
Most newly minted ROCs are led by residents unfamiliar with the challenges of serving on the board of what, in many cases, is essentially a multimillion-dollar enterprise, he adds. Part of what has made the ROC model successful — ROC USA has worked with 326 communities in 21 states — is the availability of resources at the national and local levels, through ROC affiliates.
“And look, it’s a democratic organization, and you don’t have to look far to see that democracy is not always clean,” Bullard says of the resident-owned model. “People disagree. But having the voice and having the opportunity to have a say is still so much better than the alternative.”
Playing by the rules
Neighbors often disagree about restrictions on things like parking or lawn ornaments or have differing standards on home maintenance that can be impacted not only by taste, but by a homeowner’s financial ability to pay for repairs and upgrades.
“That’s been one of the rockiest aspects for us,” Peirce says. “When it comes to rules, that’s the most contentious area you could have in the park.”
Initially, the Sans Souci board found broad agreement among residents about community rules. But early lack of enforcement led some residents to complain. Meanwhile, others pushed for more specific rules — like for length of grass or weeds. Or even more stringent rules than those imposed by the previous corporate ownership.
When it comes to rules, that’s the most contentious area you could have in the park.
— Michael Peirce, board president at Sans Souci
“That was starting to create rifts in the community,” Peirce says.
Quaintance has seen disagreements on both extremes, while for the most part residents seem to seek a middle ground.
“Our first rules meeting, that was one of the first things we stated, we don’t want to really be policing people constantly on every little thing,” she says. “But I found that we do have to have a slightly heavier hand in some cases.”
Still, it was one thing to rail against the imposition and enforcement of rules handed down from the corporate ownership, demands that sometimes felt unfair compared to what Patterson describes as the “laissez faire” approach of the previous ownership. Residents describe a variety of measures they found excessive: mowing down wildflowers, prohibiting residents from congregating in the quiet streets or wandering through the park after 9 p.m., removing lawn ornaments and clotheslines.
“They wanted it pristine,” Quaintance says. “And we kind of wanted to go in the opposite direction of what they did before. But we also want to keep the community safe and clean within reason.”
“So many of us are low income,” adds Doretta Hultquist, 81, who has lived at the park since 1967. “We don’t have the money to do a lot of upgrades.”
Peirce, who formerly taught philosophy at the University of Colorado and studied small-scale democracies, says the dynamics of Sans Souci echo what he saw in his academic work. Changes in board members, plus the transition to maintaining rather than launching a venture, can trigger a progression that diminishes the common purpose that initially defined the community.
“Oftentimes, it’s hard to sustain after you get to the maintenance point,” Peirce says. “People have less vested interests, less sense of ownership because they weren’t at the creation stage. They’re inheriting other people’s commitments.”
Patterson observes that the park has lots of people who tend to be independent and cranky, while others are eager to work collaboratively.
“But by and large,” he says, “the community has a spirit.”
And for now, that spirit includes belief that the problems can be managed and the resident ownership model can endure.
“I feel like we’ve really got to keep up hope,” Quaintance says. “A lot of people are a little bit concerned about some of these challenges we’re facing, but there’s so many hopeful things we keep hearing. I just want to work as hard as I can to get through this wastewater treatment thing and keep rents low. I think if we can make it through this we’ll be in pretty good shape for the future.”
When Peirce thinks back to 2018, when preservation of mobile home parks moved front and center as a legislative issue, he recalls “kind of a fractured group of folks who were working hard.” Now, he sees the state investing in this sector of affordable housing, counties dedicating funding to preserving mobile home parks and community foundations coming to bat to help residents purchase their communities. Even civil engineering firms have expressed interest in helping out.
Opportunity-to-purchase legislation spawned a network of support that continues to grow, a development that, despite the growing pains that have challenged the residents in their little slice of Boulder County heaven, Peirce finds heartening.
The difference in available resources between then and now is remarkable, he notes, as parks like Sans Souci helped forge a path for the ROC movement in Colorado.
“Kinda like the first child,” Peirce says. “Parents learn from their first child. And by the second, third and fourth, they end up with fewer mistakes.”
