HOORAY!!
Our Floating Home Landlord-Tenant Bill was signed into law by the governor TODAY! It is law!!! It will become effective on January 1, 2020.
SB 586 includes our Marina Issues which the Marina Subcommittee worked on throughout most of 2018, as well as the other issues we’ve been working on in the MH Coalition since 2017 which also benefit Marina Tenants in various ways.
HOW EXCITING IS THIS?!? Our bill ended up being 62 pages of additional and improved legislative protections which we do not enjoy today but will benefit from in January!!!!
Marina Tenants from around Oregon met for the first time on April 17, 2018 to change our living situations. We were listened to by the members of the MH Coalition. They established a Marina Issues Subcommittee for us to debate the concepts of what we wanted and what Landlords wanted. Together we made progress.
SOME THANKS ARE IN ORDER…
I want to thank some very special people who without them, we would not be here today.
I’d like to thank John VanLandingham for writing that first article for the Oregon Bar Association entitled “Rights of a Mobile Home Owner Threatened with Eviction from a Mobile Home Park” (now revised and updated by someone else as of May 2018) which I originally found online in April 2016 that connected for me, for the first time, the concept that floating home owners in marinas were, first and foremost, considered “Tenants” in the eyes of Oregon law, not treated as typical “homeowners”. Then, following that logic, this discovery helped me to understand that Oregon law addresses floating home owner tenants rights with the same statute laws as manufactured home owner tenants in parks. And for the first time, this trail steered me toward already-established resources for Manufactured Housing Tenant associations and resources to find out more about our rights. It had taken me 2 years of research online before I “accidentally” discovered this article and subsequenly the existence of ORS 90.505 – 90.830 (Oregon laws protecting park and marina tenants).
I’d like to next thank Ken Pryor, the Program Coordinator of the Manufactured Communities Resource Center (soon to be renamed the Manufactured and Floating Communities Resource Center!) who took my desperate call in April of 2017. I had spent a year studying the Floating Home Tenant Laws on my own and realized the dire predicament which floating home tenants would face during an eviction. But I still had so many questions and no access to an attorney who was familiar with ORS 90.505-90.830. At that time, NO resources existed for floating home owners who rent their slips. There were no tenant groups, no associations, no attorneys who represented marina tenants, no online resources to help point you in the right direction. This website you are on today did not exist. There was, in 2017, no one to turn to to find answers or help. Ken Pryor, who serves as a manufactured housing park resource, not only took my call but invited me to attend the Manufactured Housing Landlord Tenant Coalition (MH Coalition) on May 9, 2017 to try to learn more about my rights and the law.
I’d like to thank the MH Coalition for welcoming me and my listening to my Homeowner Tenant concerns as they apply to marina tenancies over the last 2 years. I cannot change the series of events which devastated our family for years, but I can work toward preventing it from happening to any other Floating Home Owner Tenants. I have found a place where I can make a positive impact for all of us. I have only missed one meeting due to a snowstorm. If you haven’t been to one of our monthly MH Coalition meetings, you should try it. Stakeholders from various Landlord and Tenant groups get together to raise issues and concerns and engage in lively discussion to arrive at potential solutions to the issues that everyone can live with. In the end, the reason we are making progress is because the concept of the MH Coalition works. The MH Coalition is the vehicle that allowed us to introduce a bill to the Oregon Senate and get our laws passed!!!
I’d like to thank Representative Tina Kotek, Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives, who is a champion of tenant rights. I reached out to her in August of 2017 when I’d come to fully understand the personal and financial devastation that can be caused when a Floating Home Owner is under threat of eviction. She elevated the issue and asked us to testify one month later, in September 2017, at the Oregon House Interim Committee on Human Services and Housing hearing to help lawmakers understand how current laws were inadequate to protect floating home owners. Between the MH Coalition support and Rep. Kotek’s support, it became apparent that floating home owner issues should be heard.
I’d like to thank…YOU. I will always remember April 17, 2018 as the day we spoke up together. WE changed the course of history. After I made flyers and postcards and tried my best to get the word out about the first ever “Marina Issues focused MH Coalition Meeting” on April 17th, I had no idea if anyone would show up. But, YOU showed up!! In a standing-room only MH Coalition meeting in land-locked Tigard, floating home tenants from all over Portland, Gresham and Scappoose stood up and shared their experiences and perspectives with the MH Coalition. It was beautiful. From that day forward, we stopped being passive victims to the whims of several rogue marina landlords and started protecting our rights together.
I’d like to thank John VanLandingham and John DiLorenzo, facilitators of the MH Coalition, for listening to us that first day, along with park tenants and landlords. They had intended for marina issues to take up about half of the meeting – 90 minutes. But it was clear after the first 90 minutes, that we were going to need more time since we’d not had a legislative voice for marinas in decades. They gave us the entire meeting, and then established “The Marina Issues Subcommittee” so that we could continue to do the necessary work to find solutions to our most pressing needs. This additional responsibility which they both volunteered to take up is much appreciated.
I’d like to thank all of the marina tenants who participated and came to the various floating home owner tenant-only meetings during the spring/summer of 2018. You showed up with courage to share your stories and we realized we were not alone. Thank you for getting the word out to your neighbors and friends. Thank you for taking your time to ensure that our rights are protected and that we create a little better future for us than we had a year ago.
I would like to thank the Marina Landlords and members of the Marina Issues Subcommittee. Our discussions were challenging at times. In the end, our working together to find solutions showed us that we do have some shared interests and can work together on those in the future – e.g. damage from wakes, etc.
I would also like to thank the good marina landlords. I know you exist and I know you by name. You care about your tenants as individuals. You hire out your property management duties to people whose job it is to know and understand the laws. You treat your marina tenants with dignity. You don’t enforce the rules whimsically, unfairly, or only when it benefits you. I want to commend you for finding a way to make it work such that you maintain your business profits and your residents maintain their dignity. Keep up the good work. We are not a threat to you. “Bad Actor” Landlords are the biggest threat to your business because they perpetuate an us-versus-them mentality between tenant and landlords, and continually tarnish the reputation of all marina landlords. I would like to personally invite the good marina landlords to become more active in helping to stop a handful of bad apple landlords from violating the rights of their tenants. Without bad landlords abusing their power, there is no need for a coalition and a tenants’ rights group such as ours. Keep being that stellar example for other landlords to follow.
I’d like to thank several individuals (who gave me their permission to thank them publicly – I never betray someone’s privacy). I really want you to know how much I appreciate them and their efforts.
Sigfried Seeliger, thank you for offering tenants a safe location to meet. Those early floating home owners meetings were imperative to helping us understand what common issues we all were experiencing on the rivers. What we uncovered in your community space was the basis for the marina issues we worked toward resolving with this law.
Thank you, Nancy Ward, for supporting us and giving us a voice on the radio. I have met several floating home owners who have said that the reason they chose to speak about their experiences is because they heard our story on the radio and then felt the courage to share their own stories. We found our power in these numbers. Thank you for offering us a way to reach out to other floating home owners.
D.M.D., thank you for showing up at all of the MH Coalition meetings, getting the word out, participating in the process and being our group’s biggest cheerleader – some days when I was tired, it made all the difference that you enthusiastically appreciated these efforts.
And thank you to the many of you who posted flyers and are watching out for other neighbors at your own marinas who may be having issues. Keep sending them to the website for help and to me when they are in need. Keep telling them that they are not alone.
Last, but definitely not least, I would like to give a thank you and a big shout out to my father, Norm, a retired attorney. Countless times over the years, I have called him in tears, in joy, in frustration, in panic, and on every occasion, he was able to help me through (as he has done my entire life) with wise advice, guidance and patience, as well as a lot of translating of law language when I first started trying to understand it. When I was little, he always used to tell me that I’d make a great attorney. I never did become the attorney he had hoped I’d be, but his influence on me is helping hundreds of Floating Home Owner Tenants in Oregon and I hope that I am making him proud.
Next steps:
- We are taking break to celebrate and the MH Coalition will reconvene in the fall after we have rested.
The final version of SB 586 can be found here.