Council Hears Debate Over Mobile Home Rent Control : Hearing: Tenants, park owners exchange angry words as Lake Forest considers regulating increases.

LAKE FOREST —  Angry words from an overflow crowd punctuated a debate over mobile home rent control at a special meeting of the City Council on Tuesday night.

Both renters and landlords in the city’s four mobile home parks accused each other of distortions before the council, which was expected to vote on whether Lake Forest should become the second Orange County city to impose rent control. San Juan Capistrano is the other.

Renters claimed that rents had shot up tremendously in recent years, while landlords produced figures to dispute those claims.

“These (mobile) homeowners are experiencing tremendous hardships,” said Gladys James, a resident of the Forest Gardens Mobile Home Park, “and they do not deserve this heartless treatment from the park owners and management.”

Larry Weaver, an attorney representing the Kimberly Gardens Mobile Home Park, countered, “We certainly don’t need rent control, and there certainly has been no gouging.”

For more than a year, the council has tried to mediate the dispute between landlords and mostly elderly tenants in the parks.

More than 100 senior citizens packed a September, 1992, council meeting to demand rent control from the council for the first time. They claimed that some tenants had seen sharp rent hikes, with some monthly space fees increasing up to $600.

Landlords say rent control isn’t needed, pointing out that most of the approximately 1,200 tenants in the four parks are under a multi-year lease.

The city offered to pay for a professional mediator. The mediator was never used, although meetings were held with the city staff and council members present.

A report was compiled by the city for the benefit of the landlords and tenants. It outlined options for both sides, including setting up a rent mediation board and ways to help tenants buy their mobile home parks.

A year later, although progress had been made on several side issues, the tenants and landlords were no closer to settling their dispute over rent increases.

Last August, the council turned over its final card, calling for both sides to submit to binding arbitration. Arbitration plans were dropped when one of the mobile home park owners wasn’t willing to participate in person, city officials said.

Reluctantly, as a group, the council agreed to consider rent control.