By Namira Haris
NewsWorks Lab data journalist
State Rep. Dan Moul, an Adams County Republican who owns and operates his own manufactured home community, has spent the past year trying to convince his colleagues to cap how much companies can raise lot rent.
The issue is one plaguing many residents in communities across state as they grapple with increasing costs. Pennsylvania has roughly 2,288 manufactured home communities, according to a June 2023 Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia report.
Moul is trying to address the problem. He said he personally flipped roughly 30 Republican votes in the House by explaining the issue directly to lawmakers who, he said, rarely have such communities in their own districts.
“Most people in the general assembly, Republican and Democrat, don’t really know much about manufactured home communities,” Moul told NewsWorks Lab. “They just don’t know about them because they don’t live in them; they don’t have many in their districts; and those aren’t the kind of people who form organizations, for the most part. They’re pretty much forgotten people.”
The effort worked — to a point. A bipartisan coalition of House members passed H.B. 1250, which would tie lot rent increases to the rate of inflation. Every House Democrat voted for it, along with 42% of Republicans. But the Republican-led Senate Urban Affairs & Housing Committee has held the bill since June 2025 without a vote.
If the bill eventually passes the Senate, Moul said he expects private equity firms to challenge it in court on constitutional grounds. A previous NewsWorks Lab report identified how national companies and investors are purchasing mobile home communities across southwestern Pennsylvania.
A Senate companion bill, SB 745, sponsored by Sen. Judy Schwank, D-Berks, mirrors HB 1250’s inflation-indexed cap while also requiring fee disclosure and allowing residents to form associations. Like HB 1250, it has sat in the Senate Urban Affairs & Housing Committee — chaired by Sen. Joe Picozzi, R-Philadelphia, who could not be reached for comment — without a vote since June 2025.
A separate measure, Senate Bill 746, also sponsored by Schwank, would give residents the right to match a purchase offer before a community is sold. It passed the Senate Urban Affairs & Housing Committee with unanimous support in June 2026 and was then referred to the Senate Appropriations Committee, where it has not come up for a vote.
Jason Thompson, communications director for Sen. Scott Martin, a Lancaster County Republican who chairs the Appropriations committee, said roughly 1,000 bills are currently before the Senate and that he had not discussed the legislation with the senator. He declined to comment on its status.
Under Pennsylvania’s two-year legislative session rules, all three bills will die automatically at the end of this year if not passed. They would have to be reintroduced in 2027.
Schwank said in a statement: “We have not seen a good-faith effort from the Senate Republicans to provide these homeowners with common-sense protections that could make the difference between Pennsylvania veterans, seniors and people with disabilities staying in their homes and losing them.”
Industry representatives dispute that characterization.
Jared Surnamer, vice president of the Pennsylvania Manufactured Housing Association, who also owns and operates several manufactured home communities in the Allentown area, said he personally drafted the industry’s counterproposal to HB 1250.
“It includes caps; it includes provisions for capital expenditures,” Surnamer said. “It’s meant to avoid trapping a homeowner, avoid creating too much risk to a landlord — try to find a middle ground.”
Neither version has moved.
The law already on the books offers residents little protection, homeowner advocates said. Pennsylvania’s Manufactured Home Community Rights Act, known as Act 261, requires that rent be raised no more than once every 12 months — but it sets no limit on the dollar amount of any single increase.
“Residents have almost no control over what rent is charged,” said Dan Vitek, a litigator at the Community Justice Project, a nonprofit law firm that represents people who can’t afford an attorney in civil cases addressing systemic economic injustice.
Rents can be increased as much as an owner wants — on 60 days’ notice, once a year, he said, and residents have little leverage.
“There’s really nothing I can do” from a litigation standpoint, he said.
Absent new legislation, the trajectory for residents is often loss of the home altogether, said Esther Sullivan, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver and a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center.
“If nothing is done, we see lot rents rise, people are priced out, people lose their homes,” she said. “At a macro level, we lose one of our most important sources of affordable housing.”
Bob Besecker, a volunteer organizer with the Coalition of Manufactured Home Communities of Pennsylvania, represents homeowners and he fears that a lack of stronger regulations allows community owners to raise rents as much as they can.
“It’s the wild, wild west,” Besecker said. “They know they can do whatever they want to do, and they are.”
Besecker said he has heard a sentiment repeated by residents of mobile home communities facing years of rising costs: “The best I can hope for is, I die before my money runs out.”
Executives at two companies that have invested in mobile home communities in western Pennsylvania said they need to raise rents to provide higher-quality infrastructure and amenities for residents.
The increases at UMH, which owns 23 properties in Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Somerset and Westmoreland counties, are lower than “those enacted by our competitors and other forms of housing such as apartments or single-family rentals,” said spokeswoman Angela Marriott.
“Each community offers a higher quality of life today than the day we acquired it,” she added.
Legislation to limit rent increases would undermine investors’ ability to make improvements, said Joel Brown, president and chief operating officer of RHP, the nation’s largest privately held manufactured home operator, with five properties in Allegheny and Washington counties.
“Capping lot increases can have unintended consequences and provide a short-term fix to a long-term housing problem, ultimately harming the residents it intends to help,” Brown told NewsWorks Lab.
RHP’s average annual rent increase since taking over management has been under 2% plus the consumer price index — which has ranged from about 2.6% to 4.1% over the past three years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, he said. That means combined increases run as high as 6% annually.
At the same time, RHP has invested $4.5 million in Pennsylvania infrastructure and improvements at its properties, including $700,000 for roads, $370,000 for clubhouse renovations, and $200,000 for playgrounds, sport courts and a dog park, Brown said in an emailed statement.
“RHP’s guiding principle is putting residents first,” Brown said. “We do not take rent increases lightly and strive to balance residents’ needs with the operational realities of maintaining well-cared for communities.”
Nowhere to go
Homeowners say they have little leverage to fight back against higher rents – no matter the potential benefits.
Most often, residents own their homes but not the land beneath it, which they lease from whoever owns the community, according to Move In Mobile, an industry blog.
As a result, homeowners cannot typically get a conventional mortgage, but rather so-called “chattel” financing, with higher interest and shorter terms, similar to a car loan, according to MobileHomeBiz, a service company for mobile home business owners.
Institutional investors “have billions and billions of dollars and a lot of power and a lot of money available to lobby against regulation,” said Sam Garin, senior communications coordinator at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a national watchdog group. These companies tend to “target markets where there’s not a lot of regulation,” she added.
At least 66 manufactured home communities in Pennsylvania have been acquired by institutional investors in recent years, according to a December 2025 report by Regional Housing Legal Services, with most of those acquisitions occurring within the last six years. In communities acquired within the last five years, the report found, lot rent increased by an average of 49%.
Buyers weigh their total monthly housing costs — mortgage, insurance and lot rent together — before purchasing a home in place, Sullivan said.
As lot rents rise, fewer buyers can afford both payments — for the land rental and the home loan — shrinking the pool of interested buyers and suppressing resale prices.
“Homeowners can lose equity because their home is just a less attractive purchase,” she said.
At the same time, moving a manufactured home can cost upwards of $10,000, an expense that often outweighs the potential savings of relocating to a cheaper community, Garin said.
A recognizable pattern
After a private equity firm buys a park, the typical first rent increase runs $20 to $90 a month — with similar increases at every lease renewal afterward, said Erin Gaede, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the industry. She based that claim on her research observing several such transitions directly.
Firms that purchase mobile home communities also frequently split out water and utility billing that was previously included in rent or controlled by residents directly, adding further cost, she said.
“This is part of private equity’s playbook,” Gaede said. “They buy the parks, they squeeze out the profit for three to five years, raise the lot rents, hire some management company, and then sell it.”
Sullivan, the Urban Institute’s researcher, agreed that a recognizable pattern exists.
“The logic of investing in the purchase of a manufactured home community is to make a return on investment, and that return on investment comes from increasing lot rents,” she said. “It’s just a fundamental part of the equation.”
Linda Carranza, 74, a retired nurse who has lived at Oak Springs in Cranberry Township for 16 years, said she has experienced lot rent increases. The community is owned by COARE Communities LLC, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Carranza said she was paying $480 a month, which included trash and water. Her rent rose to $630 in early 2024, a 31% increase – plus the company separated trash and water as add-on charges, bringing the total increase to roughly 42%.
Her rent rose again to $740 in 2025, a 54% increase above what she was paying less than two years earlier. With the trash and water charges, her total monthly cost has climbed to roughly $830.
Not every resident describes a similar experience.
Richard Bonofiglio, 71, has lived for a decade at Fox Chapel Village in Cheswick, a UMH-owned community formerly known as Cloverleaf Estate. He toured about a dozen other communities before choosing Fox Chapel Village, he said.
Bonofiglio owns his home and pays UMH rent for the lot, which he said has risen in small increments of no more than $20 at a time. His most recent increase in February 2026 brought his monthly rent to $530.
“It’s quiet; nobody bothers you,” he said. “This was close to the city and way better than the rest.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of people living in Pennsylvania’s manufactured home communities. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s June 2023 report does not include a number of residents living in these communities.
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