Great News! YOU have spoken and YOU are ready for change! And we are hear for you. As of today, this group of Floating Home Owners, who have been organizing like crazy, have representation from 11 different rental moorages! And we have been making progress on behalf of you and your rights as Floating Home Owners.
At the April 17th MH Coalition meeting, so many concerned Floating Home Owners from many different moorages attended and voiced their opinions on marina tenancy issues that were most important to them.
The meeting was so well-attended that there was standing room only as the venue ran out of seating for us!! So, thank you for your courage to come forward to speak about important topics while your Marina Owners and their attorneys listened.
There were several major takeaways from the April 17th meeting.
The first is that the Marina Owners have proposed legislation they wish Floating Home Owners will consider supporting and the second takeaway is that a clear need was demonstrated by the topics and the participants that FLOATING HOME OWNERS NEED A VOICE and a forum to continue to focus on their rights under Marina tenancies.
Marina Owners proposed the following 3 issues for proposed legislation:
- 30 Day Notice to Relocate Floating Home Owners or Lease is Terminated: Marina Owners are asking that Oregon law provide them with yet another tool in their portfolio of reasons to evict tenants. They wish to be able to serve a 30-Day Notice to temporarily or permanently relocate your floating home in order to (1) come into compliance with local planning codes (even if the cause of the code violation is because of the marina owner’s negligence and nothing you did wrong), (2) accommodate marina construction and/or dredging, (3) anticipate future dredging (meaning your home can be forced to move ‘indefinitely’ in advance of some future date of dredging, and (4) allow another home to relocate if your home is in the way of the other home’s new location. The ideas is that, if you don’t agree with or comply with the notice to move your home, landlords can evict you. WHY THIS MATTERS TO YOU: Marina Owners are asking for the ability to move your home permanently against your will and have you pay for the cost of moving it. Additionally, in real estate, you have heard “Location, location, location!” A landlord’s ability to permanently relocate your floating home from an outside end slip (similar to a ‘penthouse’ location) to an inside, view-obstructed slip located a football field’s distance from your current location (similar to a ‘basement’ apartment location) will most definitely impact the value of your floating home.
- Upzoning and Increased Population Density Via Liveaboards: Marina Owners are asking for a state law to allows them to forgo numerous local planning agencies’ requirements for infrastructure, adequate resources, parking availability, environmental concerns, etc. in order to allow liveaboards into your floating home community without proving that the facility can handle the extra congestion nor taking into account how having temporary residents that can start their motors and disappear into the night may affect permanent residents such as Floating Home Owners.
- Upzoning and Increased Population Density Via RV Parks: Marina Owners are asking for a state law to allows them to forgo numerous local planning agencies’ requirements for infrastructure, adequate resources, parking availability, environmental concerns, etc. in order to allow RV parks to be built out in their uplands areas without proving that the facility can handle the extra congestion nor taking into account how having temporary residents that can start their motors and disappear into the night may affect permanent residents such as Floating Home Owners. Additionally, they want the right to create the parks on sensitive, protected wetlands.
After the introduction of these proposals from the Landlords, Tenants voiced their opinions and the group then discussed issues that Floating Home Owners were experiencing.
After the entire meeting was spent discussing these topics, it became clear to the meeting’s facilitators that there was enough content to work through that they established a Marina Issues Subcommittee to hear just the marina issues. This separate group, comprised of Marina Landlords and Tenants, will work through various issues and proposed legislation together and then bring them to the larger MH Coalition which includes both Marinas and Manufactured Housing community stakeholders.
The successes of the April 17th MH Coalition meeting for Floating Home Owners is that their issues were heard by the very people who are tasked with drafting future legislation, that it was clear from the attendance that Floating Home Owners have long-needed a forum to discuss issues which affect them, and that the group established a dedicated Marina Issue Subcommittee so that we can continue to focus our efforts and work to find ways to protect our rights and have more stability in our tenancies so that we can more fully enjoy our floating home lifestyle.
At the close of the meeting, the Floating Home Owners felt hopeful and exchanged contact information so that they could continue to collectively build on the good work that had begun. We realized that we have power in numbers and can actually do great work together. Let’s do this!!