Complaints mount against Mobile Home University's tactics

CANON CITY, Colo. (AP) — Growing up in rural Michigan, Dawn Ketcham didn’t think much of mobile home parks and the people who lived there.

“I thought they were trailer trash,” she said.

Then Ketcham moved into the Central Manufactured Home Community, a tight-knit park in Cañon City where neighbors bake each other fresh banana bread, watch their grandkids and chat easily on their porches.

These people weren’t trailer trash, Ketcham realized — just everyday folks who couldn’t afford $450,000 mortgages in other parts of town.

And for her first eight years, life was good. Until RV Horizons-Impact Communities, a Cedaredge-based company, bought the park.

Suddenly, rent started rising. With a degenerative back condition that leaves her unable to work, Ketcham is slowly losing any wiggle room on her $800-a-month disability budget.

A pipe issue left standing water in her yard for months, attracting mice and gnats that flew into her mouth every time she brushed her teeth. Sewage backed up into her bathtub.

“They’re just money-hungry little (expletive),” Ketcham said. “I’m not renting property, just a small little piece of land.”

Residents say this is life at a mobile home park run by RV Horizons-Impact Communities, a company on Colorado’s Western Slope that stakes its claim as the fifth-largest owner of mobile home parks in the United States. Lawsuits, compliance complaints and protests against the company are piling up — and state regulators are taking notice.

As of mid-August, there were open complaints filed to the state’s new Mobile Home Oversight Program at eight of RV Horizons-Impact Communities’ 18 Colorado parks, according to state data. Regulators, meanwhile, recently subpoenaed records from one of the owners regarding...