Park-Owners in Palo Alto Ordered to Compensate Tenants for Relocation Costs

This article is a summary of the San Francisco Chronicle’s article titled “Palo Alto trailer court owners lose battle over relocation costs.” If you would like to read the full article, select the hyperlink at the bottom of this page.

Tim and Eva Jisser are the current owners of Buena Vista Mobile Home Park in Palo Alto, California and have been since 1986. The manufactured community retains 117 trailer units and is set on a 4 ½ acre lot. Although they applied to close the park in November 2012, hoping to sell the property to a potential investor, they are still battling to have their plans to come to life.

Because California law allows local governments to require mobile home park owners to protect residents from shutdown effects, the Jissers have been ordered to compensate each tenant for relocation costs; whether the residents want move their trailer to a separate location or pay a higher rent elsewhere in the city is irrelevant.

After the Jissers’ applied to close Buena Vista in 2012, Palo Alto and Santa Clara County jointly agreed to keep the community open with intent to acquire the property by any means, pledging $29 million between the two to purchase it. In September 2014, Palo Alto city officials held a hearing to discuss the sale, as Buena Vista is the only mobile home park in the city, and granted the Jissers permission, given they compensate residents for the value of their home, the moving costs and the difference between their trailer rent and the average apartment rent in the city and surrounding suburbs.

The expenditures were added and found to be approximately $20,000 per tenant, or $8 million all together.

Tim and Eva filed suit in federal court in November arguing that the city-ordered payments were unconstitutional, that they amounted to an unconstitutional confiscation of their property. But because of a technicality, a federal judge ruled for the trailer court owners to move forward with the city’s verdict.

According to U.S. District Judge Edward Davila, federal court doctrine calls for property owners to first turn to state courts before filing under the federal system and only after the state courts fail to resolve the issue can the owners take their constitutional claims to federal court.

With that, the Jissers filed an appeal later that day.

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