Tim Nangle: Giving Residents a Fair Shot at Owning Their Communities

By Senator Tim Nangle

In the 1950s, my father bought a mobile home park in Danvers, Massachusetts. He didn’t do it to get rich; he did it to build a life and a community. For decades, he kept that park running with a simple philosophy: treat people fairly. He fixed things himself, unclogging toilets and crawling under trailers on cold winter days. Sometimes he worked throughout the night to wrap heat tape around frozen pipes. If a tenant was late on rent, he worked with them. He took care of his tenants, and they appreciated that. When my father passed away, my siblings and I took over running the park and we did our best to carry my father’s approach forward.

State Senator Tim Nangle

A few years ago, everything changed. We started getting unsolicited offers from private equity firms with deep pockets and little interest in the people who lived in the park. Their goal was simple — buy the park, raise rent and extract as much profit as possible.

Thankfully, Massachusetts has a strong law on its books that gives residents the right to match an outside offer and buy the park themselves. That law gave our residents a fighting chance and they took it. They organized, secured financing and made a competitive offer. Today, they own the park and it’s thriving under their ownership.

Their story could have ended very differently, though. And here in Maine, it too often does. That’s why I’ve introduced LD 1145, "An Act to Protect Residents Living in Mobile Home Parks."

Mobile home parks are some of our last truly affordable housing options in Maine. But in recent years, they’ve become a favorite target of out-of-state investors looking to make a quick profit. These firms often raise rents, enforce strict eviction policies and skimp on maintenance. And because our current laws don’t do enough to protect residents, their actions can go unchecked.

LD 1145 strengthens protections for park residents by:

● Requiring park owners to notify residents when they plan to sell.

● Giving residents 90 days to organize and make a purchase offer.

● Creating a clear right of first refusal so they can match any outside offer.

● Ensuring that if a park is being shut down or redeveloped, residents get 90 days' notice and help relocating, paid for by the park owner.

We’ve already seen signs that Mainers are ready and willing to step up. During the public hearing on this bill, Nora Gosselin from the Cooperative Development Institute shared that under Maine’s current statute, residents in nine different communities have already organized and submitted competitive purchase offers — sometimes offering more than what corporate buyers had on the table. But six of those offers were rejected. As Nora put it, “The law needs to be strengthened into a Right of First Refusal to build upon an effective model, in an environment with so many aggressive, deep-pocketed, out-of-state corporations, amid an affordable housing crisis."

LD 1145 isn’t radical. It’s fair. It’s practical. And it’s proven. This bill gives residents the chance to hold on to the homes and communities they’ve built not just for now, but for generations to come.

The bill is currently being considered by the Legislature’s Housing and Economic Development Committee. If you agree that Mainers deserve a fair shot at owning their communities, I urge you to contact the committee and your local legislators. Let them know that you support LD 1145.

You can contact all members of the Housing and Economic Development Committee by sending an email to HED@legislature.maine.gov. To find your representative, visit legislature.maine.gov/house/. <

The opinions in this column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of The Windham Eagle newspaper ownership or its staff.

Insight: To swallow the sun

By Lorraine Glowczak

If you do any form of online shopping, products similar to what you ordered (or simply even took a moment to look at) appear in your social media feeds or other website searches. The same goes for certain information you search online – those similar topics of interest will suddenly appear in other internet platforms.

Often referred as the filter bubble, it is based upon a website algorithm that takes personalized searches and “selectively guesses” what information you’d like to continue to see. This can come in handy for online shopping by saving time searching for the products you prefer.

The downside to the genius of algorithms is that it also feeds us information that we have already developed an opinion about. This additional “information” continues to confirm our points of view – misleading us into believing we are more “knowledgeable”. But, perhaps worse yet, it can deceive us into believing that we are more “right” about our perspectives than we actually are. So right, in fact, that we scarcely listen to an opposing point of view, claiming others as closed minded, lacking intelligence, or not considering all the facts.

But, of course, we – on the other hand - are certainly opened minded and have considered all the facts ourselves. Afterall, the information confirming our perspectives is endless.

And, here I go – speaking of facts and online research, University Professor of Law, Business and Economics at Villanova University, Brett Frishmann had this to say about the subject in the scientificamerica.com online article, “Is Smart Technology Making Us Dumb”:

“I believe we may be making ourselves dumber when we outsource thinking and rely on supposedly smart tech to micromanage our daily lives for the sake of cheap convenience.

The internet provides us with seemingly limitless data…that could in theory enhance our intelligence and enable us to become more knowledgeable, to be more skillful or to otherwise use actionable intelligence. Maybe we could improve our decision-making, reflect on our beliefs, interrogate our own biases, and so on. 

But do we? Who does? Who exactly is made smarter? And how? And with respect to what?  Do we find ourselves mindlessly following scripts written or designed by others?”

Frishmann admitted that there are two sides to the story, and in some ways, the internet isn’t always making us dumber. And, for me, that’s the whole point. There are two sides to every story, and each contain some form of what is right, correct and true.

Author Barbara Brown Taylor stated in her book, “An Altar in the World,” that knowing what is right and true for oneself involves practice. “Wisdom is not gained by ‘knowing’ what is right. Wisdom is gained by ‘practicing’ what is right and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.”

For me, claiming to be 100% correct in any one perspective is equivalent to swallowing the sun (to borrow an analogy from author Elizabeth Gilbert on a different subject). Its action is impossible. So, I suppose I will practice listening to the other side of the story. And I will continue to practice – until I can swallow the sun.