In recent weeks, the city of Petaluma and owners of Youngstown Mobile Home Park have sent dueling letters to park residents that reflect the increasingly pitched battle being fought in Sonoma County over mobile home regulations.
“Any information you provide to the city – including your address, email and phone number – will become a matter of public record,” an Oct. 20 letter from the park’s attorney Paul Beard II warned of a questionnaire sent out by city staff. “If you decide to respond,” it continued, “the park may need to depose you” as part of litigation between the two, and “it may be advisable for you to hire counsel.”
As the struggle over new local rent control laws and other protections for mobile home residents in Sonoma County continues to escalate, and lawsuits start to pile up, the litigation in Petaluma offers a window into how the disputes fare when tested by the courts.
Since an opening volley in January 2024, the fight has now led to dueling legal action from both park owners and Petaluma. Even the U.S. home lending giant Fannie Mae has entered the fray.
With mobile home parks seen as a last bastion of affordable housing in California, local governments have taken big steps to try and preserve that stock, especially as residents faced with rising rents on the land beneath their homes have rallied for help. At what’s become the epicenter of the policy dispute and its rippling consequences through mobile home parks, Petaluma residents have stepped up to lead much of the advocacy.
“We’re basically trying to be at the forefront for parks across the U.S. – of how to fight, how to stand up,” said Mary Ruppenthal, who has lived at Youngstown for 38 years.
Park owners, meanwhile, protest that new layers of local regulation are heavy handed at best, and at worst, are driving them out of business and undermining the little affordable housing that’s left.
That tension has played out especially in the lawsuits over Petaluma’s October 2023 law that seeks to safeguard age restrictions for Petaluma’s five senior mobile home parks, including Youngstown. The law was born out of Youngstown resident concerns in particular, after park owners took down signs designating it an “older” community and announced plans to open to all ages – a move that city officials and resident advocates say jeopardizes the supply of homes for seniors but which park owners say is necessary to remain solvent.
The battle is taking place on contested legal ground.
Owners say the zoning ordinance discriminates against other adults and families seeking affordable housing in a state with few such options. Owners also argued the ability to serve all ages, which opens up a larger market, “was inextricably linked to the park’s economic challenges” exacerbated by the city’s mobile home rent control update tying increases to 70% instead of 100% of the Consumer Price Index, the average measure of goods and services in an area.
Rent and other rules for mobile home parks, where residents own their homes but not the land underneath, are governed by different laws than other housing. Rising cost of living pressures on residents – most low-income and many older and reliant on retirement savings or social security – led to a wave of advocacy and new protections, including tightened rent control, starting in Santa Rosa and spreading across Sonoma County, making it a battleground for a much larger and existential regulatory fight, including at the state level.
Youngstown’s owners see its Petaluma litigation as much bigger than resolving the particulars of its fight with the city.
When it comes to imposing age restrictions on mobile home parks, “our position is only the park owner can decide,” Youngstown’s attorney Beard said. “This is going to reach the Court of Appeals eventually, and so we think this issue will be resolved statewide soon.”
Youngstown’s ownership group is headed up by Daniel Weisfield, who is co-founder of Three Pillars Communities, a mobile home investment company that operates more than 90 parks in 16 states.
The city of Petaluma has defended its senior overlay law as an established tool applied narrowly and necessary to preserve housing for a particularly vulnerable population – one increasingly at risk of homelessness, according to local and state data trends.
Youngstown owners didn’t wait for the courts to weigh in. Deeming the city’s ordinance unlawful, the park has forged ahead as an all-ages operation, selling several units to younger people and families over the past couple of years. In response, the city, with the state of California, filed its own lawsuit in January 2025.
“No one gets to defeat a local enactment by virtue of them violating it,” Petaluma City Attorney Eric Danly said.
Toll on residents
Litigation is just one front of the face-off, both in Petaluma and beyond in Sonoma County.
Youngstown and another Petaluma park, Little Woods Mobile Villa, owned by the Ubaldi family, have announced potential plans to close down. The Ubaldis have signaled similar intentions for some of their other Sonoma County properties, too.
The same park owners have petitioned for multi-hundred-dollar rent increases through arbitration processes set up as part of mobile home laws where a park owner can make the case they aren’t getting a fair return and residents can fight it. It’s a lengthy and costly endeavor for all involved, even as all but one of those petitions in Petaluma have been rejected outright.
Along the way, there’s been mixed messaging, eviction notices and constant fear of displacement for residents. Last month, many Youngstown residents found a $1,000-plus charge added to their usual rental and utilities bill. The fee was an accumulation of a $118 per month rent increase awarded in a March 2024 arbitration that was – and still is in part – tied up in further legal dispute. Residents expected to be on a payment plan that had been previously negotiated but instead scrambled to pay the surprise lump sum that came with no warning or explanation.
Some borrowed, racked up credit card debt or secured cash advances. They banded together to secure funding for a dozen of the most vulnerable residents from Petaluma People Services Center and COTS.
After months now of “finding taped letters in envelopes to my place, I didn’t want to come home,” said Tim Porteous, who’s lived at Youngstown for seven years. “They were always one way or the other, threatening.” He was diagnosed with depression, anxiety and high blood pressure, he said. “That’s the first time in my life that I’ve ever had those issues.”
“It wasn’t until I was doing the paperwork in the office that the manager told me that it was an all ages park… and then also mentioned the park could be closing,” said Val Bishop who purchased a mobile home in Youngstown about a year ago.
“I wanted to pull the whole thing. I was in a panic,” said Bishop, who had been unaware of the turmoil. But, she’d already uprooted and paid – all cash. “I thought, ‘Oh God, what did I get myself into?’”
Court wrangling
In court, Youngstown argued that since the current owners bought the park in 2020, it was never their intent to operate as a senior park, and they haven’t been meeting the federal requirements to maintain that status – and so Petaluma cannot legally force them to revert, they contend, to a park for older people only. The city has pointed to annual surveys that management sent out as recently as 2023 asking residents to verify their age, specifically to comply with the federal rules. Beard said this is just one of the necessary steps, and others haven’t been taken.
While owners believe this a winning argument in their fight against city regulations, it complicated matters when Fannie Mae entered the picture. Petaluma named Youngstown owners, as well as the lending giant, in its own lawsuit over the park’s failure to comply with the local senior designation.
In turn, Fannie Mae cross-sued Youngstown for breach of contract, pointing to repeated explicit provisions in its $8 million loan that specified the park cater to seniors.
“Youngstown has admitted that it has breached the age-restrictive use provisions of the loan agreement for the subject property, which constitutes an automatic event of default,” Fannie Mae’s complaint said.
Both sides anticipate the lawsuits will be resolved without trial. Both sides also said they expect to prevail.
Beard pointed to a similar set of cases in Cotati where park owners got an incremental win recently, although both lawsuits are still ongoing. In that case, the Ubaldis, who own Countryside Mobile Home Park off West Sierra Avenue, also challenged a senior overlay zoning change even though Cotati did not tighten its rent control.
Danly, the Petaluma city attorney, said that for years park owners have been trying similar arguments in the courts that have been repeatedly rejected. “Park owners have so relentlessly challenged mobile home rent control ordinances that the Ninth Circuit pointedly characterized a case… as ‘déjà vu all over again,’” Petaluma quipped in a motion to dismiss submitted as part of another lawsuit against the city, filed last month in federal court on behalf of Capri Mobile Villa, also owned by the Ubaldis.
So far, in the Youngstown challenge, a Sonoma County Superior Court judge has denied two of the claims and allowed two others to proceed. The court is currently weighing competing motions to resolve the case in one or the other party’s favor without trial. A next hearing is scheduled for February 2026. The city’s lawsuit is ongoing as well.
New scope & scale
The sharp tension, and even the legal arguments at play, between the local governments and the businesses they seek to regulate are not new. But this latest battle with park owners has taken on a broader scale and scope.
Ruppenthal, who has lived in Youngstown since 1987, said residents didn’t always see eye to eye with the previous owners, the Young family. The family fought the original mobile home rent control law enacted 1994, but “they for the most part left us alone,” she said. After the new owners took over, “the last four or five years since have been nothing but one hassle after another.”
“We had three members of the Young family,” she said of the difference. Now, “we have large corporations that run mobile home parks throughout the U.S., we have attorneys, we have deep pockets to try to steamroll us.”
In August, Matthew Davies, founder of Harmony Communities, one of the largest park managers in the area, sent Petaluma city council members a letter signaling that a wider constellation of park landlords were watching the local fight. Harmony Communities manages the Ubaldis’ Sonoma County mobile home parks as part of a portfolio of more than 30 in California and Oregon. Nick Ubaldi, a vocal critic of local regulations, also works for the company.
“I have received over $3,000,000 in commitments from park owners across the state to challenge every aspect of this ordinance and to continue litigating with the city on the myriad issues for the next five years,” Davies wrote. “I am told that park owners will gladly contribute more as needed… At some point, the city will be draining its general fund.”
Lawsuits have now been filed in Petaluma, Windsor, Cotati and elsewhere. The Ubaldis are behind several of these complaints and work with the same attorney as Youngstown.
Ubaldi, Davies, Weisfield and another owner, Bill Feeney – who owns The Cottages in Petaluma Mountain View Mobile Estates in Santa Rosa, and is involved in ongoing litigation challenging new state mobile home legislation – have led the pushback. Other local mobile home park owners have remained largely quiet, at least publicly.
Park operators say their response is not a bullying tactic but a last resort, after seeing their concerns over unworkable laws ignored and their attempts at compromise rebuffed.
Petaluma, which is in front of most cities on the battlelines, is seeking “to uphold and strengthen regulations so they serve their purpose, not to stick it to park owners,” Danly said, and “these tactics that we’re seeing from park owners amply justify their importance.”
Petaluma is home to some 860 households across seven parks. “Litigation comes at a cost,” he said. “It’s a big commitment of time and funding, but helping people become rehoused is a very costly enterprise, too.”
Residents, meanwhile, appear more organized and committed than ever. A large contingent in Youngstown has bonded together, lobbying the city council, fundraising for legal fees and at-risk residents. They have t-shirts and picket signs at the ready for protests. They’ve coordinated with others in neighboring parks and across Sonoma County and the Bay Area and were even involved in pushing new protections at the state level that passed this year.
“I took a chance, and I’m really glad I did” said Bishop, the Youngstown newcomer who’d considered backing out when she realized what the park was going through. “I wasn’t looking for anything like this, and then once I learned more and started participating, I thought, ‘oh my god, I’m right where I’m supposed to be.’”
In her nearly four decades at Youngstown, Ruppenthal has now weathered the fight over the city’s first mobile home rules and now their updates, plus changes in ownership, landlords seeking triple-digit rent hikes and showdowns with management. She remains undeterred.
“I don’t just live in a tin can as sometimes they’re referred to. It’s my home,” she said. “It’s where my parents lived. My family – my aunts, uncles – we had Christmas parties. There’s lots of memories in my home, and I want to fight for it.”
You can reach senior reporter Marisa Endicott at 707-521-5470 or marisa.endicott@pressdemocrat.com. On X @marisaendicott and Facebook @InYourCornerTPD.