Meadowood Village mobile home park in Littleton, Colorado, where most of the park’s 139 residents are retired and living on fixed incomes.
The notice arrived on January 2, 2024, the first working day of the year, when Meadowood Village was still quiet and the yards were glazed with winter frost. Many residents of the 55-and-over mobile home community in Littleton, Colorado — about 10 miles south of downtown Denver — expected something cheerful. A “Happy New Year” from management, maybe. What they found instead was a 10-page “Notice of Intent to Sell.”
Without warning, Meadowood’s owners had put the land beneath their homes on the market, and there was a potential buyer. The park’s 139 residents — most of them retired and living on fixed incomes — understood at once what that meant. A new owner would control the facilities, the rules, the lot rents, everything. Their days there were numbered, if the experience of many other recently bought-up parks was anything to go by.
Colorado law offered one sliver of daylight: A 2022 amendment to the state’s Mobile Home Park Act gave residents 120 days to make an offer of their own. But this was not exactly bake sale money. The bid they would have to match was $18 million…