Tag: park models

PMRVs: the tail that wags the RV dog

PMRV, for the uninitiated, means “park model recreational vehicles,” which is a nonsensical word salad. Consider, for example, that the La Plata County, Col. building code defines park model RVs as “a special subset of recreational vehicles that are constructed for the purpose of permanent placement in a park or a residential site.” (Why cite a Colorado county code to make a point? More on that in a moment.) The point here is that “vehicles,” defined as “things that transport goods or people,” ipso facto become non-vehicles as soon as they are in “permanent placement.”

Still, the obvious fiction that park models really are just RVs persists, thanks to vociferous industry lobbying. An interview in the current issue of Woodall’s Campground Magazine with Dick Grymonprez, who’s retiring as the longtime director of park model sales for Skyline Champion, has him triumphantly acknowledging that the RV Industry Association—on whose board he served for a decade—was in the forefront of rebuffing federal efforts to regulate park model designs and construction. “A few years ago, the Department of Housing and Urban Development was trying to say that park model RV manufacturers were advertising and selling the units as housing,” he recalled dismissively, without disputing the claim.

Park models were a cash-cow not easily relinquished, so it’s not surprising that the industry pushed back vigorously. But after defeating HUD’s efforts, it also did nothing to dispel the notion that park models are so much more than an RV. “I think a lot of people that buy park models are buying them for a second home or vacation home”—or more, Grymonprez added, with a “what are ya’ gonna do?” shrug of his metaphorical shoulders. “If you think about it, a person’s going to live wherever they want to live. The RV business doesn’t want to admit this, but there are people that live in RVs year-round, full-time. There are people that live in park models year-round.”

In some ways, this is old news; what’s more recent is the blasé attitude by industry leaders toward the possibility of serious challenges to the housing hybrid they’ve created. And why not? At a time when RV shipments across the board are plunging by 40% to 50% over year-earlier numbers, RV park models—as seen in the bar chart above—are the stunning exception. Month after month, park model shipments have strengthened over last year and are up 32.1% for the year through the end of June. And while total park model numbers are a fraction of overall RV shipments, they’re also significantly pricier pound-for-pound than their rolling counterparts and have seen the greatest price appreciation over the past few years.

(They’re also increasingly boxier. While limited to no more than 400 square feet [500 in Florida] by HUD standards, all but a handful of this year’s shipments have been more than 8.5 feet wide—the maximum width permitted for real RVs and tiny homes on wheeled chassis. Of the 2,942 park models shipped the first six months of this year, 2,921 were too wide to be wheeled down a highway without a special permit.)

Just how costly these putative “RVs” can become is suggested by an email I received last week from a reader who wants to build his own winter ski chalet at a resort in Colorado. In 2017 he purchased a 20′ by 102′ lot in a private gated campground for $19,000, with the thought of eventually putting a park model on the site. After grading and leveling, installing retaining walls, upgrading to 100-amp electrical service and installing a heated hydrant 12 feet deep, he figures his property value is now $135,000. But in the interim, park model prices increased so much that “what was 50k for a custom model is now in excess of 100k for a cookie-cutter standard model,” making him wonder whether it’s all worth it.

Spending upwards of $200,000 for 400 square feet on a sliver of land no wider than can fit a standard automobile cross-wise isn’t how I would spend that kind of money, assuming I had it to spend. Then again, I’m not a skier. On the other hand, this kind of housing development, disguised as a resort community, is becoming ever more common, and it makes its inroads by maintaining the fiction that 12- and 14-foot-wide park models are just RVs and therefore should be admitted wherever the rolling variety is allowed.

In La Plata County, as referenced at the top of this post and as I’ve written before, Scott Roberts, an Arizona-based developer, has advanced his plans to build the so-called Durango Village Camp on the banks of the Animas River. When first presented to local residents and planners last December, the proposal foresaw creation of a 306-site RV park that would include an initial 42 or maybe 49 park models, with more to be added in some indefinite future. According to Roberts’s business model, the park models would eventually be sold—perhaps for as much as $450,000, as they currently are at some of his other properties. Still, regardless of how much that may look like a housing development, Roberts argues that Durango Village Camp “most closely resembles an RV park,” and that’s one of the allowed uses on the property as currently zoned.

But that was then, and this is now. Earlier this month, the final Village Camp paperwork was filed with La Plata County—and in the intervening eight months the proposal’s make-up has changed considerably. Instead of the 306 sites Roberts initially proposed, Village Camp would have only 277—but of those, fewer than half would be RV sites. The balance would include 54 undefined “RV cabin sites” as well as 86 park models, or roughly double the initial number. The narrative laying all this out helpfully observes that the park models “are technically RVs, but their fit and finish is similar to an upscale hotel room with beds, a kitchenette, a bathroom and living room.”

Whether this would be an appropriate use for the property in question is best resolved by the people of Durango. But their job would be much simpler if the whole process were more honest and the evidence of our senses was accepted over industry word-play and obfuscation: a park model is no more a recreational vehicle than a mobile home is mobile. They’re both fixed dwellings, separated by an arbitrary dividing line based on square footage. Nor does it help that zoning regulations all over the country—not just in La Plata County—are years behind the times in recognizing changes in the definitions of camping, campgrounds, RV parks and, now, glamping.

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Rule 1: own the land under your home

If you’re in the economic bracket that forces you to live in a trailer park, recent news has been alarming, with more than half-a-dozen such parks announcing their imminent closure just within the past week. Yet a growing number of RV parks also are encouraging campers to stay year-round, offering what may seem like a much needed housing alternative—until you realize it’s just another version of the same trap.

Mobile home park closures have been epidemic across the country, driven by aging infrastructure, rising land prices and various one-off circumstances. Officials in Grayling Township, Michigan, for example, have turned off the water to the aging Timberly Village Campground and Mobile Home Park because of its ongoing non-compliance with waterworks regulations: residents are on notice that the entire park will be shut down within a couple of weeks. The city of Flatwoods, Kentucky, meanwhile, has started eminent domain proceedings against a dilapidated trailer court on land it wants to use for a new fire house and city park.

Elsewhere, residents of the Dallas Pike Campground and Mobile Home Park in Triadelphia, West Virginia, received notice that they have 60 days to move out, reportedly because new owners will be using the land for oil and gas industry purposes. In Big Sky, Montana, the George Norman Trailer Court is up for sale after decades of providing affordable housing for local workers, with every expectation that the buyer will find a more profitable use for property located in prime skiing country. And in southwest Nebraska, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is demanding that 110 mobile homes be moved off leased federal land that they’ve occupied for decades to make way for a new campground, glamping tents and cabins, a splash pad and a dog wash.

That’s a whole lot of people learning, all within the space of a week, that they’re about to become homeless. But the reality also can be more complicated. In Louisville, Tennessee, only some of the residents of Country Acre Estates are getting the boot—the ones living in RVs. After more than 30 years, city officials abruptly realized that town ordinances regulating trailer parks restrict tenants to manufactured homes only. The occupants of 11 RVs at Country Acre Estates now have until the end of June to move out, but are complaining there’s nowhere for them to go.

Decades-old “mobile” homes are essentially immoveable, too old to withstand relocation, which means their owners typically are out on the street when the trailer court closes. But while even old RVs may be more mobile than mobile homes, the ones used as permanent shelters have two strikes against them, the first exemplified by the Country Acre Estates situation: barred from mobile home parks, such RVs also run up against park rules or municipal regulations that prohibit stays of more than two weeks at many campgrounds, which are viewed primarily as short-term recreational facilities. Moreover, many private campgrounds ban RVs that are more than ten years old, which would affect virtually all RVs that have been fixed residences. The combination can result in a severe lack of options—or none at all.

The other strike against using RVs for full-time housing is their substandard construction when compared with mobile homes. Although the RV manufacturing industry vigorously asserts that its products are intended purely for recreational purposes and are not suitable as permanent housing, the claim has a wink-wink and nudge-in-the-ribs quality, given the way these things are marketed—but by maintaining the fiction, RV manufacturers don’t have to comply with more stringent federal housing standards, such as using licensed electricians to wire their extraordinarily flammable creations. (For more on this scam, see here, here and here.)

The lower standards applicable to RVs are why Louisville and other municipalities prohibit them—at least on paper—from trailer courts. Yet as the Dallas Pike Campground and Mobile Home Park, and the Timberly Village Campground and Mobile Home Park also underscore, not everyone makes that distinction. Many mobile home parks adopt an ecumenical approach that regulatory agencies typically ignore.

Now, increasingly, RV parks are following the trailer court playbook—and as the pace of trailer park closures picks up, the pressure on RV parks to further accommodate long-timers will increase. The basic economic argument supporting that trend was laid out this week by Frank Rolfe (among others), in his observation that “one of the worst attributes of RV parks is that the customers leave . . . and every time they leave, you have no revenue on that space.” Which is true as far as it goes, although the same can be said of any segment of the hospitality and entertainment industries: whether it’s hotels or amusement parks, restaurants or ball parks, customers come and go. But Rolfe, whose commercial real estate portfolio is dominated by mobile home parks, has yet to see an RV park he wouldn’t prefer to convert into a residential property.

Rolfe’s comments came in yet another of his “RV Park Mastery Podcasts,” a series of more than 80 (and counting) sermons to actual and would-be RV campground owners that relentlessly promote RV parks as just another species of trailer courts. This week’s episode was devoted specifically to the wisdom of RV parks having park models, although in a broader sense it was arguing on behalf of permanent occupancy. For Rolfe, it all comes down to attaining “a more dependable revenue stream,” but also of getting on the right side of changing economic trends, most notably “as housing prices have become impossibly high.”

Deconstruct Rolfe’s approach and you’ll soon figure out that what he’s actually advocating is the transformation of RV campgrounds into cheaper mobile home parks. As he relates, “We have brought in literally over 100 park models into one of these RV parks, and they’ve all been sold and people live in there happily, and we as park owners . . . attain extremely stable income.” But as in mobile home parks, the owners of those park models don’t own the land on which they sit. And while park models theoretically are “mobile,” they are as unwieldy to move as house trailers, as well as being built to RV standards rather than more stringent HUD regulations.

All of which means that when things go south, as they so often do, the park model owner may be just as trapped as his or her mobile home counterpart. But that really isn’t Rolfe’s concern, and as increasing numbers of RV parks get snatched up by institutional investors whose primary interest is return on investment, it won’t be of concern to a growing number of RV park operators, either.

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Home sweet . . . shipping container?

It’s gotten to the point where the notion of a “campground” is becoming indistinguishable from that of a subdivision. True, the housing units at so-called campgrounds and RV parks are—mostly— smaller than their suburban counterparts. And their settings may be more “rustic,” perhaps with gravel roads instead of asphalt, and with such camping flourishes as outdoor fire pits or communal swimming pools. But commercial camp sites, whether for RVs or dwellings, also tend to be more closely packed together than the houses in most subdivisions, and the inexplicable fondness of many campers for lighting up their sites means starry nights at a campground will be as elusive as in any Levittown.

What brings this to mind is a couple of news items April 7 in RV Business, an online industry magazine, that illustrate the ever-widening definition of what constitutes an acceptable campgound rental unit. The first announced the “successful splash test” of something called a Bungalow Boat, developed by a sister company of Blue Water, an aggressively expanding developer and manager of RV parks and marinas. The Bungalow Boat is little more than a cabin on pontoons, suitable only for being moored in calm water, but is being promoted as “a true glamping experience”—which is to say, as an overpriced shelter that will make money only as long as “campers” are convinced they’re paying for an unusually authentic experience.

The other RV Business article that caught my attention breathlessly introduced something called the Gateway Park Model RV, manufactured by ekō Solutions LLC, “specializing in state-of-the-art eco-friendly dwellings.” Its faux Scandinavian name notwithstanding, ekō is headquartered just outside of Indianapolis; its eco-friendly dwellings are repurposed shipping containers.

There’s nothing wrong—indeed, it’s quite possibly praiseworthy—to take a 20-foot-long shipping container that has outlived its initial function and rework it into a habitable space. But it may be a stretch to label the result as “perfect for the tiny home lover or on-the-go camper who wants the amenities of a home away from home,” which is a lot to lay on a metal box that at 160 square feet is smaller than most travel trailers and easily twice as heavy. “On-the-go” possibly, but not easily. Perhaps there’s a market for these on the West Coast, where cities are scrambling for low-cost housing to shelter a growing army of the homeless, but to call them “park model RVs” suggests that ekō Solutions has a more upscale market in mind.

Recycled “camping” at its finest: the Gateway Park Model RV. Ah, nature!

Meanwhile, the more conventional park model industry is rolling along quite nicely, even as traditional RV manufacturers have seen production plunge 50% from year-earlier levels. As Dick Grymonprez, director of park model sales at one of the country’s biggest park model manufacturers, Champion Home Builders, told Woodall’s Campground Magazine last month, business for the segment is up 15% this year, driven in part by the continued building and acquisition of campgrounds by industry heavyweights like Sun Communities, Cove and Equity Lifestyles. “All the big community owners are growing their RV portfolios and putting in RV parks, so they need rentals. And they’re buying park models for rentals,” he explained.

Park models are the Trojan horses of the campground industry (as I’ve written before, here and here), a way of smuggling small houses onto properties that ostensibly were built for the more transient pastime of camping—a blurring of the line between residential and recreational communities. Layer on the upselling phenomenon of glamping, from bungalow boats to tricked-out safari tents, domes, yurts, treehouses, prairie schooners, teepees, Hobbit houses and other fantastical dwellings, and all of a sudden the RV nomads of yore find themselves boxed out and hemmed in by the new urban settlers.

It won’t take much more of this before a lot of prospective RV buyers will suddenly realize they don’t have to make a 10- or 15-year investment to go “camping” when campgrounds are providing such alternatives. True, on a per-night basis a park model or glamping unit will cost significantly more than an RV site, but for anyone not looking to be an RVing full-timer, the overall cost favors traveling by car and staying at what amounts to a decentralized hotel room disguised as something else. In this way, campground owners may already be stealing business from RV manufacturers, who in any case have done themselves no favors with their years of shoddy workmanship.

So look for still more variations on the theme, more innovative ways to put walls and a roof around beds and bathrooms while marketing the result as an unprecedented wow! way to go “camping.” Eventually all the combinations and permutations will be exhausted and the public, wowed no longer, will move on, the campgrounds they leave behind looking like those mining towns that became overrun with tumbleweeds once the ore played out.

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The park-model scam gains steam

Spring arrives next week—and as surely as the swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano (this year’s festival will be March 25), land developers armed with exquisitely rendered site plans and pulse-pounding economic projections will be descending on planning commissions and zoning boards coast-to-coast. Environmental disruption will be minimal, they’ll promise. Construction will be to the highest standards. Local shopkeepers will see an influx of new customers, tax coffers will be filled, and the people lucky enough to already be in the neighborhood will fatten and prosper.

And some of that may actually happen. Just don’t count on it, and especially not when the dream-spinners use sleight-of-hand to promote one thing while intending something else.

In southern Colorado, the dreams are being spun by Scottsdale, Az.-based Scott Roberts, owner of 11 RV resorts in five states. More recently he’s jumped on the glamping bandwagon, under the “Village Camp” label, which he describes as “an upscale outdoor resort company that combines oversized RV sites with luxury adventure cabins that can be rented or purchased as private getaway cabins.” Two such Village Camps have already opened, near Lake Tahoe in California and in Flagstaff, Arizona, and two more are in the works in Utah. Standard amenities include a steam room, fitness room, outdoor spa, swimming pool, amphitheater, playground, dog parks, outdoor fire pits, bistro with local microbrews, and a general store.

Now Roberts has his sights set on Colorado’s Animas Valley, where he’s purchased an option on a former 36-acre gravel pit that he would like to transform into a fifth, 306-site Village Camp. As with the other four properties, initial plans call for a mix of RV sites and “adventure cabins,” but the long-term goal is to convert a growing number of the RV pads to rental cabins, and eventually to sell as many of the cabins—currently offered at the Lake Tahoe property for just under $450,000—as possible. Which means, in essence, that Roberts is angling to create a series of high-dollar park-model communities without going through all the usual bureaucratic fuss that comes with building actual subdivisions.

But, of course, all that lies in a problematic future. What’s in the present is a proposal first floated at a La Plata County planning department meeting in early December, at which Roberts told area residents that only 49 cabins would be installed initially, but with plans eventually to have more cabins than RV sites. But these aren’t just “cabins,” he explained. They’re essentially tiny homes that meet the definition of an RV—thereby satisfying the less stringent zoning requirements for campgrounds—but are, he averred, the most expensive models ever produced by the factories from which Village Camps has been buying.

“This modular construction would be similar to having your own luxury hotel room,” helpfully added a planner working with Roberts, as reported in the Durango Herald. “The construction would look like some of our more high-end mountain homes here in Durango; it just happens to be smaller.” And just to drive the point home, Roberts chimed in with the claim that his resorts attract a more affluent class than one would expect to find at an RV park, mentioning several times the prevalence of six-figure Sprinter vans and Teslas on his properties.

That initial December meeting, in which the Herald reported that Roberts was greeted with a mixture of wariness and enthusiasm, was followed by a more divided planning commission hearing Jan. 12. A barrage of public comments, lasting well over an hour, included only a handful of Roberts supporters, with the rest objecting to the lack of more details, to the undefined increase in local highway traffic and to the impact of the park on the rural feel of the neighborhood. The planning board nevertheless voted, 3-2, to approve the next stage of the permitting process, clearing the way for Roberts to submit a preliminary plan that would respond to many of the concerns raised. Such a plan and permit application, Roberts said, will be forthcoming later this spring.

But in the interim, local opposition has gathered steam. The newly formed Animas Valley Action Coalition announced its existence this week and is seeking more support, contending that the planning commission is ignoring the county’s land-use plan. As argued by Dorothy Wehrly, one of the coalition’s founders, in a letter to the Herald editor, Roberts’ application should be for a “tiny home community” or a “manufactured home park,” both of which have more extensive permitting procedures, rather than for an “RV park.” Moreover, she added, Roberts is trying to have his cake and eat it, too, by proposing a 120- or 180-day occupancy limit for his cabins, whereas maximum length-of-stay under the county’s RV park rules is 60 days.

Whether the Animas coalition will generate the kind of local opposition that has greeted other recent glamping proposals is questionable: the environmental issues are not as stark in this instance as they have been elsewhere (how much more damage than a gravel pit can an RV park do?) and local opinion still seems more divided. As always, the devil will be in the details. But if nothing else, the Animas Valley case underscores yet again the Trojan-horse nature of park models, by which long-term housing can be introduced into a community in the guise of recreational vehicles. Need to meet the looser requirements of a commercial campground? No problem: park models are RVs. Want to sell “small luxury homes” for hundreds of thousands of dollars? No problem: park models can be decked out to look precisely so, and without having to conform to pesky HUD construction rules.

Finally, the sharp-eyed reader will have noticed that—as with most manufactured home parks—the “adventure cabins” that Roberts will be selling don’t come with the land on which they’re sitting. In addition, for the privilege of owning a tricked-out RV they’ll be paying $695 a month in rent, disguised as a “community fee.” And if the new owners want to recoup some of their investment by renting out “their” cabins when they’re not using them, that’s okay—provided the rentals are through the Village Camp management company, “to assure consistent guest experience.” For its troubles, the management company will claim half of the rental proceeds.

Financially incomprehensible as all that is, as evident when the glitz is stripped away, there undoubtedly are people with too much money and not enough horse sense who will snap up Roberts’ sugar plums. The question is whether Animas Valley will enable him to open up yet another confectionary shop—and what price it may pay for doing so.

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Growing identity crisis for RV parks

Despite the entrance sign at right, the R.V. Park of San Rafael is home to an eclectic mix of travel trailers, mobile homes and a park model, all visible from the entrance.

RVtravel has an interesting story today, by Randall Brink, which misses the forest for the trees but which nonetheless sounds yet another warning about a dystopian outlook for RV full-timers.

The piece, headlined “RV park tenants evicted after court ruling,” relates how residents of the R.V. Park of San Rafael, California, will lose their homes after the park’s owners ran afoul of the city’s rent stabilization ordinance—an ordinance expressly designed for mobilehome parks. In a nutshell, the property owner’s management firm, Harmony Communities, tried to raise rents by more than the ordinance permits, and on being sued by the city, argued that an RV park should not be subject to a mobilehome ordinance. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, pointing out that the ordinance has been on the books since 1991—15 years prior to the current owner buying the property—and that the matter had already been adjudicated in state court.

Harmony’s response? Issue eviction notices earlier this month to 40 of the RV park’s 45 residents, giving them until Oct. 31 to vacate the premises, presumably to prepare the land for sale. “The city wants a private property owner to singlehandedly subsidize affordable housing in San Rafael but the park has no cash and is losing money every month,” Harmony explained in a press release. “Since the city has refused to honor its own ordinance, the only choice is to shut down the park. We anticipate all residents moving out by October and look forward to redeveloping the property towards a higher and better use.”

Note that even after losing its court case, Harmony is still insisting that the city’s ordinance should not be applicable to an RV park—but is that an accurate description of the R.V. Park of San Rafael? As the photo above illustrates, the one shared aspect of the various dwellings on this property is that they all have wheels. Calling this conglomeration an RV park is no more accurate than calling it a mobile home park or trailer court—indeed, it could as easily, and accurately, be called the Mobilehome Park of San Rafael. Moreover, that blurring of distinctions is not helped in the least by California’s statutes, which define a mobilehome park as a property “that has at least two mobilehomes, manufactured homes, recreational vehicles, and/or lots that are held out for rent or lease.” [Emphasis added.]

Why does it matter? For one thing, such state laws and court rulings continue to mock efforts by the RV industry to draw a bright line between its products, which it contends are not intended for full-time residency, and actual dwellings that must be built to national housing standards. Successfully making that distinction helps the industry avoid such pesky regulations as requiring their electricians to be licensed, to cite a particularly egregious example, and it enables enormous cost-savings on construction materials and quality. If national standards for manufactured housing—the more contemporary label for mobile homes—were applied uniformly to mobilehome parks, RVs would never be admitted.

But that’s the forest that gets obscured by individual trees like the R.V. Park of San Rafael, where press coverage tends to focus on the need for affordable housing and not so much on what standards that housing should meet. What’s obscured is that RVs, park models, tiny homes and house trailers increasingly have become an undifferentiated mass of last-resort shelter, jostling each other for a place to chock their wheels in a mad campground game of musical sites—single-wides moving into RV parks, travel trailers finding room in trailer courts, park models and tiny homes springing into any chinks that can be found.

All these disparate forms of housing are not created equal, so why do we pretend that they are—except, of course, when it suits an outfit like Harmony Communities (really? Harmony?) to draw a belated, self-serving distinction? Are standards for manufactured homes too stringent, and therefore should be relaxed, if only to make house trailers more affordable? Or are those standards the bare minimum for ensuring safe and durable shelter for people with wheeled homes, even if those homes are called park models, fifth-wheels or travel trailers—in which case, what will it take to extend those standards?

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No room for RVs in gentrifying parks

As RV parks and campgrounds become increasingly folded into the cultural mainstream, it’s perhaps inevitable that they start resembling the larger society, warts and all. And so it is that campgrounds, once a refuge from the glitz and ostentation that characterize the contemporary world, have become as vulnerable to gentrification as any downtown warehouse district.

Remember Woodlands KOA? Probably not. A well-reviewed and moderately priced campground in Bar Harbor, Maine, it was closed three years ago with promises that it was going to be renovated and improved. RVers who had camped there in the past were thrilled. But when the campground reopened in 2021 it had been rebranded as Terramor Outdoor Resort, all the RV sites were gone and all “camping” was now restricted to renting one of four different styles of luxury tents–at an average price of $450 a night.

No? Then perhaps you’re familiar with French Broad River Campground RV Park in North Carolina, described in an online review as “a little hidden rustic gem” with all of its RV sites right on the river and a nightly rate averaging $45. That little gem went for $1.8 million earlier this year, as its owners of the past 27 years decided they were ready to do a little RVing themselves. “After some renovations, the new owners will reopen,” they assured their campers in a final Facebook post.

Yes, they will–but not any time real soon, as there’s still a lot of work to be done. That’s because the new buyer is AutoCamp, a fitfully growing national chain of glampgrounds that rents Airstream trailers and luxury tents but does not maintain spaces for RVs or tents, which would bring down the upscale vibe it’s seeking. This is, after all, an operation that describes itself as “an outdoor boutique hotel experience.” Which, in English, means nightly stays north of $300.

Or consider Prospect Lake Park in the Berkshires, a decades-old campground on the shores of a 56-acre lake that hosted generations of campers for the kind of idyllic summer vacations that would have caught Norman Rockwell’s eye. Its sites started at $39 a night, but if you needed 50 amps you were out of luck and whether you had a good time depended on how well you dealt with a gruff management style. If that rubbed you the wrong way, good news: the campground is now closed for at least another year, purchased last winter by a local developer, Ian Rasch, for $2.1 million.

As reported last week by Bill Shein of the Berkshire Edge, longtime summer residents who had put down deposits for this past season got refunds and were told that the new owner was planning on “significant improvements to the facilities.” Which is true as far as it goes, which isn’t far enough: the “improvements” entail replacing 125 RV sites with 40 park model RVs, reportedly being designed by a Brooklyn-based firm widely known for its “innovative prefabricated modular structures.” The improvements will not leave room for RVers or tenters.

Rasch’s intentions are also signaled by his working with LAND, an Austin, Texas-based design firm, to create a new “brand identity” for what had been a somewhat scruffy facility. LAND’s most recent project in the area was the 2018 launch of Tourists, a motel-turned-boutique hotel in nearby North Adams, where rooms rent for $300 to $700 a night. Chi-chi ‘R’ Us.

Why go to all the trouble of reworking an existing RV park rather than starting with a clean slate? Wouldn’t the latter be much easier and less messy?

Perhaps–but going the virgin-birth route opens up a developer to the uncertainties that come with seeking conditional use permits or other zoning approval, which means public hearings and potential public opposition. That’s what Terramore is discovering with its second venture, a 77-acre property it wants to develop from the ground up in Saugerties, New York. Despite its best efforts at community diplomacy earlier this summer, Terramor has been hit by local opponents who seem unimpressed with its pretensions to “outdoor opulence done right” but are worrying about water use, traffic and noise. Two weeks ago the newly formed Citizens Against Terramor told the local newspaper, “We’re afraid we’re headed for World War III.”

The alternative to that nightmare, however, can mean dancing right up to the line defining permitted use. Although Rasch’s redevelopment of Prospect Lake Park will amount to construction of a lakeside cabin community, by using RV park models instead of real cabins–or even tiny homes–he can maintain the fiction that the property will remain what it’s always been: a “campground.”

Just don’t try to camp there.

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The bogus nature of park models

A legal squabble in Currituck County, North Carolina, is exposing one of the camping industry’s biggest con jobs: the persistent claim that “park models” are just regular RVs.

A park model, as RVers who camp at commercial campgrounds probably know, is basically a cabin built on a single trailer chassis. Federal rules restrict them to less than 400 square feet, but they can be as much as 14′ wide, which neutral observers might conclude stretches the definition of “vehicle.” Indeed, like their larger mobile home or house trailer counterparts, park models usually require a special permit to be moved and usually need specialized towing equipment. Like house trailers, they usually don’t have holding tanks and so need direct water and sewer hookups for their plumbing. And like house trailers, once they’ve been set up they’re usually there to stay, wheels and axles removed and the undercarriages surrounded by skirting.

Park models, in other words, might appear to have a lot more in common with the manufactured housing found in trailer courts than with RVs. From a regulatory perspective, in fact, the only critical difference is the square-foot limitation: more than 400 square feet and the wheeled house is defined as a dwelling, subject to Housing and Urban Development regulations. Less than 400 square feet and the wheeled house is defined as “a trailer-type RV that is designed to provide temporary accommodations for recreation, camping or seasonal use,” removing it from under HUD’s regulatory umbrella and putting it under the arguably less stringent manufacturing standards of something called ANSI A-119.5.

That standard dates back to 1982, when the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association, the trade group representing RV manufacturers, sought to draw a bright line between “vehicles” and “dwellings” to forestall greater regulatory oversight of the RVs it was building. Over time, however, RVIA has steadily enlarged the scope of ANSI permissibility. In 1997, for example, it persuaded HUD to exempt “small lofts” from the square-foot calculation–and in the years since, the small lofts have grown bigger and taller, and now range up to five feet high. More recently, the industry also won the right to exempt porches built on the chassis from the same square footage limitation, opening the door for even bigger chassis footprints.

Still, even as park models grow more and more indistinguishable from mobile homes, the industry superficially maintains the fiction that park models are intended only for part-time recreational use. “Superficially” because even though that’s the official line, the real-world reality is that park models are touted as low-cost housing “perfect for retired seniors and couples just starting life,” according to one sales brochure, which optimistically adds that they’re “built to last 30-50 years or more with minimal maintenance.”

Or consider the representations of an outfit called Platinum Cottages, which claims that “while they are referred to as RVs and mobile homes, park model homes are built more robustly than their competitors and have more creature comforts that closely resemble traditional homes. They can be used for a variety of different things, from temporary living to permanent living quarters.” Indeed–and there are people all around the country doing just that, living year-round in park models parked in campgrounds and in mobile home parks and in some cases on private land.

It’s also why Currituck County, where Blue Water Development bought an existing campground four years ago, is having a problem. Having rebranded the property as the KOA Outer Banks West campground and then deciding it wasn’t entirely happy with its acquisition (don’t these people do any prior due diligence?), Blue Water soon went to court over the county’s land use restrictions–already in place several years when it bought the property–so it could add 80 RV sites, a swimming pool and other facilities. It lost that battle last summer, when the North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled that no, the county rules would stand.

Undaunted, Blue Water is back in court again, this time over new campground rules that the county adopted this past February–rules, ironically, that to some extent ease the earlier restrictions. Raising Blue Water’s ire, however, is a provision that would limit RVs to vehicles no more than 8.5-feet wide “in the transport mode.” Which is to say, no park models, which the county contends look more like manufactured homes than RVs.

Blue Water, which has 21 park models 10 to 14 feet wide at the KOA, is aghast. “The park model RVs clearly are not manufactured homes,” the lawsuit asserts, further contending that it “creates an unfair competitive advantage” for campgrounds in nearby counties that don’t have the same restrictions. Indeed, says Blue Water, the new law could put it out of business altogether, and just as the season is picking up. Currituck County’s new rules are nothing less than an existential threat that means campgrounds will “cease to exist.”

Hyperbolic? No doubt, but it will be interesting to see how Blue Water advances its claim that park model RVs “clearly” are not manufactured homes. Yes, it can be counted on to stress the difference between ANSI and HUD certification, and that might be enough to make the legal point. But the reality is that this is an increasingly arbitrary and meaningless distinction for an ANSI standard that no longer passes the smell test–if it ever did. If Carrituck County doesn’t make its case with a legal argument, it should prevail on the facts: park models do in fact look more like a manufactured home than an RV.

Time to get real.

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