Unknown buyer offers $42.5 million for Boulder County’s San Lazaro Mobile Home Park. Residents race to counter.

When San Lazaro Mobile Home Park was listed for sale this spring, residents organized an effort to buy it themselves. They feared that a new owner could sharply increase rents, displace families or redevelop the property, dismantling a community that has existed for decades. 

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Now, that effort has taken on greater urgency. 

On Aug. 10, residents were notified that an undisclosed buyer had offered the full asking price of $42.5 million, according to members of the residents’ group organizing the purchase. Boulder Reporting Lab was unable to determine who made the offer. David Eisenstein, an attorney for the park’s current owner, said the sale agreement and related nondisclosure agreements prohibit him from identifying the buyer or disclosing its plans for the park.

The offer leaves San Lazaro’s more than 800 residents racing to assemble a financing package to match it. Their public fundraising campaign has raised about $8,600 so far. 

Resident ownership would allow the community to set its own rents and address concerns including poor water quality.

Under Colorado law, mobile home park residents must be given an opportunity to purchase their community when it is put up for sale. San Lazaro residents’ initial 120-day period to submit an offer expired in July. The competing offer triggered a final 120-day period for residents to submit a counteroffer. The deadline is Dec. 8.

Residents asked the state, Boulder County, the City of Boulder and several nonprofit organizations for help, arguing that purchasing San Lazaro would preserve one of Boulder County’s largest sources of unsubsidized affordable housing. 

“In our initial conversation with the state, county and city, everyone said they had no money in their budget to help with filling the gap,” said Julie Heins, a member of San Lazaro’s steering committee. The state, county and city are facing budget shortfalls of $1.2 billion, $13 million and $6.5 million, respectively.

On Aug. 11, the Boulder County commissioners considered the residents’ request for financial help. More than 80 residents filled the meeting room andspilled into the hallway, carrying signs that read “Help us save San Lazaro” and “Ayudamos a quedarnos en San Lazaro” or “Help us stay in San Lazaro.”

In a letter to commissioners, residents called San Lazaro “affordable housing at a steal.”

“We are 213 homes of working families, seniors on fixed incomes, and longtime neighbors — a multicultural, multigenerational community — who already provide our own affordable housing without subsidy,” they wrote. 

“Preserving San Lazaro doesn’t create affordability from scratch; it protects affordability that already exists and is already woven into the fabric of the county.”

The commissioners directed county staff to prepare a letter of intent within two weeks, signaling an interest in helping residents pursue the purchase. But they did not commit funding or say how much the county might contribute. 

“We’ve been able to assist a number of communities in becoming resident-owned, and we have a very strong desire to help,” Commissioner Claire Levy said, describing mobile home communities as “wonderful places with a true sense of community.” 

“We’re not yet ready to say we can, but we want to explore that.”

A daunting financing gap 

In financial projections, San Lazaro residents projected receiving about $11 million each from the county and city. 

The city cannot use its affordable housing funds to help purchase San Lazaro because the park is outside city limits, according to Kurt Firnhaber, Boulder’s director of Housing and Human Services. 

ROC USA, a national nonprofit that helps mobile home residents buy their communities, could provide up to $15 million in financing for park purchases. But Thistle Community Housing, ROC USA’s local partner, told residents that it could not commit resources to San Lazaro until they secured additional support, like government or philanthropic grants, according to Heins. 

“It hit us like a ton of bricks and shifted us into a fight-or-flight mode,” she told Boulder Reporting Lab.

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Thistle did not respond to a request for comment.

Residents are planning a fundraising event on Aug. 23 andplan to apply for a state affordable housing grant that they say could provide up to $5 million. 

Even with that support, the price presents an extraordinary challenge. No other Boulder County park has faced a price tag approaching San Lazaro’s. Residents of Sans Souci Mobile Home Park, which has about one-quarter as many lots, purchased their property for $3.3 million in 2021. 

Boulder County has also provided administrative assistance to the residents.

Susana Lopez-Baker, director of the Boulder County Housing Authority, has met weekly with San Lazaro’s steering committee to discuss its options, support that Heins called “invaluable.”

The county also commissioned an independent appraisal to assess the property’s value. It has not made the appraised value public. 

What is at stake 

Some residents have lived in the park since the 1980s. Others grew up at San Lazaro and are now raising their own children there. 

Residents have worked across cultural and language barriers to organize the purchase effort. Their website, created to provide community updates, is available in Spanish, English and Bosnian. 

They say buying the park is about preserving the community they have built together as much as protecting relatively affordable housing. 

“This has been the safest community I have ever lived in, and amidst this soul-crushing housing crisis, I have found my faith in humanity restored consistently in this community,” Hannah Craven, a seven-year resident, told the Boulder County commissioners in May. 

“Most of the people in our community, they work in Boulder, and our kids go to schools in Boulder,” said Diana Briones, who has lived at San Lazaro with her children for about five years. “These are people who are working in your kitchens, who are helping your kids. Losing our homes would make us go further out and have to look for different jobs, different schools. The City of Boulder would be losing a lot of the community also, not just us.”

San Lazaro is also home to more than 140 children, most of whom attend Boulder Valley School District schools. Any potential displacement would come as the district confronts falling enrollment and considers closing schools. 

But the community’s financial position is precarious. 

Residents pay slightly more than $1,000 a month to rent the lots beneath homes they generally own. About half the park’s residents are housing cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on housing, according to a 2024 Boulder Watershed Collective study. Even relatively modest rent increases could force some families to leave. 

Mobile home parks have increasingly attracted private equity firms and other real estate investors. The properties can be lucrative because residents typically own their homes but rent the land beneath them. Moving a manufactured home can be prohibitively expensive, leaving residents with few options when rents rise. 

Promotional materials for one mobile home park investment course highlight that dynamic, telling potential investors that “the fact that tenants can’t afford the $5,000 it costs to move a mobile home keeps revenues stable and makes it easy to raise rents without losing any occupancy.” 

In some communities, residents have seen their lot rents double after investment firms purchased their parks.

San Lazaro Properties LLP, a Minnesota-based partnership, has owned the park for more than 40 years. The prospective buyer’s plans for the property remain unknown. 

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