UPDATE: San Jose council delays mobile home rent increase

Some of the last naturally affordable housing in San Jose may be preserved, after officials deferred a proposed rent increase in mobile home parks.

The City Council voted 10-1 Tuesday to delay a proposed 10% space rent increase whenever a mobile home is sold and engage in community meetings with residents and park owners to develop a mutual agreement. District 7 Councilmember Bien Doan voted against the delay because he wanted to reject the rent increase altogether.

Councilmembers asked staff to analyze the proposed rent increase and return back to council in the fall.

Under the existing policy, property owners are allowed a 3% to 7% rent increase on each parcel every year. Anything more than that will require city approval, and they can’t increase rent to market rate prices except when the property is abandoned, the resident is evicted or when a sale falls through.

After initially supporting the rent increase, Vice Mayor Pam Foley and Councilmember Rosemary Kamei expressed concern at the meeting after internal emails showed the Housing Department consulted with a representative of a company that owns several mobile home parks in the city to craft the policy.

“I recognize that the department did do a lot of meetings and went out to stakeholders,” Kamei said at the meeting. “However, it seems that when we don’t make policy in partnership with those impacted, they don’t feel heard under those circumstances. The community outreach feels like a pronouncement from on high, no matter how well intentioned.”

The city has more than 10,000 mobile home spaces across 58 mobile home parks that fall under the rent policy, according to city data. At San Jose Verde Mobile Home Park, space rent varies from $800 to $1,650 a month.

Dozens of residents spoke against the proposed rent increase at the council meeting.

Fred Gomez, a mortgage broker, said the rent increase would price out a significant number of working class people, since buyers would need to make three times the housing expense — including space rent — to be approved. He’s already having to turn down about half of the people who come to him looking for a loan, and said if the rent increase goes into effect, about 30% to 50% more people may be unable to afford a mobile home.

“The mobile home buyers are the working class. The city needs to protect (mobile homes) because it’s less than 1% of the overall housing within the city of San Jose,” Gomez told San José Spotlight. “Park owners are multimillionaires. They just want to line their profits by making an extra $2 (million) or $3 million.” 

When the policy was first made public in November, mobile home residents said there had been no prior outreach. Emails shared with San José Spotlight reveal the policy was being drafted with park owners in mind long before the public knew.

Emails show Housing Department employees asking Ryan Jasinsky, property manager of mobile home park company owner Brandenburg, Staedler & Moore, to provide feedback on the draft policy. Jasinsky represents the company and other park owners on the Housing and Community Development Commission. The company owns eight mobile home parks in San Jose, including Mill Pond, Mountain Springs and Quail Hollow.

The emails date back to September 2025, before the draft policy was published on the commission’s Nov. 13 agenda for commissioners to weigh in. Other commissioners said they didn’t get a chance to shape policy as Jasinsky did.

“What I feel is betrayed,” Commissioner Daniel Finn, who represents mobile park residents and lives in a mobile home, told San José Spotlight.

Emails dating as early as Sept. 21, 2025 show Housing Director Erik Soliván asking Jasinsky to do a “page turn” on the draft policy to get feedback. In that same email, he asked to set up a meeting with Jasinsky.

Jasinsky sent another email to Soliván and Eviction Prevention Manager Emily Hislop on Nov. 5 providing input on the policy language of the rental increase.

Jasinsky did not respond to a request for comment.

When San José Spotlight asked Soliván if he met with any other commissioners, he said he offered to schedule a meeting with Finn twice to review the draft with him. Finn canceled both times, Soliván said.

“The Housing Department is committed to meeting with all stakeholders on matters related to our work,” Soliván told San José Spotlight.

Finn said Soliván only offered to meet with him once after Finn called the department in early December after learning Soliván had met privately with Jasinsky. Their meeting was scheduled for Dec. 5, but Finn said he canceled because he thought his input would be ignored, since the proposed policy was already public.

“I declined the meeting because they had already met with Ryan and there had been no outreach to the mobile home community,” Finn said. “There was nothing else I could add.”

Other commissioners, including Ali Shapirman and Chair Ruben Navarro, said they didn’t know about the rental increase before the city made the proposed policy public.

“This raises a lot of transparency issues,” Navarro told San José Spotlight. “(Soliván) could have asked for my input but he didn’t. He should have let the whole commission know that he was working with Ryan on the proposed language changes to the (policy) and he should have absolutely invited the mobile home residents’ representative Commissioner (Finn) to work on the draft as well.”

Martha O’Connell, regional manager for Golden State Manufactured-Home Owners League and mobile home resident, said these emails throw Soliván’s objectivity into question.

“These proposals are nothing but a wish list for the park owners,” O’Connell told San José Spotlight.

O’Connell, who served on the commission for eight years, said Jasinsky told her a week prior to the November commission meeting he heard “through the grapevine” the city was going to increase rent.

“He didn’t want me to know that he was the one writing it,” O’Connell said.

Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X. 

Story updated Jan. 27 at 10:48 p.m. Original story published Jan. 26 at 4 p.m.