Opinion ID: 810963
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Tumwater’s Ordinances

Text: Tumwater contains ten manufactured home parks. The parks are located throughout Tumwater, and none appears to border any other park. Three of the parks are very small and do not have a name apart from their respective addresses. The remaining seven are named Laurel Park, Tumwater Mobile Estates, Velkommen, Eagles Landing, Western Plaza, Thunderbird Villa, and Allimor Carriage Estates. Against the backdrop of increasing closures of manufactured home parks in Washington and the limited constitutionally valid statutory protections, the Tumwater City Council began hearing concerns from residents that some of the ownLAUREL PARK COMMUNITY v. CITY OF TUMWATER 12965 ers of Tumwater manufactured home parks had plans to close. Tumwater residents expressed their views at several public meetings. Mobile home owners tended to seek protection from park closures, while park owners tended to emphasize respect for private property and the legal limits on property restrictions. The City Council ultimately enacted two ordinances. Ordinance No. O2008-027 amended the Tumwater Comprehensive Plan and the Tumwater Zoning Map. Ordinance No. O2008-009 amended the Tumwater City Code. The ordinances create a new Manufactured Home Park land use designation (“MHP”) and a new Manufactured Home Park zone district. The ordinances designate six of the ten existing Manufactured Home Parks—Laurel Park, Tumwater Mobile Estates, Velkommen, Eagles Landing, Western Plaza, and Thunderbird Villa—under the new land use designation and include those properties, and only those properties, as the new Manufactured Home Park zone district. Before the enactment of the ordinances, the zoning code permitted a wide range of uses on the properties, including multi-family residences and other dense types of development. The ordinances restrict those uses in the following relevant ways. First, the ordinances specify certain “permitted uses,” which are allowed as of right: manufactured home parks, one single-family dwelling per lot, parks, trails, open spaces, other recreational uses, family child care homes, and child mini-day care centers. Second, the ordinances specify 11 “conditional uses,” which are allowed via a discretionary conditional use permit: churches, wireless communication facilities, cemeteries, child day care centers, schools, neighborhood community centers, neighborhood-oriented commercial centers, emergency communications towers, group foster homes, agriculture, and bed and breakfast establishments. Third, the ordinances permit still other uses if specified criteria are met: 12966 LAUREL PARK COMMUNITY v. CITY OF TUMWATER “The City Council may approve the property owner’s request for a use exception if the property owner demonstrates a. they do not have reasonable use of their property under the MHP zoning; or b. the uses authorized by the MHP zoning are not economically viable at the property’s location.” The stated “intent” of the ordinances is: “The Manufactured Home Park (MHP) zone district is established to promote residential development that is high density, single family in character and developed to offer a choice in land tenancy. The MHP zone is intended to provide sufficient land for manufactured homes in manufactured home parks.” The ordinances include many explanations for the creation of the new land use designation and zone district and the inclusion of existing manufactured home parks in the district. Most relevant here, the ordinances state that applying the new designation and zone district to existing manufactured home parks is consistent with a wide range of goals and policies included in various documents, such as the Tumwater Comprehensive Plan. They also state that: • “applying the Manufactured Home Park land use designation and zone district to existing manufactured/mobile home parks will help to ensure a sufficient supply of land for these types of uses in the future” • “manufactured home parks are a source of afford- able single family and senior housing in Tum- water,” and “protecting manufactured home parks from the pressures of development will help to maintain the existing stock of manufac- tured housing provided by these ‘parks.’ ” • “the manufactured/mobile home parks known as Eagles Landing, Laural [sic] Park, Tumwater Mobile Estates, Thunderbird Villa, Velkommen, LAUREL PARK COMMUNITY v. CITY OF TUMWATER 12967 and Western Plaza are located within residential neighborhoods and currently have residential zoning and are easily recognized as traditional manufactured housing communities.” • “applying the Manufactured Home Park zone to the six traditional mobile/manufactured home parks . . . is consistent with [a stated policy] to support healthy residential neighborhoods which continue to reflect a high degree of pride in own- ership or residency” and “is consistent with [a stated policy] to support the stability of estab- lished residential neighborhoods” The ordinances exclude the three small, unnamed parks, in part because “the small size of these three ‘parks’ does not foster a sense of community or neighborhood, and the owners of these three small ‘parks’ appear to own all of the dwellings located on the properties which contrasts sharply with the rest of the more traditional mobile/manufactured home parks in Tumwater where the majority of dwellings are not owned by the land owner.” The ordinances excluded the seventh named park—Allimor Carriage Estates (“Allimor”)—because it “is currently the only mobile/manufactured home park within Tumwater that is zoned General Commercial, the only ‘park’ that is almost completely surrounded by General Commercial zoning, and the only ‘park’ that abuts intensive commercial development in the form of commercial strip development and intensive large scale commercial retail including Albertsons, Costco, and Fred Meyer.”