Latest / Arizona Unscripted / Episode 30: 🌵 Arizona Unscripted - RV Living: Affordable Arizona & Knowing Your Rights!
Transcript
- Arizona Unscripted: Welcome to the Arizona Unscripted. Our podcast is a way to reach people where they live. It's about Arizona, people, places, events, and local issues. We present local conversations by local voices focused on local impact. We try to counter misinformation and build community dialogue and build a space for respectful human conversation. With that, grab a coffee or a cold beer and enjoy the conversation. And now I'll turn it over to my co-host, Diane. Well, hello. Thank you, Jim. I'm very excited to be here today. We have Catherine and Carol and Joan here with us as well. Catherine, I'm going to turn it over to you to introduce our special guest today. Thanks so much, Diane. It's great to be here today. We're really pleased to have Terry Newland as our special guest today. Terry Newland is going to talk to us about the affordability of not just the affordability, but other issues regarding living in Arizona's RV parks. So Terry, thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. So this is a dear to my heart. It's my lifestyle. So I love it and I want to encourage more people to consider retiring in an R V park. So what are the what made you decide to do that, Terry? I have traveled around all my life and ⁓ several years back I ended up down in Nogales, Arizona, and I ended up caregiving for both my dad and my brother at stage four cancer. And I would go late late night when it was just me, I would go on YouTube and I would watch Bob Wells of Cheap ⁓ RV Living. That's his channel, Cheap R V Living. And he teaches Yeah, he's a he teaches van living, like when you lose your house or you just ha wanna travel around and be free and not pay rent. So that's what he and that was my escape. I was like, wow, is when when I'm done with all of the responsibilities. I want to go live that way and see if I like it or not. So that's what inspired me. And how long have you been living that lifestyle? I started this on leap day in 2020. Wow. It's been a while then. Yeah, yeah. And then COVID hit. So so we were all on lockdown. So I wasn't too far away from Nogallis and I had to ⁓ you know, stay put until We got the clearance to move about the planet again. But ⁓ I fell in love with it so much that I upgraded from my truck and trailer to a class A motor home. Uh-huh. Which is thirty-seven feet long. And I have a little ⁓ car I tow behind it. I do it all by myself. Wow. ⁓ good for you. And I love it. And exciting. It is. What a great hitting the road, freedom and You know, having the having the freedom to go wherever you want to go. Just start your motor and pull up stakes and head out, I guess. But are you so Terry, do you travel around or do you stay mostly at one park at this point in time? At this point in time I'm staying in Quartzight. Bob Wells had this ⁓ annual event called RTR. And it's for the nomads and it's in January. So I came to Courtsite in December of twenty twenty hoping to be, you know, to attend the RTR. And in fact, I instead I just fell in love with Courtsight. It sort of the the courts, the rocks, I'm a rock hound. Uh-huh. ⁓ we've got a lovely newspaper here and the kids all get in the parades and it was a just a community that kind of grabbed a hold of me. and so I've been ⁓ hunkered down in one park now for a few years and I pay annually for my park space, but I can leave, you know, for a couple months and come back if I want to. I see. So you are free to travel, but yet you've always got a secure place to come back to when you want to. Do you move out of Arizona in the summertime when it gets too hot? ⁓ I I did once to go visit my mom in Illinois and it was really nice. And then a couple of times I just went to higher ground. Like I went to Cottonwood one time and I went to ⁓ Carmen, which is down by Tubok, and and and spent the summer there. But now I've learned how to insulate my RV so that I can stay in one place. Because these are made to cool inside about ten degrees cooler than outside. Unless you make modifications. So when it's a hundred and twenty outside, it's a hundred and ten in my rig. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If I don't mind hundred and ten as long as I can go inside my air conditioned house after my walk. Well, Terry, when when we met you in Courtsite and Parker, you mentioned ⁓ a few concerning tactics of RV park owners. And so ⁓ we'd really love to hear what's going on kind of behind the scenes at these parks, Derry. Yes. ⁓ there is a landlord tenant act that's been on the books. It's antiquated, but it does cover the rights and obligations of both, you know, the landlords and the tenants in RV parks. And the rules are ⁓ do you own your own rig? Do you rent the land that it sits on? Do you have you stayed there for 180 days? And if you answer yes to all of those, then you're covered by that landlord tenant act. However, no one knows about the law. Right. So what goes on in these parks is you get a manager. kind of on a power trip that wants to control everybody. And I became a victim of elder abuse in the park that I'm in right now. And she was she was burnt out on the job the manager was, but she was also hiding how to contact the owner, which is against the law. If I want to serve notice and demand on the owner, just tell her, hey, you've got a bad park manager. ⁓ I didn't I couldn't figure out how, except I used to be an escrow officer, so I know how to go to the county assessors records, figure out who's paying the taxes, and then go to the corporation commission and find out who owns the LLC, etc. So that's what I currently do with people who are in parks who can't get past their manager. So Are you part of an organization that does this or is this just something that you're doing on your own? ⁓ it took me eight months of Googling, and I'm pretty good at searching, to find an organization called Amho, and that's AAMHO.org. And they have ⁓ program where you pay them $35 a month, and then they hire. a lobbyist to go in and get the laws changed. However, their main focus were the big manufactured housing and mobile home parks that have the clubhouse and the tennis courts and the golf course and the ⁓ restaurants. And they were only getting the laws changed for that chapter, which is eleven. They didn't even know again that the law existed for people like me. So I I put my $35 on the table and I went to their general meeting and they said, We need a director for La Paz County in Yuma County. Will you serve on the board of directors? And I said yes. And I served with them for quite some time. I don't remember exactly how long. Then they had a sister organization, which is ⁓ Pro. And that's A-E-M-P-R-O.org. And I they teach the law, they don't lobby. And I thought that was a better fit for me. So I just scooted over to the sister organization and went on that board. And ⁓ you know, we would go into an RV park, we would have all the tenants in the clubhouse hand them copies of the law, give them highlighters and pens, tell them turn to this page, highlight this, turn to this page, highlight that. And so by the end they they pretty much knew what their rights were. And what to do if they ran into a snag. And that was a great fit. However, Ampro is now dissolving. And I, because of all that I've gone through, I'm boots on the ground in Quartzight. And I go into parks and well, even in Yuma, ⁓ somebody bought into a park so he could live near his mother because she needed care. And nobody told him about the water problems. He got in there and realized there wasn't enough water pressure to get up the shower. ⁓ And that ⁓ another park ⁓ running water only one hour a day. And there was a Yeah. And and that's very illegal, not to mention other things, but ⁓ he was doing kidney dialysis at home and couldn't rinse out his equipment. ⁓ my god. So there are some very serious problems and a lot of these parks are aging out. And then the other issue is managers that, you know, are a little too full of themselves. Yeah. I think people run into that everywhere. So so you've got man you've got the owner who is perhaps even an unknown entity to the people who live there. And then you've got the manager who is sort of all powerful. ⁓ How did you manage to break through that? Trial and error. ⁓ I just kept at it because it it wasn't right. And I would call the police, you know, things like ⁓ a nail pounded into the sidewall of my tire, my sewer connection was super glued shut. ⁓ this manager would c have everybody come for donuts and coffee in the morning and then she would be wearing ⁓ leggings that had foul language all over them. And the owner was really sweet. She was ninety, super sweet, had no idea this was going on. Right. That's what I was gonna say. The owners don't even know what's going on. They don't know. And now we have investors that have come in thinking they can make a bunch of money and then flip the park in a year, year and a half. And the new management team will come in, shred all the records. Like literally just shred all the records. set up a brand new software system. And so when someone comes in and says, Well, I put a deposit down, I'm owed this money back, they say, No, it's that we don't have record of that. So you have to keep all of your receipts. These are these are the things I teach people when I go out and I and I I literally go into their homes and I listen to the noise level that they're putting up with and then I coach them. ⁓ when you call the cops and when you go for ⁓ community legal services which is a free legal service for underprivileged people and then there are also now CCLAs they're called and you ⁓ go through the Arizona court system and ⁓ just put CCLA in the search button and there are free community ⁓ certified community legal advocates is what that stands for. And they specialize in housing stability and domestic violence. So anybody can get free help from them. ⁓ that's great. That's great that you're getting the word out to people. So ⁓ are there some parks that ⁓ w actually one of my questions was it must be against the law for him. them to shred those documents, is it not? That is omitted from the law. So yes, they can do it. And like I said, that there's an there's just so much that especially chapter nineteen needs to be rewritten. And what MHO does is they go in and they get one thing fixed at a time. Like for example, until I think it was three years ago, we had the big heat wave come through. And a lot of people died, especially in Maricopa County, it was illegal to just put a window unit in your manufactured home. If if the if the cookie cutter park system said everybody has HVAC and your AC went out, you were expected to s to spend eight to ten thousand dollars to put a new unit in because a window unit might be unsightly or a mini split might be too loud for your neighbors or just would make it just wouldn't be aesthetically pleasing, like aesthetics are more important than lives. So Amho went in and got that law changed. So they can now put in reasonable air conditioning. Why we need that desperately in this state, for heaven's sakes. Yeah. Being inside at a hundred and tens, that's a little much. ⁓ right now it's ninety one inside, and I'm quite comfortable with that. You learn to ⁓ because you only have ⁓ either 30 amps or 50 amps of power. And we also have a lot of people that come from up north and they they buy a little park model here. They don't understand how the electricity works, so they think they can microwave and run their air conditioner at the same time. And that and you can't. It trips the circuit breaker off and and then you can start a fire as well. So the next step that we're going to work on here in Quartzight is educating people about the power supply. I've added solar panels, ⁓ and everything I buy, like just to boil my water to make a cup of coffee. That runs on 60 watts instead of a thousand watts. And when I microwave it's one minute at a time. Instead of just push baked potato. Wow, that's stuff that we don't we all just take that for granted, I'm afraid. Yeah. So would you ⁓ so the other question I wanted to ask is are some of the parks okay? There are parks that don't have the kind of fraudulent issues. There are several. You just have to shop around. Like if you were gonna go ⁓ rent an apartment, you might want to see what it looks like in the daytime and what is it like after dark. You know, are there a lot of people partying, that kind of thing. ⁓ the parks who charge a year up front or at least six months up front are usually better because those are the people that have a little bit more money instead of a month to month tenant that ⁓ you know, might be a hoarder or something like that. ⁓ so the other thing I recommend that you do is go and look at the reviews. Because that tells you a lot about the park. And ⁓ and sometimes if you can talk to a couple people that live in the park, that helps as well. And like right here in Courtside, I tell people make me your first call because I know which ones have the good management, which ones do not. But generally the ones that are still mom and pop owned are good places to stay. That manager. They hire the manager. Yeah. So you made a comment ⁓ when we were talking to you down in Quartzight that there were 79 RV parks just in quartzite. That is a stunning figure, even for those of us who have driven through Quartzight many times. So what's the what's the figure for the whole state of Arizona? Do you have any idea? We do not. Because ⁓ when you live in an RV, you either pay county assessor taxes or you pay ⁓ motor vehicle to keep tags on the trailer or whatever it is, motorhome. So the county assessors books, I think in just just La Paz County show maybe about 500 full time residents in RVs, and that's not correct. No. Because I'm I'm in Quartzide. We've got about 2,500 people. It's the primary form of housing. Right. So we don't really know the true numbers. And then that number, of course, probably at least doubles in the winter time. Yes, we have a bunch of units that are here. ⁓ all the people from up north come back for the winter. By the way, I do recommend that you come visit quartzide. It's really remarkable. We have all the like the the ⁓ Tucson Gemin Mineral Show actually comes to Core Sight first. And it's called the powwow here. And that's gone on about sixty years or so. Yes, yes. Very famous, very well known event in Arizona. Yeah, we have the big tent, we have all these vendors, ⁓ ethnic food carts. Gemin, you can learn to make rings and jewelry, you can do anything you want. It's really a lot of fun. ⁓ but those ⁓ those units set empty through the summer. So they prep them to make the, you know, make it through the summer and then when they come back, you know, set up house for a couple of days and then they live here all winter. Yeah, I know. ⁓ I used to go see patients down in quartzite when I was working for a home health agency. So I've been in many of the mobile homes down there in Quartzight. And some of them I must say, there were some that were quite nice, and there were others that were very, very run down. And I really felt badly for the people whom I was seeing who were ill, right? That's why I was going to see them. in these really, really run down places. So it's a wide variety of what's available down there. Yes, and you can bring in your own unit, but no more mobile homes. I think eventually we're gonna age out and we're working on getting a hospital here because we do need more health care. I think our median age now is sixty-eight. ⁓ yes. Yeah, believe that. Easily and ⁓ maybe higher by now. But that's the other concern if somebody's wanting to relocate. It's very, very affordable here, but medical you have to travel. Where do most people go? Do they go to the hospital in Parker? Do they go over to Phoenix? Where do they most people go for their health care? Depends on what your requirements are. So ⁓ the people that need an oncologist will often go down to Yuma or somewhere into the Phoenix area. ⁓ there's a ⁓ urgent care in Blythe that is the closest to us. That's about 17 miles away, 18 maybe. And then Parker takes about 35 minutes to drive to that or ⁓ emergency room. most if it's a very, very serious, almost everyone is airlifted out. ⁓ And then they decide if if it's a hard issue which place you're gonna go or whatever. That's what I was going to ask you. Where does the ambulance come from and what's the response time if somebody calls nine one one? Our ambulance is right here. Our helicopters always have blood on board. So the the the the service is excellent if if you, you know, have a very urgent thing. We hope nobody does. I'm gonna knock on wood. and ⁓ the there's been quite a few people that like the p the hospital in Parkler Parker, sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. ⁓ quite a few that like Parker Hospital. I have never been. Hmm. I've been there a few times ⁓ to have some proced to accompany a patient for procedures down there. But it's obviously very small, ⁓ typical rural local hospital. So Terry, I have a question for you since you're so involved in the community. I know it's a range, but for those listeners who are thinking, hey, This might be an affordable way to do living here in Arizona. What do the the monthly rent for a lot, slot, whatever it's called, ⁓ range from? Like beginning in at the top end and we know there's a lot of different quality of the different parks, but what would somebody be looking at? Great question. ⁓ the kind of the top end. Well now I'm I'm not count counting the very fancy rigs that come only in the winter and that park is only open for winter. So I'm talking year round. ⁓ there's a top end of about four hundred dollars a month. And then I am grandmothered in at $125 a month. Wow. Wow. And I put a shed up. So I didn't have to pay for storage anymore. And the basically the lot rent is the same as I would pay for a storage shed. So and what about those electricity bills? Winter I pay about thirty five dollars a month. ⁓ this summer I paid two hundred and fifty ⁓ for July and August. That's summer heat. Yeah. But we have Wacog that helps ⁓ with utilities and rent. I don't know if you know Wacog or not. Yes. Yes. Well I'm glad we have plenty of water there. Your w water pressure's good and everything. Yes, and we are sitting on the Colorado River basin. So the town of Courtsite has at least a hundred and fifty years of water, if not More. We're very fortunate because there are other parts in La Paz County that are running out of water already. They send it to Phoenix. So if somebody was all over. Yeah. If somebody wanted to explore this, like what would be their first steps for getting a place? I mean, do people like find a place that already has a a ⁓ unit on it? Or do they go buy a unit and then look for a park that they want to be part of? Either one, you can shop for park models. And then again, those are kind of set down. ⁓ it can it could have been a fifth wheel or a tongue-end trailer, but they've removed the holding tanks and then they straight plumbed the toilet. So now it's called a park model. And ⁓ then you want to very carefully check out the park management ⁓ who's the make sure they're paying they have a copy of the law sitting in the office and you know, you you look at the reviews. If it's quartzite, please call me first because I'll let you know. ⁓ and then the other way is to find your perfect home that you absolutely love. And they make fifth wheels now with walk-in closets in them. Wow. They're gorgeous. Then you have to find a park that will take the length of that unit. ⁓ right. And we have some of those where you pay maybe a year in advance, right around $3,000 to rent for a whole year in that kind of park that can handle that kind of rig. So it's very inexpensive. I I think for housing. Sounds like it. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I could go rent an apartment here in town. We have senior apartments. They're seven hundred dollars a month. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Terry, can you share your contact information in the chat so that when we ⁓ publish this podcast that if people have Questions or want to reach out for more information, whatever is a safe way for them to reach you that you'd be willing to share. Absolutely. My cell phone is 928-274-4664. And my email is my name, T-E-R-R-I underscore N-E-W-L-O-N at hotmail.com. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming on with us today. This is such an important topic for those of us here in Arizona that are looking for more affordable living. We appreciate it so much. Thank you, Terry. Really appreciate your time today and also the good work that you do trying to find affordable housing that's fair for everyone. Thank you for all of your efforts for that. Thank you. Thank you, Terry, for being here. We'll look you up when we come to courtsite next. Absolutely, yes.