Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Picture a notice taped to your front door on March 20. It says the ground under your house is for sale. Asking price, $42.5 million. You have 213 homes and more than 800 neighbors, and the clock just started.
That is San Lazaro. It sits in unincorporated Boulder County, just outside the Boulder city limits, and right now it is the biggest, highest-stakes test of a Colorado housing law most people have never heard of.
Here is the part people miss. In Colorado, when the owner of a mobile home park decides to sell, the residents get first crack at buying it. That is Colorado Revised Statute 38-12-217, and it gives the community a 120-day window to put together an offer and purchase the place themselves.
It sounds simple. It is not, because 120 days is brutally short when you are trying to raise tens of millions of dollars.
For months San Lazaro residents had been organizing against that March asking price. Then on August 10, the stakes jumped. An undisclosed buyer walked in and offered the full $42.5 million. No negotiating down. The whole number.
Who is it? Nobody will say. The current owner's attorney, David Eisenstein, says NDAs bar him from naming the buyer. So you have an anonymous someone with $42.5 million ready to go, and 800 people who actually live there trying to match it.
That full-price offer triggered the final countdown. The residents now have until December 8, 2026 to counter. That is the whole ballgame.
Let me lay out the math, because this is where it gets real.
On September 29, Boulder County commissioners approved a letter of intent committing
So where does the rest come from? Some of it is already in hand. Residents have raised about $300,000 in community donations, including a $40,000 gift from the Community United Church of Christ. Then there is ROC USA, the group that finances resident cooperatives. According to steering committee member Julie Heins, a 38-year resident of the park, ROC USA is typically willing to loan these communities up to
Run that in your head. County money, resident donations, a cooperative loan, and there is still a gap to close before December 8. This is not a done deal. Not even close.
One place the money cannot come from is the City of Boulder. Housing director Kurt Firnhaber said the city cannot touch its affordable housing funds here because the park is outside city limits. And that stings, because more than 140 children who live at San Lazaro attend Boulder Valley schools. They are Boulder kids by every measure except the one that controls the checkbook.
You might wonder why people would scramble this hard to buy a mobile home park. Here is the thing. Lot rent at San Lazaro runs about
And the water. Residents have complained for decades that it smells like bleach or like a murky pond. Imagine paying a grand a month for the lot and not trusting what comes out of the tap.
When you own the land, you control the rent. You control the water fixes. You stop being a tenant on your own street. That is the whole point of a resident-owned community, and if San Lazaro pulls this off, residents say it would become Boulder County's fourth ROC and Colorado's 20th.
Now, this has been done before around here. Down south of Boulder, the roughly 85-resident Sans Souci park bought themselves out in 2021 for $3.3 million. That was the proof of concept.
But put the two side by side. Sans Souci, 85 residents, $3.3 million. San Lazaro, more than 800 residents, $42.5 million. This is an order of magnitude bigger. This is the test case that tells you whether that opportunity-to-purchase law actually works at scale on the Front Range, or whether it only works when the number is small enough.
And honestly, that is why this one matters beyond Boulder County. Every mobile home community in Colorado is watching to see if 800 neighbors can out-organize an anonymous buyer with a checkbook. If San Lazaro can do it at $42.5 million, the law has teeth. If they come up short, that notice on the door becomes a lot scarier for everybody else.
So here is the real story on San Lazaro. It is not just a housing fight. It is 800 people, 140-plus kids in BVSD, and a December 8 deadline, trying to turn a law on the books into the ground under their own homes. Buckle up. We will be watching this one right down to the wire.