Local residents, nonprofits, governments and private donors are once again rallying together to help a for-sale mobile home park become a resident-owned community. If the purchase is successful, Cavern Springs Mobile Home Park — located in unincorporated Garfield County along Highway 82 between Carbondale and Glenwood Springs — would be the fourth park in the Roaring Fork Valley over the past year to transition to resident ownership.
Residents of mobile home parks often own their homes but rent the land underneath from a private landlord, leaving them vulnerable to displacement if owners redevelop or raise rents significantly.
Resident-owned parks are collectively purchased and governed by the residents themselves, typically through a nonprofit cooperative structure. The cooperative often takes out a loan to purchase the land, and residents’ monthly fees go toward paying that back, similar to paying a mortgage.
As more corporate investors buy and sell these properties, a growing community-led effort in Garfield, Pitkin and Eagle counties is also helping inform state laws and regional strategies to preserve parks as affordable housing.
Cavern Springs residents are competing with another bidder — a Texas-based investment group — and have until June 13 to secure an affordable loan and submit an offer on the park listed for $23 million. Two nonprofits — Mountain Voices Project and the West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition — are helping residents reach a fundraising goal of about $11 million from a mix of local governments, businesses and individual donors. The Aspen Community Foundation is also helping them collect donations via its Housing Justice Fund. The nonprofit opened the fund last year to help Cavern Springs but plans to continue it for other local housing needs.
Cavern Springs is sandwiched between the Roaring Fork River and Highway 82 near the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. The 98-lot park is home to about 300 residents, many of whom have lived there for decades and earn below 80% of the area median income, according to the regional housing coalition.
As of May 27, the Sopris Mountain Collective (the residents’ not-for-profit C-corporation) had raised just over $6.5 million, still about $4.5 million short of their fundraising goal.
Local governments have contributed the majority of current funding — $5.5 million — as forgivable loans in exchange for preserving the park as affordable housing. Contributions include $2 million from the city of Aspen, $1.5 million from Pitkin County and $1 million from the town of Snowmass Village. Carbondale and Glenwood Springs have also pledged to contribute $500,000 each. Garfield County, Eagle County and Basalt declined to contribute.
“Part of the condition of the money coming from the governments was to maintain the affordability through deed restrictions,” said Jon Fox-Rubin, a leader with Mountain Voices Project. “So people that would be buying mobile homes in the future in these parks would need to qualify based on their income and they have to work in the community.”
The proposed loan structure also limits residents’ ability to sell the park in the future.
“If they decide to sell the park, they actually have to pay back that money to the municipalities that loaned it to them,” Fox-Rubin said.
Residents and their nonprofit partners have also raised about $1 million through community fundraisers and private donations. According to Mountain Voices Project and the housing coalition, the donors include the Basalt Sanitation District, Eagle Crest Nursery, Molly and Chester White, Resource Generation Colorado, and former Aspen Skiing Co. CEO Mike Kaplan and his spouse, Laura.
The subsidy will help keep loan repayments affordable and help cover potential costs such as updating the park’s aging infrastructure. The fundraising goal recently increased from $10 million to $11 million based on the most current borrowing and infrastructure cost estimates.
If the coalition falls short of $11 million by June 13, Mountain Voices Project said residents should still be able to secure loan financing and submit a reasonable offer to get under contract. Residents would then continue fundraising for the remaining $4.5 million before closing this fall.
To meet the full sale price and fund potential infrastructure updates, residents and their nonprofit partners need loan financing from several lenders, including the Impact Development Fund — a regional Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that provides flexible loans for affordable housing — and Boulder-based nonprofit Thistle Community Housing.
Thistle, the primary lending partner, is the Colorado affiliate of ROC USA — a national nonprofit that helps manufactured home parks transition to resident-owned communities, or ROCs. Thistle ROC also assisted with the successful resident purchases last year of Aspen-Basalt and Mountain Valley parks in Basalt and Carbondale, and Mountain Mobile Home Park in Glenwood Springs.
The three parks sold for a collective $46.5 million, with $16 million raised from local government, philanthropic and corporate donations toward the $42 million combined price for Aspen-Basalt and Mountain Valley. The city of Glenwood Springs contributed $1.5 million in designated housing funds toward the $4.5 million Mountain Mobile Home Park purchase.
Residents organize
At a community fundraising event April 11, a group of Cavern Springs residents, including Liliana Cereceres, were busy cooking and packaging about 2,000 tamales to deliver throughout the valley.
Cereceres, who teaches at Riverview School in Glenwood Springs, and her husband, who specializes in laying tile for construction projects in Aspen, raised their two sons at Cavern Springs. Their younger son attends school at Riverview and their other son works for the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority.
Before moving to the mobile home park nearly eight years ago, Cereceres had been renting in Carbondale and the Blue Lake subdivision, and she was relieved to find a more permanent place where she could raise a family and would only have to pay monthly lot rent to the park owner.
“Ese era mi sueño: El no estar pagando tanta renta y estar estresada con una renta,” Cereceres said. “Ya como 16 años, buscando la manera de tener un hogar más estable, no estar pagando una renta donde a veces tenían que poner de venta un departamento y ya tenía que salir.”
(“That was my dream: not having to pay so much rent and be stressed out about it,” Cereceres said. “For about 16 years, I’d been trying to find a more stable living situation, instead of paying rent in places where they’d sometimes put the apartment up for sale and I’d have to move out.”)
But Cavern Springs has changed ownership twice since Cereceres moved to the park in 2018, and she said her lot rent has increased about 75% over the past 7½ years — from around $600 per month to $1,050 per month.
“Entonces vendían el parqueadero y ya nos subían también la renta, hasta llegar ahorita a lo que estamos,” Cereceres said.
(“So they sold the mobile park and raised our rent too, until we got to where we are now,” Cereceres said.)
Last spring, Cavern Springs went up for sale again. Cereceres and many of her neighbors worry that if they aren’t able to purchase the park themselves, investment companies could continue flipping it for a profit and raising rents, or even redevelop the property.
“Sería devastador, porque es lo único que tenemos nosotros,” Cereceres said. “Hay personas que contamos solamente con nuestra traila, con nuestro hogar, porque aquí es muy caro como para hacer mucho dinero, entonces sería como quedarnos otra vez con las manos vacías.”
(“That would be devastating, because it’s the only thing we have,” Cereceres said. “There are people like us who rely solely on our trailer, on our home, because it’s too expensive here to make much money, so it would be like ending up empty-handed all over again.”)
According to the Colorado Division of Housing’s Mobile Home Park Oversight Program, the average rent of the 98 lots at Cavern Springs increased 25% between 2022 and 2025, with lot rents averaging about $946 per month as of January 2025. (The state program began collecting this data in 2022.) The largest rent increase was in January 2024, when monthly average rent was raised by approximately $100 — double the roughly $50 increases in 2023 and 2025.
This tracks with a broader regional pattern across Pitkin, Eagle and Garfield counties. Aspen Journalism analyzed state housing division records for 49 mobile home communities in the tri-county region. Of those, 31 parks raised monthly rents by an average of $70 in 2022, 34 raised rents by $74 in 2023 and 41 raised them by $80 in 2024.
(There are about 70 mobile home parks in the tri-county region, but parks with fewer than five mobile homes, RV parks, and subdivided parks such as Aspen Village, Lazy Glen and several others in Pitkin County do not meet the state’s legal definition of a “mobile home park.”)
Recent property sales
In 2018, the now-defunct Strive Communities purchased Cavern Springs, formerly known as the H Lazy F Mobile Home Park, for $4.5 million, according to Garfield County Assessor’s Office records. In 2021, the Colorado-based company listed the park and an adjacent storage unit for sale for roughly $18 million — about four times what it had purchased the property for three years earlier, according to Fox-Rubin with Mountain Voices Project.
At the time, Fox-Rubin worked for the now-closed nonprofit MANAUS, and some residents were interested in partnering with MANAUS and Thistle ROC to purchase the property. The park was part of a multiproperty portfolio sale by Strive Communities; Thistle ROC successfully facilitated resident purchases of two others. But the asking price for Cavern Springs was roughly twice its assessed value — making the debt that was needed to purchase it unobtainable, with lot rents that would’ve nearly tripled for residents.
“The residents at that time just decided we can’t put in an offer, and so they voted to not proceed with purchasing their park,” Fox-Rubin said.
Instead, Maryland-based Horizon Land Management purchased the park in 2021. The exact purchase price was unclear — no document fee was recorded by the county assessor as the company claimed a statutory exemption, according to previous reporting by Aspen Journalism.
Horizon’s website lists more than 100 properties across multiple states, including two others on Colorado’s Western Slope — one in Grand Junction and the other in Montrose.
Although county assessor records show that Cavern Springs is currently valued at just under $10 million, Horizon listed the park for sale last spring for $23 million and an adjacent storage facility for $3 million. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Last May, residents received another notice from Horizon alerting them that a bidder had submitted an offer to buy the park and storage facility. The potential buyer, Axia Realty Partners, is the same bidder that competed with local residents last year to buy Aspen-Basalt and Mountain Valley mobile home parks.
State law gives residents 120 days to purchase their park from the date the seller receives a competing offer, but Cavern Springs residents were granted an extension to June 13 after finding a discrepancy in the sale prices listed in the English and Spanish notices.
Although Colorado law requires sellers to consider an offer from residents “in good faith” and provide a reasonable justification if they deny a bid, it does not give residents a right of first refusal or mandate that park owners sell to residents.
Competing bidder
Axia Realty Partners is a Texas-based investment group run by Dimitri Mastorakos, Ricardo Quinones and Eli Ware. In a May 13 email, the partners said they first became aware of Cavern Springs two years ago while visiting the area with their families.
The investment group confirmed that it owns several mobile home parks, primarily in the western United States, but none so far in Colorado.
The partners said they look for “unique markets where there is strong demand for housing” and where long-term ownership and reinvesting in aging infrastructure — including sewer systems, utilities and roads — makes sense.
Mastorakos confirmed that the investment group had met with several members of the resident cooperative to share that they intend to keep Cavern Springs as a mobile home park — as was, they said, their plan for Aspen-Basalt and Mountain Valley had their offer been accepted last year.
“We decided to invest in this community because residents have proven for decades that they take great care of their homes and have a long-term commitment to living here,” Mastorakos said.
Axia drew news coverage last year for significant rent increases at a Jackson, Wyoming, park that it purchased in December 2024. The Jackson Hole News & Guide reported that monthly lot rents for current residents doubled over roughly five months last year — to about $1,200 from about $600. Mastorakos confirmed in the news report that rent for new residents would be even higher — $2,500 per month.
The investment group said increases were necessary to cover the future cost of connecting the park to the town’s sewer system.
“While we understand the short-term burden is not easy for everyone, we committed ourselves to ensuring the community remains a mobile home park for decades to come,” the partners said.
The group said it doesn’t yet know whether similar infrastructure upgrades would be required at Cavern Springs.
“The due diligence required to properly evaluate and price those improvements is very costly and time consuming,” the partners said. “Given that we do not know whether we will ultimately be able to purchase the property, it did not make financial sense to explore further at this time.”
Axia also addressed resident-led purchase efforts — a movement it first encountered in Colorado last year. While noting Cavern Springs has had several owners in recent years and expressing respect for residents’ concerns, the investment group critiqued the ROC model as pulling residents into roles overseeing aging community utilities and infrastructure that they may not fully understand. The Axia partners also called for greater transparency around closing costs and asset management fees charged by ROC lenders.
“We do feel that more information regarding the costs, needs and responsibilities associated with operating a park to a high standard should be better represented to residents by the associated lenders,” the partners said.
Thistle ROC’s program director, Tim Townsend, pushed back, saying all loan terms, fees, infrastructure conditions, capital needs and operational details are shared directly with residents, who decide whether to move forward with a purchase.
“No details are withheld from members of the cooperative,” Townsend said.
Like Axia, the residents still need to conduct a more thorough due-diligence investigation into potential upgrades to utilities and infrastructure, but Thistle has helped the residents budget about $2 million for this work.
Townsend also argued that transparency should cut both ways and that residents deserve to understand not just ROC financing structures but also the “long-term operational models, rent increase practices, return expectations and ownership structures of any private purchaser competing to acquire the community.”
ROC residents can approve or disapprove of park budgets and rent increases — a level of control that Townsend suggested private buyers should consider adopting.
“If Axia would like to give residents at the parks they manage the ability to approve or disapprove of rent increases, along with complete transparency into the business operations and financial structure of the community, we would welcome them adopting that policy as well,” Townsend said.
Proactive strategies
Although Cavern Springs may soon join a handful of mobile home parks from Basalt to Glenwood Springs that have successfully transitioned to resident-owned communities, local governments and nonprofits such as Mountain Voices Projects and the West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition
agree that a more cohesive regional strategy to preserve these parks as affordable housing is necessary.
“We aren’t dealing with your typical market where housing prices are set by what a resident can pay,” said April Long, executive director of the regional housing coalition. “Our home prices are set by outside interest and this insatiable demand for our resort community.”
Long, Townsend and Fox-Rubin agreed that the large subsidy required and a tight fundraising timeline make the ROC model difficult to replicate in the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys, and multiple parks listed for sale simultaneously can strain local funding.
The Glenwood Springs City Council initially said it couldn’t contribute to the Cavern Springs purchase last year, having already supported several other ROC conversions, but it agreed in May to participate using the city’s replenished housing funds after learning that residents had received more time.
According to the state’s mobile home park sales database, five parks were listed for sale in Garfield and Eagle counties as of May 22, but Cavern Springs is the only one that has received major community support.
Thistle ROC had been in contact with residents at Rifle mobile home parks King’s Crown (200 lots) and Westside (24 lots) who expressed interest in buying their parks, but it found that more residents would need to be engaged in the process to raise the large amount of subsidy required. The nonprofit said it’s also in early talks with residents at Dotsero Mobile Home Park (81 lots). Residents at the Roaring Fork Trailer Park (14 homes) in Glenwood Springs confirmed that they are also interested in buying their park and plan to reach out to Thistle ROC.
Mountain Voices Project and the West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition said they don’t have much capacity to help other parks given the June 13 Cavern Springs deadline, but they are working on a more proactive approach.
“We need to support these mobile home parks before they’re in a for-sale situation with really tight time and pricing constraints,” Long said.
The housing coalition’s board recently voted to conduct a regional analysis of mobile home communities to gather information on current ownership, how many more parks are likely to go up for sale, and which ones have deeds or zoning restrictions to keep them affordable or protect them from redevelopment.
Both local nonprofits are also exploring ways to raise subsidy, such as a regional housing fund or asking those who can’t donate to offer repayable, low-interest loans.
“[A loan] might be a more attractive option or a more viable option for, you know, Garfield County, or a local business, employer or community member,” Long said.
Long also wants to explore partnerships with local housing authorities.
“There is a provision we believe that allows a housing authority that has ownership interest in a park to be exempted from paying property taxes for that portion of the property that meets some affordable housing criteria,” Long said.
Although she doesn’t yet know how stakeholders will respond to these ideas, she hopes they’ll recognize the value in preserving existing communities.
“It’s much, much less expensive for us to preserve the housing that we already have available that’s affordable,” Long said.
Strengthening laws
The housing coalition and Mountain Voices Project have also been sharing policy ideas with state lawmakers to help strengthen current laws aimed at protecting mobile home residents from being evicted or priced out.
“The state has made incredible progress over the last five or six years, and we want to acknowledge that, and thank them for that, and then say, ‘Let’s keep going a little bit further, because it’s still not as protective as we think it needs to be,’” Long said.
Some of their ideas were already included this spring in a recently passed bill that would require mobile home park sellers to disclose information to residents upon request — including the park’s purchase price, infrastructure age, inspection reports, redacted rent data and operating expenses — as well as any pricing changes or discounts if the park is being sold as part of a larger portfolio. The bill awaits Gov. Jared Polis’ signature after passing both chambers on party-line votes, and if signed, the new law will take effect next year.
Other ideas that local nonprofits are advocating for at the legislature include creating tax incentives for owners to sell to residents, extending the 120-day timeline for residents to submit an offer — and making state housing funds more available for mobile home parks.
“We recommend that the state have an acquisition fund that’s more flexible and faster than their current grant programs,” Long said.
Long, Fox-Rubin and local advocacy groups such as Voces Unidas have also said they’d like to see the state increase relocation payments for residents displaced by park redevelopment, as well as reconsider rent control measures that have failed at the legislature in past years.
“Under current state law, a mobile home park owner can only increase the lot rents once a year, but there’s not a limit on how much they can increase them by,” Long said.
Deadline approaches
Funding challenges remain for Cavern Springs and other parks hoping to become resident-owned communities, but local nonprofits such as the housing coalition and Mountain Voices Project believe that these obstacles can be overcome.
“What we did last year — bringing the local governments, the private businesses and the philanthropic community together — was described as ‘miraculous,’ but I don’t want us to believe that we can’t do it again,” Long said. “We just did something for the first time that now we need to better understand and improve.”
Long and Fox-Rubin acknowledged that some communities may not want to form a resident cooperative and buy their parks, but for those that do, the communitywide effort is carving a clearer path forward.
“It’s a great model that allows residents to be governed by and led by their own community, rather than private equity investors who are not local,” Long said.
Although Cereceres and her fellow Cavern Springs residents may not be able to raise the final $4.5 million in subsidy before the June 13 deadline, they’re still hopeful they can secure a loan and submit a viable offer.
If their offer is accepted, the residents will need to raise the rest of the funds before closing in the fall, including by holding more community events like the recent tamale fundraiser.
“Sé que es mucho dinero, pero somos unas familias que estamos luchando por un hogar y estamos haciendo lo que podemos o sea — es lo único,” Cereceres said. “Como personas trabajadoras del valle no tenemos la posibilidad como de que cada quien aporte 1 millón para poder comprar el parqueadero. Entonces es la forma que nos estamos reuniendo para hacerlo.”
(“I know it’s a lot of money, but we’re families fighting for a home and we’re doing what we can — I mean, it’s the only way,” Cerecers said. “As working people in the valley, we don’t have the means for everyone to contribute $1 million to buy our mobile home park. So this is how we’re coming together to make it happen.”)
Editor’s Note: Aspen Journalism’s data desk editor Laurine Lassalle contributed reporting and data analysis for this story.
The Spanish-language interview quotes were transcribed in both Spanish and English with assistance from Convey Language Solutions.
