The Roaring Fork Valley may be known as a destination near Aspen, filled with high-end dining and shopping, world-class skiing, and luxury vacation homes.
However, it’s also a regular community, full of people with regular jobs. Like teachers who commute an hour each way to the schools, wastewater operators who show up at 5 a.m. to keep critical utility systems running, and construction crews, the housekeeper, or paramedics who all play pivotal roles in the community. These are the people who make the community function and flourish. And increasingly, they are the people who can least afford to stay here.
A regional housing needs assessment projected a deficit of approximately 5,700 affordable housing units in the Roaring Fork Valley for households earning below the area median income. Mobile home parks have long been one of the few reliable answers to that gap. They are close-knit, established communities. But as housing costs rise across the country, and property values in the valley increase exponentially, the sale of mobile home parks has become increasingly common.
At Roaring Fork Engineering, this isn’t a policy issue we observe from a distance. We live here. Our staff sends their kids to local schools, works alongside municipal operators, and understands firsthand how hard it is to secure stable, affordable housing in a valley where land prices have long outpaced wages. That’s why, when a mobile home park goes up for sale and residents mobilize to buy it, we show up technically, financially, and as neighbors.
Mobile home parks aspart of the community
Colorado’s more than 85,000 mobile homes represent the state’s largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing. In the Roaring Fork Valley specifically, mobile home parks are considered some of the most affordable housing for the valley’s workforce that helps drive the regional economy.
The risk for current mobile home park residents is real: most mobile home park residents own their homes but rent the land beneath them. When that land goes up for sale, residents have no guarantee of staying. A new owner can raise rents, change terms, or redevelop the site entirely. The result is a displacement of an entire community that took decades to build and the loss of affordable homes for community residents.
The Roaring Fork Valley is facing both an unprecedented shortage and unprecedented demand for affordable housing, particularly for the “missing middle” workforce, or those who earn too much to qualify for housing assistance but not enough to afford the skyrocketing housing costs in mountain resort communities. Mobile home parks are often the last rung before that workforce is priced out of the valley entirely.
Supporting affordable housing is an essential part of our mission here at RFE. In addition to helping mobile home parks transition to resident-ownership, we’ve been deeply involved in projects like The Lumberyard — the City of Aspen’s largest affordable housing development to date, where we serve as the civil and utility infrastructure engineer — as part of a broader commitment to keeping the people who make this valley work able to live here.
How resident ownership works
Colorado has created meaningful pathways for mobile home park residents to purchase their communities. Under state law, park owners are required to notify tenants when they intend to sell, giving residents the right to make a competing offer. In practice, residents typically have three to four months to match the highest bid, which is a narrow and high-pressure window for communities that have never organized around something of this scale.
Typically, the land underneath a mobile home park has a multimillion-dollar purchase price, and maybe a few hundred residents. Four months isn’t a long time for those folks to get money together. However, Colorado offers support programs.
The financing mechanism that makes these purchases possible is a low-interest loan program administered through the Colorado Department of Local Affairs. Colorado’s Mobile Home Programs provide funding to support both the acquisition and improvement of mobile home parks, allowing nonprofits and local governments to help residents buy and stabilize their communities.
But there is a critical condition attached to that loan: the state will not issue funding unless all infrastructure meets current regulatory standards.
This is where things get complicated and where engineering becomes essential.
Most mobile home parks in the region are located on unincorporated county land, outside the reach of municipal utilities. That means they operate their own water systems, their own wastewater systems, and sometimes their own electrical infrastructure. For decades, many of these systems have been maintained reactively and fixing something only when it breaks, but rarely upgraded or replaced proactively. By the time a community is trying to qualify for a state loan, the infrastructure gap can be substantial.
Nonprofit organizations statewide and specific to the Roaring Fork Valley have emerged to help residents navigate the purchase process. They coordinate financing, organize community governance, and engage professionals like engineers and planners to move the effort forward. RFE is typically brought in by the nonprofit or their planner, stepping in as the technical partner that determines what the community has, what it needs, and what it will take to get there.
What we find when we look beneath the surface
When RFE begins an infrastructure assessment on a mobile home park, we follow a standardized process: inventory every utility system, evaluate conditions against current regulatory standards, identify deficiencies, and produce a detailed cost estimate.
Much of the development in this region happened in the 1970s. That means buried water lines, sewer pipes, and other underground infrastructure that is now 50 years old or more. The American Society of Civil Engineers consistently gives the nation’s drinking water infrastructure a “C-” grade, noting a water main break somewhere in the country every two minutes. Mobile home parks, many of them privately owned and operating outside public utility oversight, can often reflect conditions that are worse than that average.
At Three Mile Mobile Home Park near Glenwood Springs our assessment revealed a bridge crossing a creek that had been de-rated so many times that only passenger vehicles could safely use it. Emergency services could not reach the far side of the community. That same bridge had been built within the 100-year floodplain, which no longer meets county code. It wasn’t built wrong for its time but now, regulations and floodplain science have all moved on. Bringing it into compliance was a matter of public safety.
It gets even trickier when we start to assess water and wastewater systems. These are invisible by design. Most people never think about them until a pipe fails. The prevailing mindset in underfunded systems is to fix it when it breaks rather than replace it before it does. That’s an understandable position when budgets are tight. But for a community on the verge of taking on a multi-million-dollar loan, it’s a risk that can unravel everything.
Reactive maintenance costs an average of two to five times more than a proactive approach. When a pipe fails in an emergency, you’re paying for rush materials, overtime labor, emergency mobilization, and service outages on top of the repair itself. For every dollar spent proactively, a community can save roughly three dollars in reactive costs. For a newly formed resident ownership group with a loan to service, a single major infrastructure failure in year one isn’t a risk they can take.
The goal of RFE’s assessment work isn’t just to clear the bar for loan approval. It’s to give communities a true picture of what they have, what they’re inheriting, and to build systems that will serve residents reliably for the next 50 to 100 years.
RFE’s role: from assessment to long-term stability
RFE’s involvement in mobile home park projects typically moves through two phases.
The first is assessment. We survey every utility system, document conditions against current standards, identify required improvements, and produce a cost estimate detailed enough for the nonprofit and community planners to use in fundraising. This step is foundational — without a credible engineering assessment, there’s no clear path to the loan, and no framework for understanding the scope of what needs to be done.
Fundraising is often what happens next, and the results can be significant. At Three Mile Mobile Home Park, the approximately $3 million in required infrastructure improvements was funded entirely through grants and state programs at no direct cost to residents. That outcome was possible because the assessment was rigorous and provided a clear and defensible cost estimate so the funding organization had confidence in the technical picture we provided.
The second phase is design and construction. RFE engineers the improvements, oversees construction, and upon completion produces the documentation the ownership group needs to execute their state loan. We also help new community owners understand what they’re managing going forward. For example: what systems are in place, what a reasonable maintenance and capital improvement plan looks like, and how to avoid the deferred maintenance cycle that created the problem in the first place.
RFE is currently active on two projects in the Glenwood Springs area: Three Mile Mobile Home Park, where construction is nearly complete, and Cavern Springs, where we are currently in the assessment phase.
Working in a close-knit community
Infrastructure work in mobile home parks is different from most of what we do. When you’re working in a tight-knit residential community, like a project replacing a water main that runs through someone’s backyard, we meet people, learn their names, and feel a direct and personal connection to the work we do.
The contractors we work with on these projects consistently say the same thing: they love this work because of the community. There’s a tangible human dimension that is rare in civil engineering, where most of what we build is experienced anonymously.
Only about a thousand mobile home parks across the country are communally owned by residents. It’s a hard model to execute because it requires financing, governance, ongoing maintenance, and a community willing to work together over the long term. But it works. Lot rents at resident-owned communities tend to stabilize after the first year of ownership, rising by about 1% per year on average, which is a big step towards stable, long-term affordable housing.
If your community is facing a sale
If you are a resident, planner, or nonprofit organizer involved with a mobile home park that is approaching or facing a potential sale, the most important thing we can tell you is this: don’t wait.
The engineering assessment needs to happen early, ideally before an offer is matched, not after. Understanding what infrastructure improvements are required, what they will cost, and how that cost can be funded through grants and state programs is the foundation of a viable purchase plan. Without that picture, communities are navigating one of the most consequential decisions they will ever make without a map.
Affordable housing in mountain communities doesn’t happen by accident. It takes lawyers, planners, funders, advocates, and engineers who are willing to show up early, invest in the outcome, and do the work that nobody sees.
Roaring Fork Engineering is dedicated to helping communities like these. We welcome conversations with nonprofits, planners, and community organizers working on mobile home park preservation anywhere in Colorado. Get in touch.