Council considers lifting ban on mobile homes

The City Council agreed to consider lifting a yearlong moratorium on allowing mobile homes in the city limits at the request of Councilmember Tommy Kimbro, who complained that a planned citywide rezoning had gone off track and was preventing residents from upgrading mobile homes that are already in place.

“Why would you want a person to live in a junky old trailer house when they want to put a 2021 on there and get rid of the old one?” Mr. Kimbro said. “Why not? There is already a trailer house there.”

Mayor Pro Tem Tom Parker and Councilmember Harrison Wellman said the moratorium - put in place in July of 2022 - was supposed to allow the Council time to “restructure and rezone” the entire city to protect property values and encourage the building of homes.

“We discussed a full rezoning of the city and that’s when the moratorium was put in place,” Mr. Wellman told Mr. Kimbro.

“And we haven’t discussed it since,” Mr. Kimbro shot back.

“[Mobile homes] may have been placed there previously but because of zoning we don’t want somebody to go back into that same place with another one,” said Mr. Parker. Last year, Mr. Parker delayed the start of the moratorium to allow a woman to move her mobile home from the county to a site off Church Street and State Highway 79 “as an exercise to see how this would work,” he said at the time.

The mobile home was placed across multiple lots in a “park-esque” setting that could work well for other mobile homeowners, he said. It’s not clear what conclusions, if any, the Council drew from that exercise since the Planning and Zoning Committee, which would direct a citywide rezoning, has not met in more than a year, city officials said.

When the moratorium was passed 15 months ago, the Council’s intention was “to stop the infill of lots where primary residences of people were, not so much where the rental stuff is,” Mr. Parker said at the time. “A mobile home going into a place that has primary residences in it doesn’t do anything for the value of the neighborhood.”

Since that discussion, two developers have come to town with plans to build more than 20 homes, townhouses and duplexes.

“There are lots of people that can’t afford the houses we are building,” Mr. Kimbro said at the Council’s Oct. 23 meeting. “They want to put a new [mobile home] on there and get rid of the old one. I want to discuss what we need to do.”