The Illinois Department of Public Health licenses manufactured home communities of five or more homes under the Mobile Home Park Act, 210 ILCS 115 — but not in home-rule units that regulate their own.

Blue Island is home rule. So enforcement here ran entirely through municipal licensing, and IDPH's regime — its permits, its community requirements, its licensee responsibilities, its graduated penalty scheme — never applied.

That is the structural finding: a manufactured-home resident's protection in Illinois depends on which municipality their park sits in. Two parks in comparable condition, one in a home-rule city and one outside it, are regulated by different bodies under different standards with different remedies.

What the IDPH regime looks like, for comparison

77 Ill. Adm. Code Part 860 governs: Subpart A definitions; B permits; C community requirements; D licensee responsibilities; E administrative action. Its penalty scheme escalates — uncorrected Type A violations become Type B; Type B violations carry $25 per violation per day; Type C violations carry $100 per violation per day, for each day the violation persists.

The Part was last amended February 6, 2019. There is no 2025 or 2026 amendment. The only administrative movement we could verify on the programme is the licence application form, revised October 2025, carrying fees of $300 plus $17 per mobile home site for an original licence and $500 for a permit to construct a new community.

A correction worth recording: a set of 2025-2026 Illinois Register citations circulating as amendments to Part 860 — including a “recodification of Subparts V and W” — cannot be right. Part 860 has only Subparts A through E. Those citations belong to a different Title 77 Part.

The gap the closure actually reveals

Not licensing. Relocation.

Residents who own their homes but not their land had no mechanism to buy the park and no guaranteed relocation payment. The mayor could urge $5,000 a household; nothing required it.

Illinois has given manufactured-home residents real protections in recent sessions — a right of first refusal on a park sale, restrictions on eviction grounds, and this year a bar on charging residents for common-area utilities. What it has not built is a floor for the case where a park simply ends.

And a right of first refusal is worth little to residents of a park whose operator owes millions in unpaid water bills. Exercising it would mean buying the liability.

The other end of the same sector

Where a park continues but changes hands, the pressure shows up as rent. Three residents of a Bloomington-area park sued their Texas-based owner in February 2026 alleging missed 90-day rent notices and unauthorized fines, with lot rents rising from $370 to as much as $645 in about three years. A 3% rent cap cleared committee and died at adjournment.

What to watch next

Whether the 105th General Assembly takes up park-closure relocation assistance. It is the one protection this sector demonstrably lacks, and Forest View is the case that shows what its absence costs.