Albuquerque gave mobile home park residents a chance to buy. The state twice refused.
Albuquerque gave mobile home park residents a chance to buy. The state twice refused.
2026-09-15 · New Mexico · Regulation
New Mexico's Legislature has twice failed to give mobile home park residents a chance to buy their park. Albuquerque already did it — in December 2024 — and it has been on the books since January 2025.1
What was enacted
Council Bill O-24-52, “CREATING A NEW ARTICLE IN CHAPTER 14 OF THE REVISED ORDINANCES OF ALBUQUERQUE 1994, TO BE KNOWN AS THE 'MANUFACTURED HOME COMMUNITY STABILITY AND EMPOWERMENT ORDINANCE.'”
Introduced October 21, 2024 and referred to the Finance and Government Operations Committee; passed by Council on December 16, 2024; enacted as O-2024-043, with the City Clerk's notice of publication dated January 8, 2025. It is codified at Chapter 14, Article 26 of the Revised Ordinances, including a section headed “NOTICE TO RESIDENT OF INTENT TO SELL PROPERTY.”
What the City says it does
Owners must give residents advance notice of an intent to sell, lease or transfer the community. Resident homeowner groups may submit a purchase offer that the owner must consider in good faith. The owner must deal transparently and in good faith through the process. And residents are protected from retaliation during a sale, lease or transfer.
The sponsoring councillor's stated purpose: “By empowering residents and promoting stability, we are working to ensure that these communities remain affordable and welcoming places to live.”
One caution on detail. The enacted ordinance as published by the City Clerk is a scanned document without a machine-readable text layer, and the codified article was not directly accessible for this account. Two different notice periods are in circulation in secondary summaries and they cannot both be right. Treat the existence, the chronology and the City's own description as reliable; confirm any specific deadline against Article 26 itself before relying on it.
Why geography decides the answer
This is the point most New Mexico coverage gets wrong. A statement that park residents in New Mexico have no purchase right is wrong for the largest concentration of parks in the state.
Inside Albuquerque the right exists and has since January 2025. Outside it, there is no state equivalent. At the state level:
HB 426 (2025), on mobile home park sale notices, passed the House 37–26 and died in Senate Judiciary. HB 442 (2025), on mobile home rent stabilization, got a committee substitute Do Pass out of House Consumer and Public Affairs and died. HM 35 (2025), a regulatory-framework memorial, got a committee substitute Do Pass and died. In 2026, HB 167 on notice of sale and HB 274 on nonconforming lots were never printed and died in House Rules.
And the separate Mobile Home Park Act was not amended by any enrolled bill in either session.
The one state-level thing that did pass
A memorial. HM 54 (2026) requested that the Public Regulation Commission “convene a working group to develop recommendations for a regulatory and statutory framework that would promote reliable and consistent access to utilities for tenants residing in mobile home parks,” with membership drawn from the Commission, the Superintendent of Regulation and Licensing, the Attorney General, a park owners' association representative, a park tenants' association representative, a municipal utility and a low-income advocacy group.
It asked the group to report “to the appropriate interim legislative committees that study housing and property issues by November 1, 2026.” It passed the House 55–0. A memorial is not law and carries no enforcement — the Legislature is requesting, and a working group may or may not deliver.
That November deadline is the next real thing to watch in New Mexico manufactured housing.
What is already written down for 2027
The advocacy agenda is on the record, in a legislative committee handout rather than in press speculation. A presentation filed with a legislative committee by the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty and the New Mexico Housing Alliance names three asks: a resident purchase path, “Explicit Authority for the Attorney General to Enforce the MPHA,” and civil legal services funding.
The second of those is worth noting by homeowner association members, because it is the same remedy association owners were offered and did not get. SB 239 (2025) would have let a lot owner complain to the Department of Justice and allowed the Attorney General to bring a civil action on that owner's behalf. It cleared one committee and died in Senate Judiciary, and nobody has announced plans to refile it.
Park residents have an organised campaign for a public enforcer. Association owners do not.
Why an HOA reader should care
Because the protection attaches to the tenure form, not to the household. A mobile home park resident in Albuquerque gets advance notice of a sale, a good-faith opportunity to buy, and protection from retaliation.
An owner in a New Mexico homeowner association gets none of those things, and faces a lien that arises when an assessment or fine becomes due and “may be foreclosed in like manner as a mortgage on real estate” with no minimum amount, no minimum delinquency period and no carve-out for debts made up solely of fines.
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