Albuquerque owes park residents 18 months' notice — and puts a 30-year clock on the park
Albuquerque owes park residents 18 months' notice — and puts a 30-year clock on the park
2026-09-15 · New Mexico · Regulation
Albuquerque's zoning code contains the closest thing New Mexico has to a park-closure protection — and, a few pages later, a provision that puts an end date on most of the parks it protects.1
The 18-month notice
Both provisions sit in the 2025 Update to the Integrated Development Ordinance, adopted February 18, 2026 and effective April 20, 2026.
Section 14-16-2-3(C)(3)(g): “In cases where the owner of a manufactured home community intends to change the use or rezone the property to a zone district other than R-MC, which will result in expiration or termination of resident occupancy, the owner shall mail each resident written notice of their intent not less than 18 months prior to the rezoning of the property.”
And the duty is not confined to the manufactured-home zone. Section 14-16-6-8(C)(7)(d): “For changes of use or rezoning of developments that include mobile homes that will result in expiration or termination of resident occupancy, the standards in § 14-16-2-3(C)(3)(g)… apply, regardless of the zone district the development is in.”
A separate public-notice provision attaches to changes of use or rezoning in the manufactured-home zone, to any subject property including any mobile home dwelling in any zone district, and to rezoning of developments including two or more manufactured homes in any zone district.
The 30-year clock
Section 14-16-6-8(C)(7)(b): “A nonconforming use of land and incidental structures consisting of a mobile home development may remain for the life of the structures, which shall never be more than 30 years, but only if all of the following provisions apply.”
Those conditions: the use must not “cease operation for a period of 1 year”; any private street system must be “paved at least to a standard approved by the City Engineer”; and homes must be “skirted with materials similar in appearance and durability to the siding of the mobile home, or the unit is situated at ground level, within 2 years of the use becoming nonconforming.”
And for a single home: “A single mobile home dwelling on an individual lot outside of the R-MC zone district is a nonconforming use and shall be removed.”
Why the two provisions belong together
Eighteen months is a long runway, and it runs to the rezoning rather than to move-out. A resident who receives that letter has a documented clock — and, in practice, the only window in which organising a purchase under Albuquerque's separate resident opportunity-to-purchase ordinance is arithmetically possible.
The two ordinances are complementary and nobody is presenting them that way. The purchase right, in Chapter 14, Article 26 of the Revised Ordinances since January 2025, requires notice of an intent to sell, lease or transfer, and good-faith consideration of a resident group's offer. The zoning code's 18-month notice attaches to a different trigger — a rezoning that would end occupancy — and gives the residents time that a sale notice alone would not.
The 30-year cap is a loss of optionality that nobody budgets for. A park that is a nonconforming use has a statutory end date measured from when it became nonconforming, plus two maintenance conditions an absentee owner can trip without intending to: the one-year cessation rule and the paving standard.
A household buying a manufactured home into such a park is buying into a countdown, and no New Mexico disclosure form asks about it.
The contrast that should interest an association reader
Albuquerque will not let a park be rezoned out from under its residents without eighteen months' written notice to every household.
New Mexico imposes no comparable notice on a homeowner association before it forecloses a lien. The association's lien arises when an assessment or fine becomes due and “may be foreclosed in like manner as a mortgage on real estate.” A 2025 bill that would have added a $5,000 floor, a twelve-month minimum delinquency and a carve-out for liens built solely of fines was reported Do Pass from one committee and then never heard in the second. It died at adjournment.
So the protection in New Mexico is attached to the tenure form rather than to the household. A resident who rents a pad in an Albuquerque park has more advance warning of losing their home to a land-use decision than an owner in a covenanted community has of losing theirs to accumulated fines.
What this means for a board in a mixed community
Some New Mexico associations include manufactured homes, and the interaction is worth knowing. A covenant excluding “mobile homes” or requiring “site-built construction” was drafted against an image the federal government is currently dismantling — HUD has proposed to let a manufactured home have an upper storey without a permanent chassis, with comments closed in August 2026 and a final rule pending.
Separately, Freddie Mac's expanded no-review path for small condominium projects expressly excludes projects that include manufactured homes except on one refinance product. So a New Mexico project with even one manufactured unit loses a financing shortcut that other small projects gained in August 2026.
Boards with manufactured homes in the community, or with covenants that address them, have three moving parts to track rather than one.
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