The Lot Rent Index: California

The California state registry lists 4,053 licensed mobilehome parks across 57 counties, holding 350,093 lots between them. Of the 3,868 parks FEMA has mapped, 282 (7.3%) sit in a special flood hazard area. For scale, HUD's FY 2026 fair market rent for a two-bedroom rental across those counties runs $1,108 to $4,214/mo — the area apartment benchmark, not lot rent, which usually runs well below it.

Parks and the county rent benchmark

One row per county. Registered parks and lots come from the California registry itself, as of August 24, 2026. HUD FY 2026 2-BR FMR is what HUD estimates a modest two-bedroom rental costs in that county — the figure Section 8 payment standards are set from. It is the area apartment benchmark and it is not lot rent: lot rent buys the ground under a home the resident owns, and it usually runs well below the FMR. The two are side by side here because the gap between them is the thing worth reporting, not because they are the same measure.

4,030 of 4,053 California parks carry a lot count in the registry; the lot totals are over those. The California registry does not collect vacancies, so there is no vacancy column — an absent column, not a zero.

What the parks themselves look like

Two federal joins the registry does not carry, matched park by park, and the one occupancy figure a handful of registries do collect. Each says exactly what it counted and what it could not.

• Their own drinking water. At least 320 of 4,053 registered parks (7.9%) run their own EPA-regulated community water system: a well or intake, a distribution main, and a meter on every lot. Those parks are water utilities that also rent land. This one is a floor, not a census: a park counts only where the EPA record matched confidently enough to publish, so the real number is higher, never lower.
• Flood exposure. We hold coordinates for 4,053 of the 4,053 California parks; FEMA returns a flood zone for 3,868 of them, and 282 of those (7.3%) sit inside a special flood hazard area. A further 153 fall in FEMA's Zone D, which means the hazard is undetermined because no analysis was done; they are left out of the share rather than counted as not-at-risk. Unlike the water count, this share is not a floor: the parks we could not place or FEMA has not analysed could be more exposed than the mapped ones or less, and we have no basis to say which.
• Vacancy. California does not collect it. Only three of the thirteen registries in this index do, which is itself the finding: nobody can say how much of this housing stock sits empty, because almost no state asks.

Lot rents we could actually find published in California

Eight parks in the state publish their current lot rent somewhere we could find and check it. That is a sample of published prices, not a rent survey — 8 of 4,053 registered parks. Nobody should average it, us included. It is here because a real, sourced, dated figure is worth more than a modelled one, and because it shows how little of this is public.

Method, in one paragraph

We pull each state's own licensing or registration file, normalize the addresses, geocode what we can, and join the result to three federal datasets: HUD's county Fair Market Rents, EPA's inventory of active community water systems, and FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. Nothing is modelled, estimated, or filled in. Where a source is silent, the page says so and shows nothing. Counts come from the registries and can lag real life: a park that closed last month may still be licensed, and a park that opened may not be listed yet. Every figure above recomputes from the snapshots each time the page is served, so the next pull moves the numbers with no edit to the page.

Source: California Department of Housing and Community Development, Permit to Operate registry (gis.hcd.ca.gov), as of August 24, 2026. Counts come from the state's registry and can lag real life. See something out of date? Tell us.