Benjamin Raber

The guy in the cowboy hat next to LeBron spends about $500,000 a year on courtside seats, and he pays for it with rent from retirees who can't take their homes and leave. His name is James Goldstein. He's been to more than 5,000 NBA games, and he owns trailer parks in Southern California. Here's the thing about trailer parks most people never think about. You own your home, but you rent the little patch of dirt it sits on. And "mobile" homes almost never move. The Supreme Court looked at this back in 1992 and noted that only about 1 in 100 ever gets moved once it's set down. Moving one can eat a huge chunk of what the house is even worth, and a lot of parks won't accept older homes anyway. So if the landlord raises your lot rent, you can pay it, or you can walk away from a house you own outright. That's basically the whole business model. It's why more than 100 cities and counties in California put rent control on mobile home parks, and it's why Goldstein has spent decades fighting them in court. In 2006 he bought Colony Cove, a park for seniors in Carson, for about $23 million, most of it borrowed. The next year he asked the city to let him raise rent $618 a month per lot. The city said no. He's sued Carson at least eight times since, including a $78 million claim a state judge threw out. A federal jury gave him $3.3 million in 2016, and an appeals court took it back two years later. In Palm Springs he tried something smarter. He moved to break his El Dorado park into individually owned lots, which can knock out local rent control and leave residents choosing between buying the ground under their own house or paying market rent. The city paid him $937,500 to settle, and the appeals ruling from that fight gave park owners all over California a legal path to do the same thing. It took a new state law in 2013 to let cities block those conversions when residents don't want them. To give him his due, Goldstein argues rent control is unfair to owners, and when it comes to apartments a lot of economists would back him up. Trailer parks are where that argument gets a lot harder to make, because leaving means hauling your house down the freeway. Now do the math on that 2007 raise. $618 a month comes out to about $7,400 a year per lot. The raise on roughly 67 lots would pay for an entire season of his courtside seats.