MIAMI — Florida mobile home owners struggling with affordability might soon get some short-term help.

The Florida House of Representatives is debating a bill that would make it easier for local governments to provide financial assistance to mobile home owners facing rising lot fees.

And, as mobile home parks like Sweetwater’s Li’l Abner shutter across South Florida to make way for new developments, the bill requires counties and cities to create contingency plans to assist the people displaced by park closures.

House Bill 267 relaxes funding restrictions to the State Housing Initiatives Program, known as SHIP, which provides local governments with money to promote housing affordability for residents.

Previously, counties like Miami-Dade — which received $12.4 million in SHIP funds this year — could allocate no more than 20% of their program funds to support owners of “manufactured housing,” or prefabricated dwellings. The House bill, and its Senate counterpart, Senate Bill 594, which passed on Wednesday, lifts that restriction.

“What I’ve heard from residents in my community is just constantly increasing rents, but their income is not proportionally increasing as well,” said state Sen. Colleen Burton of Winter Haven, one of the Senate bill’s sponsors.

The state’s housing program intends to promote homeownership — 65% of the funds have to go toward approved homeownership activities, like down payment financing, emergency repairs and mortgage assistance.

And while many mobile home owners own the trailers they live in, they typically rent the land beneath them, putting them in an ownership gray zone.

But their homes aren’t typically mobile. They’re often cemented into the ground and movable only at great expense. Because of that, said Burton, the bill classifies lot rental fees as a homeownership activity, meaning that mobile home owners making less than 140% of area median income — $123,900 for a family of four in Miami-Dade County — could qualify for up to six months of lot rental assistance.

“We’re just putting [mobile home owners] on the same playing field as other residents of Florida,” said Burton.

Displacement threat remains

Both the House and Senate bills require local governments to develop plans to help those affected by mobile home park closures.

Many of Florida’s mobile home communities have closed in the last decade and a half.

One of those was the Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park. Home to 15% of the city of Sweetwater’s population, Li’l Abner’s owner, CREI Holdings, closed the park last year after decades to make way for the development of multifamily housing.

Roughly 3,000 residents, many of whom were seniors and low-income, were displaced, pushing a number into homelessness.

But while the bills order local governments to put together plans to help mobile home owners facing park closure, they are mum on specifics, including whether displaced and lower-income mobile home owners are entitled to more than the $3,000 to $6,000 relocation payments that are already guaranteed to them by the state.

“Displacement can be a very expensive issue,” said Burton, adding that it “would have to be funded separately.”

“My guess would be that may be the next thing that comes in front of us,” she said.

If enacted, the bill’s provisions would take effect on July 1.

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