Imagine having to move because the land is being sold right out from underneath the home you paid for.

KIRO 7 Consumer Investigators have uncovered a problem that does just that to thousands of families.

KIRO 7 Eyewitness News Consumer Investigator Wayne Havrelly shows how we convinced state leaders to change the laws that made matters worse.

Mobile homes: Plenty of jokes are made about them, but those who live in mobile home parks say it's a wonderful and affordable way of life -- a way of life that's rapidly disappearing.

It's cold, and getting dark, but there's no time to lose for the Anthony family of Covington. This family of four with another on the way is working against a deadline to pack up and leave the mobile home park they've lived in for three years.

"It's upsetting. You know, I wanted to stay here for another four to five years, let my kids finish out their grade school and we wanted to have a house, but now we're going to have to move and start over," said Cynthia Anthony.

The Anthony's have plenty of company. At one park alone, 109 families must pull up stakes -- and pull their homes to another park, if they can find one with vacancies.

Why? Because the owner is selling the several-acre park to a developer. Soon, large, custom houses will take the place of these more modest homes, as another mobile home park in Washington state simply vanishes.

"I never would have thought that this was going to happen," Anthony said.

Neither would her neighbor, 62-year-old Rendall Litch. A carpet installer for forty years, Litch is now so disabled he can barely move, and when he does, he worries about falling due to his bad knees.

He's recently had brain surgery following a series of strokes. The last thing he wants to do now is move, especially because he has no idea where he can move to.

"The mobile parks are all full, or pretty much all full, unless they're evicting someone and that's hard to find," Litch said.

To make matters worse, when Litch bought his home last year, he was not told by the owner that the property was in the process of being sold. There is nothing in current state law that requires that kind of notification.

"There should be a disclosure of some sort, like you've have with automobiles and other things that we sell, to let me know that was his intention, so I could have said, 'I'm not gonna purchase this.' It would have been silly for me to buy this, knowing I'd have to go through all that again in six months," Litch said.

Our state is facing a mobile home space crisis. Exploding real estate prices are making the land too valuable for this moderate-to-low income way of life.

According to state figures, 115 parks have closed in Washington since 1989.

In the past year, nine parks have sold or are up for sale in the Puget Sound area, where land prices have risen the most.

Six hundred twenty one families in our area now must find another place to move their mobile homes, 167 in King County alone.

MORE ON THIS STORY Track Senate Bill 6851 by entering "6851" into the search box at leg.wa.gov Sites that provide more info about the declining number of mobile home parks in Washington State: ruralhome.org mrsc.org fanniemaefoundation.org [pdf]

The problem is so severe that the state has a special Mobile Home Relocation Office in Olympia, an office that pays an average of $12,000 to help displaced mobile home owners find new places to live.

Still, Cynthia Anthony says that covers only the move itself.

"That's not the U-Haul. We have to put brand-new skirting on our place, we have to paint our house," she said. "We have to have new decks, we won't have room for the nice big deck that we had."

And since space at the remaining parks is so limited, the homes themselves are very hard to sell.

"Over the years, as land values have increased, particularly in this neighborhood, we've seen them disappear," said State Senator Margarita Prentiss.

Prentiss chairs the powerful Senate Ways and Means Committee and is a longtime advocate for mobile home owners. She herself lives in a manufactured home in Skyway and has stayed in a mobile home in Olympia during legislative sessions.

She feels frustrated that an affordable means of housing in our state is fast disappearing.

"They're folks who don't have a whole lot of means. They tend to be people my age and older who live within their means, and when that goes away, then they really have no place that's affordable for them to go," Prentiss said.

She did promise help in one regard, however.

After we told her of Rendall Litch's problem, she agreed that homeowners like him should be made aware whenever mobile home parks are being sold.

"I think that is such a reasonable expectation that I think they should at least be informed."

Due to our investigation, Senate Bill 6851 was introduced in this session of the Legislature, a bill that clearly alerts mobile home buyers to the risk of their park being sold.

Passage of that bill will solve one problem. But it seems there's no easy answer to the continuing loss of this kind of affordable housing that so many depend on.

Senate Bill 6851 has passed the Senate overwhelmingly and is now in the House, where it is scheduled for a public hearing.