Mobile-home parks are vanishing
March 5, 2006
Star Tribune
By DONNA HALVORSEN
Vanessa Ramirez's daughter Mariangelica, now 4, learned to walk and talk at Shady Lane Court in Bloomington, a mobile home park where her parents bought a home for $12,000 four years ago.
When Ramirez, 24, learned that the park would be closed to make way for condos, she tearfully sent her daughter to Mexico with her husband. She works 15 hours a day at three jobs, but now, less than a month before she has to be out, she doesn't know where she'll live.
"Time is running, and I have no one but myself," said Ramirez, who is one of 135 people -- many of whom are recent immigrants, elderly or disabled -- scrambling to find another place to live.
For all of the scoffing society directs at mobile homes, advocates say these low-rent communities offer desperately needed affordable housing.
More than 900 parks in Minnesota house an estimated 50,000 people, but the parks are disappearing rapidly as land prices soar and park owners cash in.
A dozen Minnesota parks have closed since 2000. Five more, most of which are in the metro, are being closed. Sixteen more are at risk of closing, according to the Housing Preservation Project, a Minnesota affordable-housing advocacy group.
Altogether, these closings could displace more than 5,000 people on 2,098 lots around the state, throwing them into a housing market many are ill-equipped to afford.
At Shady Lane, for example, most residents paid about $350 a month to rent the land on which their homes sat. Apartments around the metro typically cost $700 or more. Security deposits also are required.
Affordable-housing advocates are also keeping an eye on Blaine, where 998 mobile home lots are located within 2 miles of the proposed Vikings stadium.
"I don't think there are resources in the Twin Cities metropolitan area to house [1,000] displaced households," said Margaret Kaplan, attorney for the Preservation Project. "I think we need to start thinking about that part of the stadium issue."
The closings take a substantial toll on families that must move, said Ned Moore, community organizer for St. Paul's All Parks Alliance for Change (APAC), who helped the park residents through the closure. "Park closings are a problem because you're displacing people, you're disrupting that community, forcing people out that have been in their homes for a number of years, and they have no say in the matter," he said.
'Close to everything I do'
A nonprofit group tried to buy Bloomington's Shady Lane park for $2 million on the residents' behalf, but it ran out of time and couldn't come up with the extra $1 million required to fix up the park.
Although the city has long had concerns about the park's condition, Bloomington Mayor Gene Winstead said the down side is that the park included "some very affordable living units in our community that are gone, and those are always scarce."
Kaplan said she was disappointed with city officials' response to the closing. "I think they're sympathetic, but I don't think they were ever willing to do anything about it," she said. "Sympathy is not really hard currency in a situation like this."
Bev Adrian, a Bloomington resident for 18 years, bought her home in Shady Lane on April 1, 2005. She was notified June 1 that the park would be closing. "It's close to everything I do," she said about her tasks, which include taking care of an elderly mother. "I rallied around the cause and became association president in order to campaign to save the park."
She said the park wasn't seen for what it is -- "a little community, a little village, [where] people looked out for each other."
Some move in with family
State law requires that the city notify residents of a park closing and schedule a public hearing. A Bloomington ordinance goes further, requiring park owners to pay residents' expenses to relocate trailers and buy units that can't be moved.
Although the city's list for subsidized housing was closed, the city found vouchers for eight Shady Lane families.
Other Shady Lane residents have moved in with families elsewhere around the metro. Some have moved their homes to an Apple Valley park owned by the same firm that owned Shady Lane, but there are concerns that eventually they may be displaced again.
Even with help from the city and the park owners, the closure process has been difficult, said Adrian, who plans to move back to her former house, which she had rented out.
"Last week our water was shut off from 11 in the morning until 8:30 at night," she said. "We weren't notified. ... There's a mother with a 2-month-old child here who was melting ice cubes to make formula. Somebody's water heater burned out. When she called the caretaker, she said, 'That's your problem.' "
APAC's Moore said Bloomington's park closure ordinance, one of 16 in the state, is good "because it imposes a pretty strict set of guidelines that really regulate the process so people get compensated for their actual costs of moving the homes or for the tax-assessed or market-appraised value for their homes."
Shady Lane will be replaced by four four-story buildings with 216 condos, if the city approves. A rezoning request for the property will come before the city's planning commission on Thursday .
Ramirez is proud of the home she was able to make for her family at the park. "When I first moved out here, we had started from the bottom and worked all the way up," she said.
Ramirez is sad that her daughter won't ever be able to come back to a place she loved. "I know she's going to ask to go back to a home that's not home anymore," she said. But she's intent on finding another home for her: "She's my everything," she said. "She's the one who gives me the strength to keep going."
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