There Goes the Neighborhood
By: Source: AARP Bulletin Today Date Posted: 2006-02-22 16:32:09.654233-05:00
The tall woman with a quick smile has lovingly tended her comfortable home in a retirement community on the northern outskirts of St. Petersburg, Fla., for 10 years. Big clay pots of orchids decorate her patio, and a small wood plaque by her front door proclaims, "Home of Frances Fernandez."
"I can’t imagine living anywhere else," says Fernandez, watching seagulls float in the dazzling blue sky above Boca Ciega Bay.
Next month, though, she will be forced to abandon her home and, at age 72, start her life over. Like millions of Americans, Fernandez retired to a mobile home park where the home she owns sits on land she leases. Now the family that has owned Parsley’s by the Gulf for more than 50 years has sold the property for $28 million to a condo developer, and Fernandez’s dream house, a white 1957 singlewide she has renovated extensively, is too old to move. Mobile homes, it turns out, are not that portable once they are installed at a site.
"So I lose everything—everything," she says.
"These have been the best times of my life. This is my home, my biggest investment. And in a month all I can do is close the door and walk away. It’s unbelievable. I never dreamed this could happen."
The mobile home park, an American icon since the 1950s, is a dying institution. Parks that opened decades ago on the outer edges of cities and towns are now valuable real estate. Park after park is being snapped up by developers for condos, shopping centers or single-family homes. Sometimes, local governments themselves purchase such land to create urban parks or smart shopping promenades.
"It’s an epidemic here in Florida," says Don Hazelton, president of the Federation of Manufactured Home Owners of Florida. "We’re seeing parks vanish every week."
Coastal areas and other vacation spots are especially hard hit. No one seems to have good numbers, but "wherever population is booming and land values are rising, older mobile home parks are becoming anachronisms," says John McIlwain, senior fellow for housing at the Urban Land Institute. So anachronistic, in fact, that last year Los Angeles designated a mobile home park a historic site.
To many people, mobile home parks will always be trailer parks, nuisance concentrations of marginalized people whose ramshackle homes litter the landscape. But other parks are appealing neighborhoods, where homeowners keep their birdbaths clean, their tiny lawns mowed and their garden hoses neatly coiled.
For years, McIlwain says, mobile homes have affordably sheltered a wide range of people, "from the retired schoolteacher to the cop with a young family to the down-on-his-luck drifter."
About 43 percent of all mobile homes occupied year round are owned or rented by people over age 50. That’s why so many older people who have carefully planned their retirements share Frances Fernandez’s nightmare—losing their homes, investments, friends and communities.
Eight miles southeast of Parsley’s, Pearl Budde, 92, sits in her mobile home on a palm-lined street in the Colony park, where she retired from bookkeeping 32 years ago. Budde is sharp, active, full of life—still taking in local bingo games and making peanut brittle for her neighbors.
A big discount store recently made a tempting offer for the park. Budde’s mobile home can’t be moved, and the prospect of losing it frightens her.
"Where would I go?" she says. "I live on $837 a month in Social Security, and I only have a few thousand dollars of savings left. I pay $356 a month here. Where can I get a nice place for that money?"
"I pray every day God will take me before I have to move," she adds.
If the Colony closes, Budde’s options will be limited. "Leaving a manufactured-home community isn’t like leaving an apartment," says Andrew Kochera, a senior policy analyst with AARP, which recently commissioned a study to develop model legislation to assist tenants. "You can’t just pack up the bags and move the furniture. You have to take the whole house with you or abandon what may be your single largest asset. Either way the cost is more than many older residents can afford."
Although still called mobile homes because their prototypes were camper trailers that could be hauled by car, manufactured homes are surprisingly immovable. They are made to be moved once—to a site where they are placed on foundations, connected to utilities and often expanded with carports and additional rooms.
Even when a newer home can be refitted with an axle and tires, moving it is an expensive proposition. One owner of a doublewide in Parsley’s says it will cost him $18,000 to $25,000 to relocate.
So most people leave their homes to the bulldozers. "When the parks go, the people go, too. They just disappear," says Hazelton of the Florida homeowners association. "We’ve been trying to track them, find out where they go when the parks close."
The lucky ones buy a condo or lease a small apartment. Although many other displaced residents would qualify for government subsidized housing, McIlwain says, "the wait for that housing can be longer than their life span."
So they move in with relatives or rent cheap motel rooms, Hazelton says. "A few are even living out of their cars."
There are those who turn around and buy another mobile home. Mobile home parks may be disappearing, but manufactured housing is not. Despite a few tough years recently, caused in part by low-interest mortgage rates that made conventional homes more affordable, the industry provides one out of every 7.5 new houses. An average singlewide home costs $32,000, a doublewide $60,000.
The trend, however, is for bigger manufactured homes, says Michael O’Brien of the Manufactured Housing Institute, a trade organization. These units "look just like any other nice houses" when they fill subdivisions where people buy the lot and the home.
Where can owners haul their homes, new or used? The stigma attached to trailer parks is so great, says O’Brien, most communities are zoned against them, so "very few new parks are opening today." Figures from a report based on the 2000 census show that 60 percent of new homes are placed on the owner’s property, most in rural areas or planned developments. Only 34 percent land on leased lots in parks.
Still, O’Brien says, there are plenty of vacancies in parks across the country, but "you can’t just pick up and move these houses 500 miles." Ten or 20 miles is the maximum, homeowners say.
Hauling a mobile home to a park is one thing; getting it in can be another. Several big companies have been buying older parks, adding pools, clubhouses and other amenities and marketing them as second homes for affluent retirees. Many parks will not take a home older than two years.
Finally, even if the home will move and a park will take it, leases in some areas can be sky-high. In some parks in California and Illinois, for example, where the squeeze is on, rents have jumped to $800, $900, even $1,000 a month, according to manufactured-home owners associations.
Gerry Harriott, who retired to Parsley’s in 1982 with her husband, Don, found they could move their home, but not cheaply. "To buy a lot in a resident-owned park—and there aren’t many—costs $25,000, and they won’t take a home this old," she says. "So someone told us they could haul our house out to a farm where the migrant workers live."
"It’s going to take a lot of money we don’t have to get out of this mess," Don Harriott says. Under Florida law, a fund with contributions from homeowners and park owners will pay $1,375 to $2,750 to an owner who has to abandon an immovable home because of the sale. If the home can be relocated, the owner of a singlewide gets up to $3,000 for the move, a doublewide, up to $6,000.
Residents say the compensation isn’t nearly enough, but Florida’s law is often cited as one of the most protective in the country. In addition to offering compensation, it allows residents the first right of refusal to buy a mobile home park if the owner decides to sell—but not if the owner is approached by a buyer independently.
Mobile-home owners have been lobbying states for stronger protection, but it’s a slow process. "It took 28 years and millions in attorneys’ fees to get that Florida law passed," says Clarence Cook, president of the Manufactured Home Owners Association of America.
In Snug Harbor, a mobile home park 12 miles east of Parsley’s that has been sold for a townhouse development, Bill Uhl, 66, is literally the last homeowner. In days he will move his home to a local lot he bought years ago. Now, he is saying goodbye to Sewanee, an egret that has walked up Uhl’s steps and into his kitchen every day for 10 years.
Holding out a fish for the bird, Uhl says, "Leaving this place is killing me. My friends are scattered. And where I’m going there’s no birds, no water. It’s nothing like what I had here. I won’t ever be able to get this back."
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