Growing Pains : Trailer Park Residents Must Move--but Where? : CORONA NORCO
Sylvia Leon wasn’t really surprised to find the notice tacked to the side of her mobile home Friday.
After all, rumors that the Corona Growers Trailer Park would close had been circulating among its 36 families for more than two years --nearly as long as Leon has lived there.
Leon, a cafeteria worker at a nearby hospital, is one of only a few residents eager to leave the 25-year-old park, which she said “is too far out in the boonies” on Temescal Canyon Road, south of the Corona city limits.
But Leon fears that many of her neighbors, with families larger and trailers older than her own, may have difficulty finding a place to go in the year remaining before the park is closed.
Some of her neighbors still work in the groves and fields, picking lemons, oranges and vegetables, but many of the laborers are unemployed, holdovers of a once-booming citrus industry that earned Corona the title of lemon capital of the world.
Tracts Sprouting Fast
The groves are disappearing, though, giving way to commercial developments and housing tracts that have been sprouting fast enough to make the area a contender for another title: growth capital of the nation.
About a mile north of the unlit, broken streets of the trailer park, the sign in front of a clean, new housing tract advertises houses for six figures. In the Corona Growers park residents wonder how they can afford to move their homes away.
“A lot of the people here don’t know where they will go,” said Hortensia Martinez, a volunteer from the Good News Church in Corona. “Some will go back to Mexico.”
The trailer park, like so many of its residents, is a casualty of the disappearing citrus industry.
It was opened by Corona Growers Inc. to provide housing for a burgeoning population of pickers, but “is no longer needed to house the agricultural workers the company employs,” according to a statement issued by Daon Corp. of Irvine, which now owns Corona Growers.
“It is not economically or commercially feasible for the owner to maintain the premises in a habitable, healthy or safe condition as a trailer park,” said the English- and Spanish-language notices distributed Friday. “The owner is not in the business of owning trailer parks . . . .”
Daon is offering financial aid, based on lot size and moving date, to residents who leave before the Feb. 1, 1986, deadline, but Leon’s neighbors say the money is too little, too late.
If Leon and her husband leave by May 1, for example, Corona Growers will pay them $1,200, close to the $1,500 maximum the company is offering. “That’s not entirely fair,” she said. “It will cost more than a thousand two hundred to move the trailer.”
If they move between May 2 and Aug. 1, the notice posted on the trailer said, the company will give them $600. After Aug. 1, they can collect $300, and after Nov. 1, nothing.
“I’m mad,” Alisa Juarez said in Spanish, while another neighbor interpreted. “Who is going to be able to move their trailer in three months? . . . . You can’t find anywhere to go in three months.
“Instead of helping us out, they are hurting us,” Juarez said. “Why couldn’t they give us more notice? Why couldn’t they give us more time?”
Daon Corp., a subsidiary of Vancouver-based Daon Development Corp., plans to sell the Corona Growers property once it is vacant next year. The new owner will probably build another expensive housing tract, the current residents speculated.
“I bought this trailer about two years ago,” said Filipe Ramos, gesturing from the hood of the 1973 Capri he had been fixing when he stopped to talk about the notice he had received that morning.
“My friend was living on the other side (of the park). That’s why I bought the trailer,” he said. “Now I have to move.”
The financial aid from Daon “is a pretty good deal,” Ramos said. “But, for me, I don’t know how I’m going to sell my trailer.”
Ramos paused to look at his 4-month-old daughter’s diapers hanging on a clothesline. “And I don’t know where I’ll go.”
