Critics Hit Trailer Co-Op Conversion Plan
These days, only a single pair of pink flamingos and a few Buddha rock gardens still decorate 1950s-style trailers in what residents fondly call “the ghetto” at the Seal Beach Trailer Park.
More and more of the trailers at the old park near the sea resemble two-story town homes. Built over now-invisible trailers and complete with ocean-view sun decks, the ritziest have multiple fireplaces, expensive Art Deco brick walls, hot tubs and even a baby grand piano.
The conversions of mobile homes to town house look-alikes have won the eccentric little haven that first sprang up in the 1930s a state award for innovative and affordable housing. But they also have been the target of sharp criticism from neighbors who say that park residents--all but five of whom are protected by rent control--get unfair rent subsidies from local and federal government agencies while spending thousands on lavish remodeling projects.
Now the park’s 125 residents want to turn it into a cooperative--with a little help from the city, county and state. The plan, which involves buying the six acres of coastal land with the help of a state assistance program, is being met with criticism, too.
City’s Help Questioned
“I’d like to know how many low-income people are actually living in the park,” resident Norma Strohmeier asked the City Council at a recent meeting. “Seems to me if you can make an investment” of $50,000 for an addition, “I don’t really see how the city needs to help.”
Added another Seal Beach resident, Mitzi Morton: “These people who couldn’t afford the rents . . . and couldn’t afford to buy new trailers . . . now we’re going to help them own property, when they wouldn’t do it for me or any other resident in town.”
Park tenants point out that the poorest of the residents still live in modest coaches and that most of those in the more elaborate structures built them themselves on shoestring budgets, helped by carpenter friends and neighbors. And the cooperative, they say, will provide security for the oldest and weakest of their flock.
First, though, the trailer park residents have several hurdles to overcome, not the least of which is finding a commercial lender who won’t demand a 10% down payment and will lend more than $2 million for land on which the park is located.
The band of renters needs $2.7 million to buy the park from developer Bill Dawson, who until a few weeks ago lived there.
They’ve asked to borrow $543,000 from the state through the Mobilehome Park Assistance Program, designed to help preserve affordable housing. The City Council voted in April to act as a sponsor on the state loan, which will cost taxpayers no money directly but demands administrative time for city staffers to shepherd the loan application.
The county also is considering helping with those tasks.
This month, a state committee will decide on the tenants’ application for a loan, some of which would go toward reducing monthly mortgages for poverty-level tenants, said Julie Stewart, public affairs director for the state program.
If their plan comes together, the Seal Beach Trailer Park tenants will join a small legion of mobile home owners in California who have taken advantage of state assistance programs and successfully bought the land beneath them.
“Up until now we’ve been living month to month,” said Scott Wildman, a 32-year-old Northrop engineer, standing on his second-story balcony gazing toward the Long Beach marina. “We want to have some control over our future.”
Low Monthly Payments
There isn’t a space in the park that rents for more than $294 a month. Some rent for as low as $190. A few residents pay only $35, with the remainder of their rent being subsidized through a federal Housing and Urban Development program. And the tenant association insists that monthly payments will not increase more than 10% with the park’s purchase.
“I think it’s feasible,” said Ed Knight, Seal Beach’s director of development services. The park residents, he added, “have survived this far.”
The park runs along 1st Street between Pacific Coast Highway and Marina Drive.
Eight years ago, the tenants were to be evicted and their park condemned. Then the city expanded its redevelopment boundaries to include the park, and land owner Dawson was permitted to build 80 town homes on the edge of the 11-acre parcel nearest Pacific Coast Highway. The mobile home owners, with $1 million in relocation assistance from the city, moved to the back of the site. Trailers that could not be moved were replaced. Rent control was imposed in the park to protect the residents, a majority of them then elderly, from eviction.
The tax revenue generated from the town homes, priced as high as $275,000, paid back the city relocation costs, Dawson said.
“It was,” Dawson said, “a combination of miracles that permitted what is there to be there, which is 125 homes on six acres, which are appraised at $1 million an acre. The bottom line is we have folks there paying out $35 and $45 a month out of their own pocket,” with county-administered HUD funds paying the remainder.
Dawson is trying to sell his “trailer” home, a 3,000-square-foot pink spread with four fireplaces, four bathrooms and a baby grand piano in the living room. His tiled-roof residence, which has a three-car garage, is the most lavish of the novel structures at the park, and it earned Dawson an award from the governor in 1981 as innovative affordable housing.
Trailer Kitchens Retained
But by law, residents are allowed to build onto and around their trailers on rented property only if the resulting structures are “removeable.” They must also retain at least the kitchens of their trailers.
Sixty homes are designated low-income housing; the other 60 are moderate-income housing. This means that, based on the 1987 projected median income in Orange County of about $40,000, park tenants can make up to $32,000 a year and remain eligible for a low-income spot, and up to $48,000 for the moderate-income designation, Wildman said.
It is only at move-in time that eligibility for rent control has to be proven with income tax records. A resident could earn more after that and not have to move.
Wildman is a case in point. All that is left of an old travel bus on his homestead is the kitchen and bathroom walls, long since bolstered and covered with custom tile.
He pays $191 monthly space rent for a woody-looking, two-story home with skylights and solar panels, which he shares with his wife.
Wildman has lived in the trailer park since he was a 20-year-old college student at Cal State Long Beach, and he typifies the kind of resident the state program seeks to help.
Impoverished and putting himself through school a dozen years ago, Wildman bought a scruffy travel-trailer with a loan from his father and moved into the old Seal Beach Trailer Park. Within four years, Wildman had built his striking one-bedroom home--with skylights, solar heating and second-floor sun deck--while living at his girlfriend’s Los Alamitos trailer park. The couple are now married. The project cost him $32,000--almost all of it for the building material itself.
Wildman’s towering home drastically differs from those of some neighbors. Some of them live in what they call “the ghetto.” As diverse as the trailer homes, the residents are a collection of young couples, older retirees, an Olympic gold medalist and a Seal Beach police detective.
At No. 94 Welcome Lane is Robert Latta, 51, a burly blond carpenter who has lived the last four years in an 8-by-16-foot trailer. He earned $6,000 the year he qualified as a tenant. He made $19,000 last year, easily in the low-income range. He has no shower and no hot water. But he does have dreams.
His old Frigidaire, from which he offers visitor sodas and juice, sits outside in his fenced-in yard, along with a sink propped against a fence. Nearby is an overdraft oven, one of what he says are only five in the world, 19th-Century vintage and converted from burning coal to gas. It will go perfectly, he points out, in the Victorian-style home he has drafted plans to build around his old trailer.
“I’m going to have a coffee area here,” he said, rolling out the drawing for visitors, “and a railing here where I can watch sunsets.”
Another drawing, taped to a trailer wall, shows his dream home in graduating shades of purple with a copper dome.
“The city Planning Commission said, ‘You can’t have that color; it’s got to be earth tones. All the trailers are earth tones.’ Well, we have got a pink one and a gray one. There’s lots of discrimination from the city because it’s low- and moderate-income housing in here.” And, he added, suggesting that townspeople are jealous, “the thing is, you can be a millionaire after you move in here.”
No Longer Poor
Wildman isn’t a millionaire, but he has grown out of his poor college days.
“Scott Wildman, for example, was an impoverished student at Long Beach State, and now he’s a well-paid engineer,” Dawson said. His wife, Nancy, “is a well-paid chemistry teacher, so they’re certainly by no means low-income anymore. But you don’t evict people when they became successful. That wasn’t the point of all this.”
“Sure, some of the coaches are worth $50,000,” said Dean Scheele, a park resident since 1971, puffing on a pipe. “But we’ve got one woman going on 100 years old. She can’t hear and she can’t talk, but she walks twice a day in the park.”
Minnie Newell, who will turn 90 later this month, lives with her back to the San Gabriel River. She uses a cane and a special walker, still healing as she is from a hip broken last year in a fall. She has lived in the park since 1959.
Of the plan to buy the park, she said, “I’m supportive in a way, but my income isn’t enough to contribute much.”
Her rent is $294; her Social Security check, $419. “Where will I come up with this down-payment money?”
Joyce Dawson, former wife of the park owner and now its business manager, said the tenants will stick together whether they manage to buy their park or not.
“This is a real community inside a community here,” she said. “We have a buddy system here. When the blinds aren’t up by 9 a.m., someone checks on you.”
