Mobile Home Park Tenants Dream of Their Own Seaside Site

A few years ago, tenants at a coastal mobile home park in San Pedro won a court battle against a landlord who, they said, wanted to jack up rents in violation of Los Angeles rent control.

The park’s management has changed, but the lengthy battle has prompted some residents--led by a retired Air Force colonel with experience as a mobile home park developer--to take a stab at building their own park next door in Rancho Palos Verdes.

“The only way you can survive and enjoy this life style is if you run your own operation,” said Pat Hall, who has lived at the Palos Verdes Shores park with her husband, Robert, for 14 years.

People from other South Bay communities who want an affordable way to live on the coast have joined in the effort, which envisions 350 manufactured homes on 53 scrubby acres that terrace down to the Pacific. Rents, common areas and park regulations would be controlled by residents through a cooperative, nonprofit corporation. Most residents are expected to be older couples.

The organizers are floating the idea by officials of Los Angeles County, which owns the land and will be asked to sell or lease it for the park, and in Rancho Palos Verdes. The city would have to change its general plan and coastal plan, which designates the land for recreational open space. Approval by the California Coastal Commission would also be required.

At this point, the proponents acknowledge that their proposal is a long shot, and interviews with county and city officials indicated that both are far from accepting the idea.

John Pitchford, the retired colonel who is general manager of the venture, also said he expects to encounter what he termed the “snob appeal of Rancho Palos Verdes.”

“They have never considered mobile home parks, and when you talk about them, someone will say ‘trailers,’ ” Pitchford said.

About 20 families, half of them residents of Palos Verdes Shores, are involved in the organizing group, which is called Shoreline Community Development Inc. Each has paid $2,000 to prepare a development proposal and has pledged to spend $10,000 per family to get the project going.

While providing homes for themselves is the group’s main purpose, it also sees the park as housing for Palos Verdes Peninsula workers who cannot afford to live there, such as city employees, teachers, firefighters, police officers and other service employees.

“I have long been concerned that people of middle and lower income are being deprived of a view of the ocean by the exigencies of economics,” said the Rev. Alfred Henriksen of the Pacific Unitarian Church in Rancho Palos Verdes, who is involved in the corporation.

Pitchford said 25% of the units in the park would be reserved for people with incomes of $25,000 to $30,000. But they would have to pay the minimum $10,000 down payment required of everyone to buy shares in the cooperative and obtain a leasehold.

All residents would own their own coaches, which would have to cost at least $25,000 to ensure quality. Pitchford projects a $225 monthly homeowner fee to maintain the park’s private street system, landscaping and clubhouse.

Jack and Johanna Lytle, who have owned a Torrance house for 22 years and are a part of the organizing group, said they could not afford to live on the Peninsula except in a mobile home.

Both are teachers who will retire from the Los Angeles Unified School District in four years. Their combined income of $80,000 a year will drop by half when they retire, Jack Lytle said. Even after selling their home, he said, they would have to pick up a $100,000 mortgage to live in a standard home near the Peninsula coast.

“We’re interested because it’s a very nice location and would make a nice home,” Jack Lytle said. “It’s a very good concept of helping people who retire have really decent housing, and it’s bringing both sides of the economic picture together. It is set up for those who can afford more and those who can afford less.”

‘Acceptance in Principle’

Pitchford said he wants “acceptance in principle” from the county and the city before investing more money on the venture or starting a geological investigation of the land, which is in an ancient slide area. The study will cost $40,000, he said.

Pitchford is scheduled to ask for an agreement from the City Council on Sept. 29. If he is successful, he will go to the County Board of Supervisors.

“We need legal assurance we will be able to use the land,” he said.

County and city officials said Pitchford has it backward. They said approval should come only after he files a development proposal and geological study.

Jim Okimoto, assistant director of the county Parks and Recreation Department, which has designated the 53 acres as a future park site, said the county cannot evaluate the idea without detailed study and “a complete geological study.”

Proponents of the mobile home development note that the county has no plans to build a park.

“There are no immediate plans to open a park,” Okimoto acknowledged, “but that is not the same thing as saying it is surplus. It could be developed down the line.”

The county does not want to sell the property, Okimoto said, and if it were willing to lease it, the $250,000 annual lease-rent the Pitchford group is contemplating would be too low. “We would like substantially more, $200,000 to $250,000 per year to the general fund and another $300,000 to $500,000 to benefit parks and recreation directly,” he said.

At the city level, Councilmen Robert Ryan and Douglas Hinchliffe said they are concerned about geology and density. The city’s general plan calls for one housing unit per acre in the area, but the group wants to build six units per acre.

Hinchliffe also objected to the request for approval before the usual studies are completed.

‘A Little Bizarre’

“I find the whole approach a little bizarre,” he said. “We say, ‘Make an application,’ but part of that process involves expenditures of money for geological surveys, and he doesn’t want to do that.”

Hinchliffe said that if the city were to endorse the concept, it could be opening itself to a lawsuit by the park proponents if they then did studies, filed applications and then were were turned down.

Pitchford said the biggest hurdle is demonstrating that the land is safe for mobile homes. Menlo Park geologist Karl Vonder Linden, in a report contained in the corporation’s development proposal, said the slide has not been active “for several thousand years” and there is reason to conclude that it is safe. Among other things, he said, the property has remained stable during heavy rains during the last decade and the adjoining Palos Verdes Shores park and golf course have given no indications of a slide.

However, Vonder Linden has proposed an investigation of surface and subsurface geology of the site, which would include exploratory borings through the slide mass, mapping and analysis of rock and soil samples.

Because the Peninsula has three active slides that have destroyed homes, Ryan said that the geology “really worries people” and that concern outweighs what officials acknowledge is Pitchford’s best argument: provision of housing for moderate income people and senior citizens in an affluent city. City officials have acknowledged the need to promote affordable housing to comply with the city’s general plan.

“This would be responsive to that concern,” Pitchford said. “It would provide substantial housing for senior citizens and retirees. There is a lot of sympathy for that on the Peninsula.”

Ryan said the only way the city would accept this development would be “as an escape valve” in the moderate-income housing issue, predicting that the city will oppose mobile home development on the coast.

Past Legal Disputes

Pitchford, 72, has been involved in legal disputes over some of his past developments, but he said he did nothing wrong. He said investors in the Shoreline park project know about his past problems and are not concerned about them, which investor Robert Hall confirmed.

He said that after he retired from the Air Force in 1960, he went into commercial mobile home park development, building parks in San Luis Obispo, Arroyo Grande and Dinuba. He also bought a park that was already operating and got involved in condominium conversions.

In one such project in Rancho Palos Verdes, Pitchford and a business associate organized a limited partnership to buy an apartment building and convert it into condominiums. He said that the project came at the time Rancho Palos Verdes was incorporating in 1973 and that even though the county had tentatively approved the conversion, Rancho Palos Verdes delayed action for more than a year and the project died.

Los Angeles Superior Court records show that in 1977 partners in the venture demanded an accounting of their money, which totaled $165,000, and the matter went to arbitration in San Luis Obispo Superior Court, where the case was filed.

An arbitration judge the following year ruled that Pitchford and his associate breached their responsibilities to the investors, misapplied funds and failed to account for them. It ordered repayment of the money, along with interest, totaling $218,794.32.

Pitchford said in an interview that he did account for the funds, contrary to the complaining investors, and that he was repaying the money when the case was filed. He blamed the action on a disgruntled investor and a San Luis Obispo attorney who, he said, “went after me” on a total of 11 limited partnerships. He said all of the money was repaid, but without the interest.

Proponents of the Rancho Palos Verdes park say that once they secure necessary government approvals and a land lease, they foresee no problem in getting financing to develop the $4.8-million park, which they say will take two years to complete and will have no trouble attracting residents.

“I can close my eyes and see people lining up for a place overlooking the ocean,” Pitchford said.