Closure of Trailer Parks Puts Squeeze on Residents : Many Face Choice of Bad Housing or None
After living for more than 20 years in the Holiday Trailer Park in Lennox, 71-year-old Grace Hartinger has been told to get out. Now she wonders how she will stretch her monthly $352 Social Security check in a neighborhood where studio apartments go for $450.
The Ponce family, which lives in the Pepper Tree Trailer Court north of Watts, has also been told to leave. It was the high cost of housing that prompted the family--Ismael, Maria and their four children--to spend $600 on an old trailer and somehow squeeze inside.
James Stanford, a resident of the nearby Angelus Trailer Park, has heard the same orders. The odd thing is that Stanford not only lives in the trailer park, he owns it.
In each case, the eviction notices have been delivered by Los Angeles County, which has judged the trailer parks to be substandard. But coming at a time when the lack of affordable housing in Los Angeles has reached a crisis stage--when the choice for many is between substandard housing and none at all--the county’s actions have raised the specter of government making a bad situation worse.
Growing Number
Holiday, Pepper Tree and Angelus are among a growing number of inner-city trailer parks that have failed muster in recent zoning reviews before the county Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors.
For years, the county allowed trailer parks to operate under conditional-use permits. But in the last two years, the county has ordered nine trailer parks to close within one year of receiving notice, while granting extensions to 10. Another five parks await a county decision.
In the coming months, this could mean that hundreds of residents--typically, poor people who own their trailers and rent their spaces--will be displaced.
Usually, there is no legal place to go. The county’s phase-out effort has coincided with a wave of mobile home park closures, mostly initiated by landlords eyeing land development profits.
Trailer parks are “not one of the easier issues,” said Dan Wolf, a spokesman for Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, whose district includes most of the parks facing closure. “There are basically pros and cons, because we do have zoning laws and health codes and they shouldn’t be flouted either.
‘Judgment Call’
“You don’t want to evict people, but you don’t want to have substandard housing out there. Either way, you’re subject to criticism so you just have to make a judgment call.”
Housing activists and residents agree that conditions in many trailer parks are poor. But getting rid of the parks is not the answer, they say.
“My gosh, I can’t afford to live anywhere else,” said Robert Syvrud, 64, who receives $489 a month in Social Security benefits and has lived at Holiday since 1980. “Why don’t they (the county) tell us what they want done and we’ll try to do it?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” said attorney Bernida Reagan of Public Counsel, a public-interest law group representing the Holiday Trailer Park tenants. “They have an affordable housing resource in the parks. What they are choosing to do is to literally put people out on the street.”
Ironically, while the county sees trailers as part of the housing problem, the City of Los Angeles sees them as part of the solution. In June, the city spent $1.5 million to buy and ship to Los Angeles 104 trailer homes that had been used as temporary housing for construction workers by a Utah power company.
Homeless Families
City officials, envisioning the trailers as “transitional” housing for homeless families, plans to locate the units on property owned by the City Housing Authority and nonprofit social service agencies, such as the Salvation Army.
The City Council is also weighing a proposal by Mayor Tom Bradley to spend an additional $6.3 million to buy and move more than 550 prefabricated housing units to help ease the shelter shortage.
Most of Los Angeles’ urban trailer courts had their genesis in the housing shortage during the World War II era. Several parks were established to provide housing for people working in the booming defense industry. The county allowed such “temporary” use of the land for 40 years or more.
Trailer residents facing displacement say they have few options.
According to state housing officials, the number of mobile home parks in Los Angeles County has decreased from 770 to 737. The vast majority of the closures affected smaller, older, run-down trailer courts with smaller, older, run-down trailers. The numbers also reflect the opening of several newer parks in outlying areas of the county, but those facilities almost uniformly reject old trailers, and most also do not allow children. The restriction on children is being challenged in court.
New Spaces
Even if the displaced trailer park residents could find new spaces, few trailers over 20 years old could stand the strain of relocation, and even fewer owners could afford the $2,000 to $5,000 cost of the move.
Some trailer residents anticipate hauling their homes to illegal locations, such as a friend’s backyard or a public street. Those who choose to move into a house or an apartment say they will incur a double financial beating: Not only would their rents jump, but, in the current market, they would lose a considerable investment in the sale of their trailers.
Like other Holiday Trailer Park residents, Carol Groen, a 13-year resident, is facing a move-out deadline of Jan. 8. Groen, 74, owns two 1964 10-foot-by-50-foot trailers at the park, including one purchased in 1980 for $8,500. The most she has been offered is $1,500.
“These older coaches are just not worth much unless you have somewhere to park them,” she said.
Groen said she will stay at the park as long as she can, then will move into an apartment, which she figures will cost about $550 a month. She currently pays $110 a month for her trailer space.
Financial Assistance
Although Reagan, the public interest lawyer, maintains that the county is obligated to provide special financial assistance to help the dislocated tenants move, county officials disagree. They point out that in every such case, the tenants have been given a one-year period to move out, and that poor tenants may qualify for housing assistance.
The trailer park residents facing removal by the county may face greater strain than those who are evicted directly by development-minded landlords. Mobile home park landlords who close their parks are required by state law to provide financial assistance to relocate tenants.
Similarly, government-sponsored redevelopment efforts also provide for resident relocations assistance. Under federal and state law, redevelopment agencies are required to provide replacement housing and relocation assistance to those they are displacing. For example, the Redevelopment Agency in Inglewood, which borders Lennox to the north and east, is also looking to rid the city of its run-down trailer parks, but it is buying the land and providing replacement housing.
County’s Position
The county, however, maintains that it has no special legal obligation to provide financial assistance to help relocate the residents, a point disputed by Reagan.
“What’s the difference?” she asks, suggesting that the county is also obligated to assist the trailer park residents it is displacing. Simply inviting trailer park owners to apply for housing assistance “is a joke,” declared Reagan. Many people who qualify for assistance have had to wait for more than two years, she said.
Hahn’s press aide, Wolf, agreed that public housing programs may not provide a solution.
“It would be nice if we had a public housing system able to immediately absorb them,” Wolf said. “But that’s not the way it is.”
As a general rule, the trailer parks that are ticketed for closure have typically had problems complying with codes for years, said Richard Frazier, a supervising regional planner for the county. He denied the charge by Reagan and by many owners that the county is simply trying to do away with trailer parks.
Not Connected
Many are in compliance with county codes, but many others amount to overcrowded fire hazards, Frazier said. Extension cords run across the grounds; in some cases, sewage connections failed to connect, he said.
In many cases, Frazier said, the county “has had a bad experience trying to work with the owners to bring (the trailer parks) up to snuff.”
“If a park has been allowed to run down over time, the experience has been that granting a permit extension wouldn’t cause improvements to be made,” he said.
Clem Savant, owner of the Pepper Tree Trailer Park, and Stanford, owner of the Angelus Trailer Park, have hired a lawyer to try to keep their parks open. They said they are puzzled by the county’s assertions that their parks are substandard.
“There have been some very bad trailer parks in the county, and we’ve been tarred by the same brush,” Savant said.
Signed Petition
In 1983, Savant was told his park was overcrowded and in poor condition. Neighbors signed a petition saying that the park was a center of drug activity. Savant, an electrical engineering professor at California State University, Los Angeles, removed two trailers, poured a fresh layer of asphalt and put up a chain-link fence. Over time, he said, he has evicted “a whole bunch” of problem tenants.
Inspectors also suggested that a decrepit wooden trailer owned by longtime resident Juan Lozano, 87, had to go. Savant gave Lozano a replacement. With one three-bedroom house and 18 tailers on the premises, Pepper Tree is now home to about 70 people.
But in early September, county officials ruled that Savant’s improvements were inadequate and gave him a year to close up.
“This isn’t Beverly Hills,” Savant said at the park on a recent day. “But it’s a hell of a lot better than sleeping on the street or sleeping in a car.”
Market Value
Stanford’s park, by contrast, appears far from crowded. Eleven people live in nine trailers. There are no children. Stanford’s rents are in the $100 to $150 range, well below market value. The trailers are larger and newer than those found at some other parks.
“It’s very well-maintained,” said resident Noel Williams, a Methodist minister.
In shopping for another space, Williams said the best space rent he has found has been $400--”and nothing in town.”
Although he lives in a trailer, Stanford, a truck driver, has a Mercedes and Corvette for leisure use. He has had some luck with Antelope Valley real estate, he explained.
Stanford has also had luck with his trailer park. He said he bought it in 1978 for $21,000. Zoned for manufacturing, it was recently appraised at $80,000.
Even though a sale would prove profitable, Stanford is not eager.
“I don’t want to make these people move, and I don’t want to move myself,” he said.
Frazier said that Stanford’s property was “a marginal case.”
“It could have gone either way,” he said.
