Tenants’ Victory: ‘Lesson to Landlords’ : Dispute: It took time and patience, say mobile home dwellers who won a settlement from the park owner, but they would do it all again.

In the eight years her family has lived at the Aloha Palms Trailer Park in Costa Mesa, Julia Jimenez said, they have endured sewage running down the streets because of broken pipes, water leaking through their roofs and cockroaches crawling about their home.

On Tuesday, she and 10 other tenants who recently won a $230,000 settlement from mobile park owner Rubidoux Partnership, held a news conference in Santa Ana to say that their fight to improve squalid conditions took time and patience, but that they would do it all over again.

“I hope this is a lesson to other landlords that we are humans and we have rights too,” said Jimenez, one of the organizers of a rent strike three years ago that eventually led to the lawsuit against the park owners. “If they had made the improvements when we first complained, we would not have gone to court.

“It took a lot of time, but I would do it all again for my kids,” said Jimenez, a mother of three. “This is really about them.”

Richard Spix, a lawyer with the nonprofit Hermandad Mexicana Nacional Legal Center, which represented the tenants, said this settlement is part of a growing trend in Orange County to hold landlords accountable for squalid conditions on their properties. The legal center is also involved in lawsuits against Santa Ana landlord Carmine Esposito, who is being sued by 70 tenants. On Monday, after a five-year legal struggle, Esposito agreed to pay one tenant $19,000. The other cases are still pending.

An attorney for Rubidoux said this settlement clears the way for much-needed improvements to the Aloha park.

“We’re very, very happy with the settlement,” attorney Stephen Duringer said. “We feel it’s fair to both sides.”

He said many of the problems at the park, at 133 E. 16th Street in Costa Mesa, were created when it was under its previous ownership, and Rubidoux inherited the tenants’ ire.

“The park is a bad park,” he said. “The current owners purchased it in 1988 with the specific purpose of rehabilitating it. A month later, the rent strike happened.”

Originally, the Hermandad legal center represented 28 tenants but several of them moved away or abandoned the action. The 11 who are left will share the $230,000 in compensation for what they have had to endure, Spix said.

At Aloha Palms, tenants live in park-owned mobile homes that are about 30 years old, Duringer said. As part of the settlement, the owners have agreed to rehabilitate the park and replace each mobile home with a new double-wide one. After the rehabilitation, rents will increase from $400 to $750 a month, still below market value, he said.

Duringer, who specializes in landlord-tenant disputes, agreed that property owners are becoming more aware of their obligations to tenants and that tenants appear to be savvier about their rights.

“Landlords are becoming more educated, much more responsible,” he said. “But it works both ways. Tenants are finally realizing that there are certain things under their control. . . .

“When cases like this go to litigation, no one really wins,” he said. “The tenants live in conditions they really shouldn’t live in. The owners are prevented from doing what they need to do as a business enterprise. Both sides probably could have handled it better in this case.”