Regional Report : Battle of the Ages Hits Mobile Homes : Housing: Influx of families is upsetting to many senior citizen park residents.

A 2-year-old boy cheerily rode his tricycle along the street gutter until a neighbor, a 75-year-old woman with a bedridden husband, reminded him not to make noise in front of her mobile home.

The toddler’s mother, hoisting an 11-month-old on her hip, acknowledged that the tricycle might have to go. “I try to keep them quiet,” said Sherry Tyrie of her two small sons. “But there’s no way in the world you can keep them down all the time.”

The children’s toys scattered on the porch of Darryl and Sherry Tyrie’s shiny new home are an unusual sight in San Bernardino’s Sequoia Plaza mobile home park, where the average resident is about six decades older than the youngest of the couple’s four children. And most of the elderly homeowners are angry that young families are moving into what used to be a senior citizens’ community.

“We bought here to live out our retirement,” said Dexter Goody, who is leading the elderly homeowners in a lawsuit against the park owner, “not to live in a condensed area with kids crawling all over the place. That’s not the life we bought into.”

Once the domain of senior citizens, mobile home parks are being populated by growing numbers of young families seeking refuge from the soaring prices of traditional houses. For a fraction of a mortgage payment, a young family can make monthly installments on a two- or three-bedroom mobile home and rent space in a park, while building equity that can be applied toward a conventional house within a few years, mobile home owners and industry authorities say.

“This is the only way young families coming up are able to afford anything,” said Darryl Tyrie, 30, who moved his family into a 1,470-square-foot home last month. His family pays about $900 a month for mortgage and space rent, he said, “and you can’t rent a three-bedroom apartment for $900.”

But more than economics is at work. In 1988, Congress amended the fair housing law to prohibit discrimination against families in all housing, including mobile home parks.

Although the law had little effect in the 48 other states, in Florida and California--where many parks are senior citizen havens--”it opened up a bunch of mobile home parks to families,” said Norm McAdoo, past president of the Western Mobile Home Assn. Last-minute lobbying by the mobile home industry resulted in the addition of two stringent exemptions in the law allowing age restrictions in parks that were to be run as retirement communities.

According to McAdoo’s organization, there are about 210,000 mobile homes in 2,253 parks in Southern California. About half the parks statewide are choosing to accept families, while the remainder limit their communities to older residents under the federal regulations, he estimated.

Tustin mobile home broker Greg Anderson says most of his customers are families. “It’s the only affordable thing left in our area for housing,” he said. In Orange County, where the median price of a single-family home is upward of $240,000, an average mobile home can be bought for anywhere from $30,000 to $80,000. Land rent and monthly mortgage on a $45,000 home amount to about $900 a month, while payments on a comparably sized house would be about $2,000, Anderson said.

“We were all set to buy a conventional home, but we had to back out because we couldn’t come up with the $10,000 down payment. What young family can these days?” asked Joanne Long, who moved into a mobile home in San Bernardino with her husband and two daughters nearly two years ago.

With land prices so high, few new mobile home parks are being built these days, so many families are moving into parks that were constructed for adults. The parks often are equipped with a pool and a recreation room, but they rarely have swing sets, basketball courts or grassy play areas for romping and ball-throwing.

For park owners to obtain exemptions allowing them to restrict their communities to older adults, the anti-discrimination law requires that they provide special services and amenities geared to the elderly. But the law has no comparable requirements if the parks are open to families.

Consequently, in many parks open to families, older residents complain about noise, children playing in the streets and harassment by teen-agers. Many parks prohibit ball-throwing or bicycle-riding in the streets, but “there’s no other place for the children to play,” said Ken Harding, 85, president of the homeowners’ group in his Ventura mobile home park.

The concerns voiced by Joan Stoner, who lives in an Arcadia mobile home park that has recently opened to families, are typical.

“I’m 53. I have no problems with the children. I enjoy them,” she said. “But when the park owners decided to go for families, they didn’t put in provisions for a playground. So we have kids playing in the street, and 88-year-old people backing out of their driveways. When you’re that age, you don’t see as well. You don’t react as quickly. I’m afraid one of these days, a child is going to be hit.”

Many older residents say park owners actually prefer families because young households can pay more for space rent than senior citizens on fixed incomes. What’s more, they say, families are more likely to move out faster, allowing owners to raise space rent for the next resident. Senior citizens, by contrast, move into mobile homes expecting to live the rest of their years there.

Park owners counter that they are prohibited by law from discriminating on the basis of age. Although they can seek the exemption for parks restricted to residents 55 and older, there are many costly and difficult standards they must meet, they say. These include requirements to provide recreation, social and health care programs, transportation services, and other services geared to the elderly. They also must prove that 80% of the coaches have at least one resident who is 55 or older, and that future residents will be restricted to that age group. (Another exemption for senior citizen parks provides that every resident must be 62 or older, and no special services are required. Michelle Brooks, regional director of the Western Mobile Home Assn., knows of only one park in the state that has qualified for that exemption.)

The requirements are not to be taken lightly; park owners can be liable for significant fines if they do not comply, said Barttina Wilkins, a Culver City consultant who helps park owners meet the standards.

If a family who is turned away from a 55-and-older park believes the owner has failed to comply with the law and is discriminating, it can file a complaint with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Fines can be as high as $50,000 for the first offense. Victims of discrimination also can sue park owners in federal court.

Park owners did not like the 1988 law any more than the older homeowners did, said Vickie Talley, executive director of the Manufactured Housing Educational Trust, a political action group.

“They had no choice. The federal government mandated that parks must be open to all ages,” she said. Mobile home parks “may not be the first choice for a place to raise children,” she said. “But it becomes a function of affordability.”

Said Bill Hanks, vice president of a firm that manages 26 mobile home parks, 23 of which are open to families: “Families have to live somewhere. Everyone can’t go out and buy a stick-built house.” Mobile homes also offer more play space than apartments or condominiums, he said.

The growing market for families has actually encouraged some in the manufactured housing industry to market new parks specifically to the young.

In Canyon View Estates in Santa Clarita, upscale mobile homes with vaulted ceilings and custom-designed interiors are set on varied lots with front and back yards. The park has a security gate, playground, tennis courts and other facilities. “Most of our customers don’t even equate the homes to other homes that are built in factories,” said project superintendent Mark Seidenglanz. If the homes were “stick-built”--a term for standard construction--they would sell for at least $120,000 more. But because they are manufactured homes--priced from $68,950 to $104,950, excluding the land lease--young families can afford them, he said.

Probably nowhere in Southern California has the changing mix in mobile home parks created more tension than in Sequoia Plaza in San Bernardino.

There, elderly homeowners contend in a lawsuit that they are being discriminated against by the park owner’s decision to allow families. Dexter Goody, the homeowners’ leader, said that when he moved in, he signed a contract stating the park was restricted to people 55 and older. “We have the largest investment here. All he (the owner) has is the bare land. We provide the homes, the amenities, the landscaping that increase the value of his park,” Goody said. But they had no say when it came to the decision to open the park to families, he said.

Moving out is not a simple solution. It can cost up to $10,000 to move a coach, there are few senior citizen parks in the area, and there are fewer vacant lots.

“What we are is hostages,” Goody said. “We can’t afford to move. And even if we could afford to move, where would we go?”

Sequoia Plaza property manager Hanks countered that the park initially did restrict homeowners to 55 and older, but the residents would not participate in the programs provided to comply with the exemption.

“We got such poor response, and we were concerned that we would lose our exemption if a HUD complaint was filed,” Hanks said. “We had turned a few families down, and we had been threatened with a complaint. It didn’t seem practical to fight the federal government if it looked like we didn’t qualify.”

HUD spokesman Dirk Murphy, said, however, that whether the services are available is more important than whether residents use them.

Industry authorities say there is bound to be some initial friction when families blend into formerly senior citizen mobile home parks. “Some of the older people weren’t happy at first, but the majority now really accept it,” said the manager of Cavalier mobile home park in Oceanside.