COVER STORY : THE GOOD. . . . . .AND THE BAD : Trailer Tempest : Officials Seek to Improve Mobile Home Parks With Local Inspections

At the Homeward Trailer Park in Bellflower, many sites are clogged with weeds and littered with rusting refrigerators, greasy auto parts and piles of rotting wood.

Some residents in the park’s 27 units have pieced together 2-by-4s, scraps of plywood, chicken wire and Pegboard to create makeshift additions to their cramped, weather-beaten trailers.

City officials say conditions at Homeward and many of the other 41 trailer parks in the city are unsafe but that the city is powerless to take action. Mobile home parks in most cities are regulated by the state, which discontinued routine inspections more than two decades ago because of budget cuts.

Other cities in Southeast Los Angeles face similar problems. Long Beach, Compton and Paramount also have large concentrations of mobile homes, many of which have been in poor condition for years, officials say.

“We have some of the nicest parks you’ll find anywhere and we have four or five with horrendous living conditions,” said Patrick West, city manager of Paramount, which has 19 mobile home parks.

Some of Paramount’s worst parks have communal bathroom and laundry buildings that are dilapidated, trailers set on makeshift foundations, lights that spew sparks, poorly maintained roads, inadequate parking and no landscaping, West said.

But nowhere in Southeast Los Angeles is the problem as vexing as in Bellflower, where trailer parks are almost as common as gas stations, bars and restaurants along some thoroughfares. Bellflower has more mobile home parks than any other suburb in Los Angeles County, according to state officials.

City officials, who recently made cursory inspections of the 42 parks, say nine trailer parks have serious violations, such as illegal additions, faulty wiring, outmoded sewer connections and excessive junk and debris in yards, while 19 parks have less extensive problems. Fourteen other parks are in good shape.

“Some of the parks are very nice, but others are truly the pits,” said Judith S. Arandes, the city’s community development director.

She says the trailer parks will continue to deteriorate unless the state enforces health and safety regulations or gives Bellflower jurisdiction over its parks--an alternative that the city has been exploring for the last year.

“Some park owners just collect the rent and don’t put anything back into their property,” Mayor Ken Cleveland said. “For the safety of the tenants, it’s necessary that someone do some enforcement.”

The state Department of Housing and Community Development enforces building, health and safety codes in mobile homes in most Southeast cities, but doesn’t have enough staff to provide routine inspections, said John Frith, the agency’s assistant director.

The department’s 40 inspectors have to concentrate on inspecting new mobile home parks and responding to complaints in 3,800 parks throughout the state, Frith said. Twenty inspectors are assigned to Southern California and report to the agency’s Riverside office. “More inspectors would allow us to do the job faster, but state government” is cutting costs, he said.

After some prodding by Arandes, however, the department agreed to inspect five Bellflower trailer parks that city officials identified as having the worst conditions.

State inspectors visited Flamingo Trailer Park on Lakewood Boulevard and Trailer Garden on Artesia Boulevard in March. They have scheduled inspections at Homeward on Artesia, the Elms Park on Alondra Boulevard and Pines Mobile Home Park on Bellflower Boulevard later this month.L

The rest of the city’s parks will be inspected within a year, Frith said.

State inspectors said they found 107 code violations at the Flamingo.

Most of the violations were minor, said Flamingo manager Jake Garcia. “It’s easy for state inspectors to come in with a fine-toothed comb and find violations,” he said. “We’ve already started to remedy them.”

The park was cited for such violations as improper room additions and unkempt yards, Garcia said.

Eight-year resident Dick Giles said the conditions at the park are “not bad, but could be better.”

Giles said he was concerned about an all-wood patio enclosure built a few feet away by his neighbor. “If it catches on fire, I’m going with it,” he said.

Giles has some doubts about whether the inspection will lead to any lasting improvements in the park. “I’ll wait and see what good it’s done,” he said.

State inspectors haven’t completed reports on what they found at the Trailer Garden, but the owner said inspectors noted improper room additions and excessive debris next to or under several of the 26 trailers.

Park owners are given 30 days to correct the violations, Frith said. Those who refuse to correct problems face criminal prosecution.

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Lee Terry, 62, who owns the Trailer Garden, said the remodeling required to bring one trailer addition up to code will cost almost as much as the trailer itself.

Terry said he is fed up with the hassles of owning a trailer park, particularly dealing with tenants who balk at paying their $200-a-month rent. “If the city were to come in and say I have to close down, I’d dance,” he said.

Down the street at Homeward Trailer Park, manager Roger (Rocky) Eggleston is trying to get his park ready for a state inspection later this month.

The state gives at least 30 days notice of inspections to encourage park owners to make improvements voluntarily, Frith said. “The object is not to cite or fine people, it’s to make sure the parks are being operated in accordance with health and safety standards,” he said. “If they correct violations before we show up, so much the better.”

Eggleston’s two-man work crew has cleared trash, junk and weeds from the yards and patios of several trailers. They also had dismantled some of the crudely assembled rooms that had been added illegally.

Frank Myers, who moved into a trailer at Homeward to work on the cleanup crew, said he was appalled by the squalid conditions.

“It was like something out of ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ ” he said, referring to the John Steinbeck novel about the hardships faced by a poor family that moved from the Dust Bowl to California in the 1930s.

Eggleston said he is pleased with the cleanup crew’s progress. “It was pretty shabby for a while, but everything is in tip-top shape now,” he said.

The yards and patios around some trailers were tidy, but other trailers were still surrounded by refrigerators, stacks of lumber, chairs, bicycle parts and boxes of clothes.

Eggleston, 79, who has managed the park for 2 1/2 years, has few rules--most of them unwritten: No children. No dogs. No loud partying. No “business ladies”--his euphemism for prostitutes.

Aside from that, he lets tenants do basically as they please. “As long as people pay the rent on time, they get no hassle from me,” he said, leaning on a shopping cart that he uses for a walker.

The lax management is evident outside the tiny 1947 trailer that Earl Hough has lived in the past 13 years. There are two rusting metal sheds, two old refrigerators, a mattress, several rolls of carpet, a small stack of car tires and a hodgepodge of other possessions.

“I know it looks bad, but I don’t have anywhere else to put it,” said Hough, a part-time security guard.

Hough said Homeward’s accommodations were satisfactory--until some alleged drug dealers moved in. “I don’t like living here now,” he said. “I’d love to move out if I could.”

Hough said conditions elsewhere in the park have improved considerably since the cleanup began. “It’s probably not as good as it could be, but it’s a lot better than it was,” he said.

One of his neighbors, who asked to remain anonymous, agreed. “You wouldn’t believe the difference between the way it was a month ago and today,” he said last week. “I just wonder how long it’s going to last.”

Most of Bellflower’s trailer parks date to World War II, when the Southland’s booming arms industry attracted tens of thousands of new workers from across the country. This migration strained the region’s housing supply, forcing many transplanted families to either bring house trailers with them or buy them here.

Back then, Bellflower was an unincorporated agricultural community. Land was cheap and zoning regulations were lax--ideal conditions for the proliferation of trailer parks, said City Administrator Linda C. Lowry.

Trailer parks were originally set up to serve as temporary housing while new homes were built, but many of them outlasted the farms that once dominated Bellflower.

The parks continue to be a source of cheap housing. Officials refer to trailers as “housing of last resort”--one step above homelessness.

In Bellflower, spaces in the 42 parks rent for $160 to $460 a month. Residents include the working poor and people on welfare or pensions. The majority are senior citizens.

“Sometimes it’s the only housing that some folks can afford,” said Frith, the state housing official.

Ted Hoskinds said he lived in his car before moving into a small, drafty trailer at Homeward Trailer Park two years ago. “I get cabin fever from time to time, but it’s better than being on the streets,” he said.

The state housing department, which has regulated trailer parks since the 1920s, used to inspect mobile home parks every two years, but stopped 21 years ago because of budgetary cutbacks, Frith said.

Under pressure from the Golden State Mobile Home Owners League, the state Legislature in 1990 ordered the agency to inspect all parks under its jurisdiction by 1997. “We favor more inspections because trailer parks would be better maintained if the state came in on a regular basis,” said Virginia Croft, regional manager of the organization in Los Angeles County.

The deadline was extended to 1999 after the Northridge earthquake because trailer park inspectors were temporarily reassigned to help assess the region’s extensive quake damage.

State inspectors started with parks in Northern California and had just turned their attention to Southern California when the quake hit, Frith said. Most parks in Southeast Los Angeles have yet to be inspected.

Frustrated by the slow-moving inspections, Bellflower city officials began exploring the possibility of taking over regulation of the parks. “The state is supposed to be regulating them, but they’ve failed to do their job,” said Lowry, the city administrator.

She flew to Sacramento a year ago to discuss the idea with state housing officials.

In December, Bellflower officials received a letter from Travis Pitts, a deputy director of the state housing department, saying the state would be “elated” to give the city jurisdiction over its trailer parks.

Frith added that if Bellflower or any other city wants jurisdiction, they can have it. In fact, about a third of the cities now oversee trailer parks, he said.

Lowry says she is now looking for money in the city’s tight budget to hire a full-time trailer park inspector, which would cost $50,000 to $60,000 a year. Lowry said she had been led to believe initially that the state would provide some funding for the inspector, but later learned that was not the case.

Frith said the state and the city will share the annual operating permit fees paid by park owners in Bellflower--about $9,600 a year. The city’s share, however, would be only a fraction of what it needs.

Mayor Cleveland said he would be willing to do whatever is necessary to force trailer park owners to improve their properties.

But Councilwoman Ruth A. Gilson expressed reservations about having the city take control of mobile home parks. She said she is worried that more aggressive city enforcement might force some owners to close parks or raise rents, potentially displacing some low-income residents.

Lowry insisted, however, that the city is not trying to get rid of trailer parks.

“We’re just trying to improve the quality of life for the people who live in them,” she said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Where Trailer Parks Are

CITY PARKS SPACES Artesia 1 96 Bellflower 42 1,486 Cerritos 0 0 Compton 11 475 Downey 5 197 Hawaiian Gardens 2 248 La Habra Heights 0 0 Lakewood 2 84 La Mirada 1 150 Long Beach 13 2,264 Lynwood 2 72 Montebello 4 199 Norwalk 6 441 Paramount 19 1,341 Pico Rivera 8 453 Santa Fe Springs 2 111 Signal Hill 0 0 Whittier 5 185

Source: California Department of Housing and Community Development