An Uneasy Truce

These days at the Rancho La Puente Mobile Home Park, tricycles are as likely to grace the brightly colored porches as rosebushes, balls are as common as fishing rods and Big Wheels increasingly share the carports with the family automobile.

It wasn’t always that way. Until about 10 years ago, older residents are quick to point out, a no-children policy was strictly enforced; even an overnight visit from the grandchildren required registration with the management.

But a federal law forced residents to open their tidy community, with its perfectly manicured patches of shrubs and flowers and newly paved narrow streets, to the young and their parents.

Then this week, the Justice Department and civil rights lawyers in Pasadena settled a suit against seven mobile home parks--six of which are in California--that will give more than $2 million to families who were deterred from buying mobile homes in the parks or held to different rules once there. Other owners, including a previous owner of the La Puente park, refused to comply with the settlement and still face litigation.

But neither law nor lawsuit is going to make the new mobile home world order peaceable.

The older residents want quiet and the younger ones want to share a safe affordable community in which to raise their children.

Somewhere in the middle is the detente that is the La Puente mobile home park.

“It’s been a pain in the neck,” said 79-year-old Alice Lemmons, a 19-year resident, during a break from her regular Tuesday afternoon bingo game in the community room. “We had our kids, and now we want to be with grown-ups.”

As if on cue, no sooner had the bingo game resumed than a big, white ball came thwacking into a community room window. One of the bingo players marched outside and with a “Humph!” of indignation demanded that a group of three children relinquish their ball.

“It used to be quiet here,” Lemmons said, shaking her head.

Since the 1970s, California law has prohibited discrimination against families with children. But there was an exemption for mobile home parks which, as the La Puente bingo group knows well, developed mostly as low-cost housing for senior citizens.

In 1988, the mobile home parks lost their special status because of a federal law protecting families with children from discrimination in any housing facility.

Lemmons and five other women who gather for bingo haven’t been pleased since.

The pool used to be usable, they said, because there were no children splashing--and doing God knows what else in the water. The walkways weren’t mucked up with chewing gum, windows weren’t broken by flying balls and the streets weren’t filled with shouts, squeals, cries and whoops.

But unless they wanted a 55-and-older park, which the law allows, they would have to open the park to all. The residents younger than 55 weren’t about to move.

Jackie Anderson, who moved to the park in 1982, sees the issue from both sides. When she bought her mobile home, the management didn’t realize her son was 17, not 18, she said. Then when circumstances forced her to open her home to her newborn granddaughter, the management told her to get out.

“We had a heck of a time,” she said. While the Andersons waited to sell, the park changed the rules to allow children.

“A lot of young people can’t afford these new houses and end up here,” Anderson said. “I don’t mind the kids if they’re watched and taken care of. When they’re wild, I hate it, too.”

Marie Pyle, 25, walking next to her 4- and 5-year-olds on their bikes and carrying her 3-month-old son on her back, said that the young families want to live in the park for the same reason the older folks do.

The park is like a mini version of a traditional hometown America.

The nearly 100 rectangular homes sit side by side on lots barely bigger than the skirts of the trailers. But there is room enough for individuality: some of the homes have aluminum siding; others are sided in wood painted in the usual house colors of white, cream, peach and buff, often with a contrasting green or blue on the accents. Porches have only front steps or wrap-around sitting areas.

The streets--which double as sidewalks, driveways and lawns--meet at a few intersections.

Without a playground or large lawn, those streets are where the interests of the old and the young collide.

“Kristina! Michael! Over to the side,” Pyle shouted down the road as a car, waiting for the children to move, stood idle.

“There are problems,” Pyle said.

She wouldn’t have to tell that to the exasperated bingo players.

“Sometimes I’d rather have the kids than the crabs,” Anderson said. “At least the kids are happy.”