Affordable O.C. Rent: Where? : Old Trailer Park Far From Madding Market
The tiny trailer park sits just south of the industrial rumble of the Riverside Freeway in Anaheim, squeezed between an alley and a peach-colored motel.
There are seven tiny homes here, all on a rutted, cracked apron that is 72 feet wide and 112 feet long.
The rounded 1940s-vintage trailers might be the cheapest homes in one of the highest-priced housing markets in the nation, but they still offer a wafer-thin slice of home ownership to those who can afford little else.
The typical cost to park here is $250 a month, including water and electricity. That’s a bargain in Orange County, where the average apartment rent has climbed to $956 a month, and there are four times more low-income renters than there are low-cost units to rent, according to recent studies. The Anaheim-Santa Ana metropolitan area, along with Los Angeles County, lies at or near the bottom of nearly every index of affordable housing in the U.S.
“It’s a very good place to live. No noise, no crime, no beer drinking, nothing. Eight o’clock, all the people here go to sleep,” said Maria Gutierrez, who has lived here with her husband and daughter for six years. She, like others here, vastly prefers a trailer to a noisy apartment building. But there are no pretensions about this place.
“It’s a trailer park, that’s it, not a manufactured-home community or anything fancy,” says landlord Ed Heffner, who lives in Long Beach but grew up in a trailer park in Burbank himself. It’s not even a mobile home park, where double-wide dwellings rest on actual foundations. Built to be recreational vehicles, these trailers are the truly mobile homes, still on wheels, though they haven’t gone anywhere in 40 years or more.
The postage-stamp community on West Romneya Drive represents a cross-section of the region’s blue-collar work force: a gardener, a dishwasher, a construction worker and three warehouse workers and their families call it home. The park, here since at least 1931, according to city records, also provides snapshots of the cycles in the area’s history.
Called Anaheim Auto Camp in the early 1930s, the now-nameless park was here before Disneyland, before the freeways, when the orange groves at the city’s northern edge were just beginning to be chopped down for factories. The immigrant workers in the beet sugar refinery a block away were German and Chinese.
Nearly every occupant here can boast of being a homeowner. Each paid $3,000 to $4,000 for one of the small trailers. That price of admission for the most part guarantees a stable group of neighbors, mostly Mexican American workers and their families.
“It’s a little, quiet house of our own,” says Hermenesilda Silva, 40, who has lived here with her three children for the last year. “I like to have my own house.”
Their bathroom looks like that of any other house where teenage girls live: a tangle of hairbrushes, a giant blow-dryer, strewn makeup. Except that the sink, toilet, mirror and shower are all pint-sized.
Silva’s 16-year-old daughter is so embarrassed to call this home that she declines to be identified.
“I’d rather be back in Whittier, in our house!” she says defiantly. Her mother laughs wearily. She and her three children moved here when she separated from her husband. Luz, 19, her oldest daughter, heard about the unit from a friend. Silva borrowed nearly $4,000 from her retirement account at the Anaheim sheet and blanket factory where she has worked for years, and bought the green trailer in the middle of the lot.
Silva, who is saving every dollar she can, dreams of buying a bigger home. She talks to real estate agents regularly, but the prices are always too high.
One has told her that government-repossessed houses may be going on the market in December--costing about $150,000. She just might be able to afford it. In the meantime, she sleeps wherever she can find space: in the shed attached to the trailer, or in the cramped area that is a living room by day and a bedroom at night for Luz and her younger brother, Jose, age 12.
“It’s too small, it’s hard,” Silva says. “But I like Anaheim, everything is near. The school, Disneyland, the stores, it’s good.”
“It’s comfy, it’s affordable, but it’s tiny,” agrees Luz, who takes the bus each day to Cerritos College, where she is studying administration of justice in hopes of becoming a lawyer. “We had a big house, a big yard, big family room, the whole big-house thing. Now we buy everything small.”
The park is managed by Juventina Ramos, 55, a retired Hunt-Wesson tomato products factory worker, and his wife, who live in a one-bedroom bungalow at the back of the lot with their Chihuahua, Samson.
When Ramos is not fiddling with a set of open-air washing machines, he is a swap meet vendor, repairing damaged electronic goods for resale in Santa Fe Springs.
To fend off rain, he has spread a giant blue tarp over one end of his small patio in the back. Shreds of last year’s tarp still flutter in the breeze.
Ramos, who started out as a tenant in one of the smaller units here, gradually worked his way up to the bungalow at the back of the lot.
He loves the life he and his wife lead.
“I work for myself,” he said. “I make more money than at the factory.”
The couple have been here for eight years, and the place suits them fine. The price can’t be beat: $250 a month.
“We got everything we need here--all the trailers got air-conditioning, water heaters,” he said.
Still, he knows it is hard on the families with children to live in such confined quarters.
“They want to live better, but where can they go?” he said.
He’s not the first to park here permanently. A former manager lived here for more than 40 years before she was moved out to Colorado, at the age of 98, by a great-nephew.
There are touches of unexpected beauty.
Scarlet and magenta bougainvillea drape over one unit. Towering trees shade the tiny dwellings.
Through the late afternoon and suddenly dark evening, the workers return home, dining on canned food, tortillas and sometimes a bit of meat or soup cooked on old white porcelain stoves.
Out in front of the Silva family home, a bird cage holds three golden canaries.
“They’re my mother’s. They sing to her,” says Luz Silva.
Her mother drapes a heavy sheet over the cage to keep the birds warm, and goes back inside.
