Trailer Dwellers May Lose UCI Home

Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?

They paved Paradise

And put up a parking lot.

--”Big Yellow Taxi,” Joni Mitchell

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It’s easy to see why the denizens of UC Irvine’s trailer park hold sentiments similar to those 1970 lyrics. Home to slightly more than 100 people, many of them graduate students working on their doctoral dissertations, the motley collection of trailers has a high concentration of Birkenstocks and bougainvillea, unleashed dogs and outdoor showers.

Perhaps not Paradise to many in tidy Irvine, but a campus-housing Eden to those in search of the legitimately funky on a modern, highly planned university campus.

But even when Irvine Meadows West, the park’s official name, got underway, university officials made it clear that this was a temporary setup, destined to make way for university growth someday.

Now, 20 years later, someday seems to have come. University officials are telling residents that the trailers will have to make way for a parking lot.

The trailers may be moved to another spot, or the park may cease to exist entirely.

Associate Vice Chancellor Chuck Pieper said the campus planning office is doing a study to see if another site can be found.

“It’s a great community, and the people are quite different,” he said. “It’s also the cheapest housing in Orange County.”

Residents are in talks with university officials, asking for at least two years before they must leave, which Pieper said has been orally agreed to by the university. But many hope they will be left indefinitely.

They love the trailer park for what it is not: It is not typically Irvine. To hear some of them describe the city and the campus, they are living in purgatory--a temporary state of necessary punishment they must endure before obtaining doctorates and their souls achieve academic bliss.

Lured by dynamite educational opportunities--no one complains of the university’s programs--many arrived after leaving picturesque college towns filled with coffeehouses and pubs, falafel stands and inexpensive housing co-ops.

“I think that many graduate students are very depressed when they first come here,” said Alice Sowaal, 29, who is writing her dissertation on French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes.

Irvine is also expensive. Until she found the trailer park where rent is $130 a month after purchase of the trailer, Sowaal paid $600 a month for a room in a house with several other students.

“The trailer park provides a sense of community in a university that has been repeatedly criticized by students as cold, alienating and devoid of community life,” graduate student Colin Fisher recently wrote in a letter to university officials. “I myself would have left UCI for another graduate program long ago had it not been for the trailer park,”

Irvine Park West provides a splash of color amid a beige campus. Trailers are painted in psychedelic hues and subdued pastels. A quote from Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” graces one, a hand-painted Octopus writhes on another.

Evidence of avid gardening is everywhere. Trailers are nestled in a profusion of roses, morning glories and native California plants.

The tiny community has been a hedge against loneliness and a magnet for like-minded people.

Five people visit comfortably in graduate student Nina Leacock’s trailer, which like many has been ingeniously crafted to maximize use of space. The bedroom floats above the kitchen space in a loft. It is reached by climbing up a ladder and slipping through a rectangular hole.

The living room has a couch, a desk, a computer and lots of books. A bumper sticker proclaims: “I’d rather be reading Jane Austen.”

Philosophy student Sowaal toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer, but her horrified parents urged her instead to study the principles underlying the nature of the universe.

In her dissertation she supports Descartes’ theory that a body can be at rest and in motion at the same time.

“Because there are no bodies, we just perceive them as individuated,” Sowaal explained. Not surprisingly, even the residents’ approach to preserving the trailer park takes a highly academic form.

Some cite low-cost housing statistics; others use parking and transportation budget figures.

Fisher, who is writing a dissertation on the use of parks to develop nationalism, calls it ironic that a university known for Nobel Prize-winning work on global warming would encourage car use by building parking lots.

Not that the residents are above thinking in terms of personal finance. Most of them plunked down $6,000 to $12,000 to buy their trailer. That’s a large sum for graduate students and an investment to be protected. They buy trailers from departing students but sign a rental agreement with the university for the land it occupies.

Several trailer park residents, however, are careful to say that the university isn’t the bad guy in this story of Paradise in danger of being lost.

“They told us back then that if we were willing to take the chance [of the park being closed] then we could go ahead and live here,” said Dan Hillyard. Hillyard, 37, has lived in the park for nine years while completing a doctorate on victimless crimes. “It would be nice if it could stay, but if it has to go then I’ve learned a lot living here and I’m grateful for that.”