Paradise Found in a Trailer Park

Doug Harmon just plunked down $225,000 for a little piece of paradise overlooking the pounding surf of Laguna Beach.

The place is a dinky singlewide, but the whitewashed mobile home--with its Sub-Zero refrigerator, fireplace and marble countertops--is definitely more Laguna chic than Dixie Chick.

It sounds like a bargain, but there’s a catch.

Harmon’s dream vacation house is scheduled to be dismantled in 21/2 years along with the rest of the El Morro Mobile Home Park. The oceanfront homes are perched on a sliver of Crystal Cove State Park, and the state has ordered them out by December 2004 to make room for a campground and RV park.

“I didn’t buy it as an investment,” said Harmon, kicking back on his sun-bleached deck with his wife and two kids. “I bought it because it was worth spending part of your life here--a place your kids will never forget.”

El Morro and other trailer parks along the Southern California coast once offered the dime-store version of the American Dream: a place where a Buick-driving pensioner could afford the same million-dollar view as someone in a gated Malibu mansion.

Those patches of beachfront nirvana are disappearing, washed away by the tide of park owners cashing in to make way for posh, $500-a-night resorts, million-dollar estates and other “higher and better uses” of the land.

Along the Orange County coast alone, nearly a third of the trailer parks that existed in the mid-1980s have disappeared or will soon be closed. Between Malibu and Dana Point, fewer than two dozen oceanfront parks remain, and many that have survived are priced way out of reach for the average homeowner.

At the Paradise Cove mobile home park in Malibu--the surfside spot where TV private eye Jim Rockford lived in the 1970s hit series “The Rockford Files”--an ocean-view doublewide recently sold for $690,000. And that doesn’t include the $1,500 monthly rent.

Paradise Cove is a neighbor to Barbra Streisand’s cliff-top mansion just off Pacific Coast Highway and is such prime real estate that its owners ultimately plan to transform half the park into a small, exclusive oceanfront hotel.

*

The Last Remnants of Working-Class Culture

The gentrification troubles some longtime beach residents, who have already watched as real estate prices along the coast soared beyond the reach of all but the well-to-do. When the trailer parks disappear, they say, so will the last remnants of working-class culture in many beach towns.

“I hardly recognize the place anymore,” said Christopher Goldblatt, a seafood importer who grew up in Paradise Cove when commercial fishing boats still docked at the pier down below. “You had surfers, cooks, people who loved the water.... You’re not going to see people like Streisand out here snorkeling with a spear gun.”

Tustin businessman Richard Hall, whose partnership closed down a Laguna Beach trailer park to make way for a seaside resort, says coastal trailer parks occupy some of the most coveted land in Southern California. Something’s got to give.

“They’re on a path to extinction. It’s all a matter of economics,” Hall said.

No one knows that better than the 500 people who lived at the Treasure Island Mobile Home Park in Laguna Beach. The park was razed a few years ago to make way for the Laguna Beach Colony, a $150-million development that includes a 275-room hotel and pricey homes and condominiums.

With its secluded beach and panoramic views, Treasure Island attracted working-class mobile home dwellers from across the county. The spot was a featured backdrop in Disney’s “The Love Bug,” Lucille Ball’s “The Long, Long Trailer” and a few other films.

“It was like a little village like in the olden days. We’d have these great beach parties, all dress up for Halloween, you name it,” said Connie Vlasis, who lived at Treasure Island for 15 years with her husband. “You’d be living next door to Pilar Wayne--John Wayne’s wife--and the next person over was a nurse, then two gay guys and then a lady who’s a kick and sells Avon.”

Treasure Island closed in 1997, 10 years after it was snapped up by a real estate partnership Hall had formed with Merrill Lynch Hubbard, the investment giant’s real estate subsidiary. After the purchase, Vlasis said her monthly rent jumped from $900 to close to $2,000, and that didn’t include the $600 monthly payment on her trailer.

“They raised the rents so high, a lot of people just couldn’t afford it,” said Vlasis, who moved to another park before buying a bed-and-breakfast inn near Palomar Mountain. “Don’t even go into a park unless you own the land, because you have no rights.”

Hall agrees that trailer park living can be risky. In the vast majority of trailer parks, residents lease a plot of land but must buy the actual mobile home. The problem is, most mobile homes aren’t “mobile.” So residents live at the mercy of park owners and are out of luck if the park closes.

Hall’s company, RHC Communities, owns about a dozen trailer parks in California. He said coastal mobile home parks can be a great investment because many are undervalued and can be turned around for a tidy profit.

Residents can also cash in on the booming housing market--but there’s always the chance of going bust.

That’s what happened in Huntington Beach. In the late 1990s, the city hoped to revitalize coastal business district by closing down the sleepy Driftwood Beach Club Mobile Home Park on PCH, which was on city land, to make room for what will soon be a Hyatt Regency resort.

The city offered to relocate residents to another city-owned park, Ocean View Estates, which was built on the edge of an old mushroom farm and is nowhere near the ocean. When their 20-year leases expire, they’re on their own.

“We’ll never have what we had at the Driftwood,” said Robert Conger, who grew up in Huntington Beach and lived at Driftwood for 17 years. “Even though our mobile home was kind of a dump, I lived across from the beach, next to a golf course. I mean, it was paradise.”

That paradise will soon belong to free-wheeling, mimosa-sipping tourists. And it won’t be the only one.

The Dana Strand Beach and Tennis Club in Dana Point, a bluff-top trailer park with a priceless view of the water, was closed in the late 1980s and is set to become part of a $500-million village of seaside homes, shops and a posh inn.

For the last 15 years, Newport Beach has been trying to close Marinapark Mobile Home Park, home to 56 mobile homes on some of the choicest city-owned property on the exclusive Balboa Peninsula. Residents live there on year-to-year leases and pay below-market rent. When it comes time to move, they get nothing.

“Our days are numbered,” said Herb Williams, who has lived off and on at the Marinapark for the last 43 years. “If I can squeeze out another three or five years, that’s not bad, because the truth of the matter is we’re living like millionaires for a hell of a lot less money.”

In some Southern California coastal cities, trailer parks are the only affordable housing--and that might be their salvation.

Malibu Councilwoman Joan House said people may laugh at the idea of paying a couple of hundred thousand dollars for a trailer, but in her city and neighboring Pacific Palisades, finding an ocean-view house for that much is an even bigger joke.

“If they were to buy their own house on the beach, they’d be putting in 2- to 3 million at least,” House said.

“You like to have economic diversity within the community if possible. No one likes economic cleansing, just having millionaires or billionaires.”

Similarly, the Seal Beach Trailer Park has long been on the threatened list. But because it offers some of the only low-income housing in the city’s upscale Old Town district, the City Council last year put together a deal in which redevelopment funds would be used to help preserve it. Now, the park is owned by a nonprofit organization.

Joe Hecht paid $34,000 for his Paradise Cove trailer back in 1974 and still pays only $680 a month rent. At daybreak, the 82-year-old former nightclub owner takes a dip in the ocean, and Friday nights joins neighbors for a round of cocktails.

“It’s a real neighborhood--and Malibu doesn’t have many neighborhoods,” said Hecht, whose wife, actress Jane Keane, played Trixie Norton in the 1960s TV revival of “The Honeymooners.”

*

Some of the Best Deals in Southland Real Estate

The wealthy are now flocking to these places, and biting their lip when asked how they like trailer life, because it’s one of the best real estate deals in Southern California, said Sheila Dey, executive director of the Western Manufactured Housing Communities Assn., which represents park owners.

“They’re living in the nicest places in the state,” Dey said. “The rent is cheap. The homes themselves are not, but the rent is.”

Just off El Camino Real in San Clemente, squeezed on a spit of land between the railroad tracks and Pacific Ocean, sits Stephanie Leuthesser’s trailer--one of about 90 waterfront homes at the private Capistrano Shores Mobile Home Park. Most are empty vacation hideaways.

Leuthesser has no problem with that. That means plenty of peace and quiet, and more waves for her surf-addicted husband, a professor at Cal State Fullerton.

“It’s like vacationland. We walk out onto the deck, then bow down saying, ‘We’re not worthy,’” said Leuthesser, a Web site designer and native Texan.

The Leuthessers don’t own a lawn mower. The backyard consists of a tiny deck, a 10-foot strip of sand and then--the Pacific. Since moving in three years ago, they’ve rescued three injured seals, a handful of pelicans and countless gulls.

There is a downside: sweeping the sand off the living room floor. An El Nino-fueled storm also nearly flooded them out a couple of years back. And, 17 times a day, the ground quakes under a passing train.

“You kind of have to be an odd sort to be here,” Leuthesser said with a laugh. “Sometimes I tell people we live in a trailer park next to the railroad tracks. Some people we tell we live in a gated community in Orange County right on the water.”