Residents Will Get Title to Gardena Trailer Park

If Jim Settle had had the money, he might have stayed in Redondo Beach. But he didn’t, so he decided to buy a single-wide in Village Mobile Home Park in Gardena, where rent was cheap.

For about $357 a month for 19 years, Settle had a quiet community, a decent-sized lawn and eventually cable TV. And at the end of this year, he and his neighbors will have an even bigger luxury -- the deed to their three-acre park.

After holding on to Village Mobile Home Park on Gramercy Place for 20 years, Gardena will transfer title to the park’s 50 resident families by the end of this year. Ownership comes after $2.8 million in monthly payments to the city by the mostly low-income senior citizens.

Now “we have control over the rent and how the place is run,” said Settle, who serves as vice president of the park’s board of directors.

“We don’t have somebody like in other parks, like a landlord or something, that controls the rent and how much you have to pay. That’s the best part about it. If we want to adjust the rent, raise it or lower it or keep it the same, we can do that,” he said.

Until now, the bulk of the rent from the park’s 50 mobile homes went to Gardena, which bought the park in 1985.

The city’s arrangement with Village Mobile Home Park is unique. Though municipalities sometimes buy and manage mobile home parks or provide financial assistance to low-income residents seeking to purchase their parks, cities rarely buy them outright, and even more rarely deed them to the tenants, said Gerald Gibbs, a San Clemente lawyer who specializes in resident-owned parks.

Nonprofit organizations also have sprung up to buy mobile home parks or broker purchases for residents, generally charging fees for their role.

Statewide, about half a dozen parks have been sold this way or are in the process of being purchased.

Gardena made no money on the transaction. “The city was willing to take a risk and go with people with zero credit,” said Clinton F. Lau, president of Hermosa Beach-based Les Frame Management, which manages the park. “It ended up a good investment for the city, and the residents got what they wanted.”

Risky ventures have caused trouble for Gardena. A municipal insurance company and a first-time home buyers program, both created in the 1990s, left the city owing $26 million to Japanese banks.

“You had, I think, people who were being creative, who had creative thoughts, who had visions of doing good things. It’s just unfortunate that the stars did not all align for us for the first-time home buyers or the insurance ventures,” said Mayor Paul Tanaka, who was elected in March but has been on the City Council since 1999. “Fortunately, they aligned for us on the Village Mobile Home Park.”

Gardena’s partnership with the park began in 1985 after a year of protests from park residents, who had received eviction notices from the property’s new owners.

The landlords planned to build a medical facility on the site.

“We had nowhere to go. We checked all around.... The closest place to take [our mobile home] would be to Victorville,” said Jeanne Bright, who along with her husband, Bill, have lived in the park for 29 years -- the longest of any residents.

To fight the eviction, residents attended every semimonthly City Council meeting for a year and regularly addressed the council during public comment periods.

The residents’ experience is in sharp contrast to recent struggles faced by mobile home owners in Orange County.

This year, residents in El Morro Village, Dana Point and Garden Grove unsuccessfully fought demands to move out, with some even going to court over the matter.

Dr. Kenneth Tokita, one of the previous owners who had sought to build at Village Mobile Home Park, attributed the residents’ success to their political savvy.

“We met with the homeowners one time. When they talked to me, they were very civil but they were very strong. I sensed that it would be very tough” to convert the park. “When I met with City Council a couple hours later, I knew it was over. It was time to quit,” said Tokita, who now runs the Cancer Center of Irvine.

Gardena bought the park from the developers in 1985 for about $1.1 million.

In exchange, Gardena sold them a 6.5-acre parcel on the northwest corner of West Artesia Boulevard and South Normandie Avenue for nearly $2.7 million.

Tokita and his partners built a shopping center on that property, which they no longer own.

“It was a better location. We did not have the stomach to fight” park residents, he said. “The City Council didn’t either,” Tokita said. The “City Council felt threatened because there were so many votes from that mobile home park.”

Then-Mayor Donald Dear acknowledged the political influence of at least two Village Mobile Home Park residents, Jack Griffin and Victor Mormile, who have since died.

“If they had been 50 regular citizens who didn’t know anybody and didn’t know to come to the council meetings, they probably would have been gone,” Dear said.

Only five of those residents stayed or lived to see the fruit of their efforts, including the Brights.

“It’s really sad,” said Joni Mullback, who lives in the mobile home once owned by the late Danny Phelps, the leader of the residents’ campaign in 1984.

“The majority of them have passed on and they didn’t see this happen. It’s really sad,” Mullback said.