Low-Cost Housing Threatened by Gentrification
They’re going toe-to-toe to keep from getting towed.
Mobile home residents in Culver City are fighting an effort by the city to replace their park with nicer housing, a neighborhood renewal project they say their community doesn’t need.
City officials have labeled two Grand View Boulevard mobile home parks “blighted” and picked a private developer to draw up plans to replace the parks’ 43 coaches, possibly with townhouses.
But residents contend that their trailer parks are well-maintained and provide badly needed affordable Westside housing for senior citizens and others with low incomes.
The proposed revitalization project marks a major extension of a 33-year city campaign that has transformed many parts of Culver City from one of the few affordable areas of the Westside into a more gentrified, upscale community.
About 42% of the city is included in its redevelopment zone. But in the past, officials have concentrated on sprucing up the city’s downtown core, building a new City Hall, new public parking structures and a 12-screen movie theater-restaurant-office complex.
Last year, a renewal project converted downtown’s 57-year-old Culver Theater movie house into the Kirk Douglas Theatre, a 300-seat venue for live performances.
In the process, parts of Culver City are beginning to look a lot more like tony sections of the Westside, with art galleries, coffeehouses and trendy restaurants along with the designer furniture stores that have long been a city mainstay. The once-sleepy downtown area to the east of the Sony movie studio has seen the biggest transformation, but it is far from alone.
And that has residents of the mobile homes saying that the gentrification has gone too far.
Along with the mobile home parks, officials want to replace an adjacent retail shopping center and aging storefronts at the west end of the city near Washington Boulevard and Centinela Avenue with new retail and part-commercial, part-residential development.
City Council members serve as directors of Culver City’s redevelopment agency. They have ordered a marketing study and project-financing plan from Olson Urban Housing, the Seal Beach company specializing in “in-fill” projects that is launching the redevelopment effort.
Mobile home residents own their coaches but rent their parking spaces.
They bristle at the suggestion that the two nondescript, 40-year-old trailer parks are unsightly or unkempt.
“There’s no compelling reason whatsoever to redevelop this,” said coach owner Tom Mullins, a 57-year-old handyman who lives in the larger of the two parks. “This is a clean, safe place with a kind of village orientation -- everybody has their own space, but there’s a sense of community.
“It’s wrong to kick out elderly and disabled people from an area that doesn’t need to be improved. There’s no justification for redevelopment, period. It’s a violation of what community redevelopment is all about.”
City officials disagree. They say the two parks are “blighted and underutilized properties that are prime for redevelopment.”
Under Culver City’s laws, neither the City Council nor the redevelopment agency has the authority to use eminent domain to acquire property that is used for residential purposes.
So City Council members have encouraged Olson Urban Housing to negotiate privately with the parks’ owners to buy the land and relocate the residents.
Residents are fighting back by pressing the parks’ owners to resist. They say the owners could form joint ventures with the city to use redevelopment funds to pay for upgrades to the parks. Or residents themselves might be able to band together and buy the parks as a group.
In the meantime, residents are challenging Culver City’s ability to comply with state law that requires the city to find “a comparable replacement dwelling within the financial means of the displaced person.”
Since their mobile homes are detached, single-family dwellings, Culver City must either find a new place to move their coaches to or find small houses for them to move into, residents assert.
That’s a tough order in the increasingly expensive and crowded Westside, residents say. City officials agree.
“We are required to relocate them to a comparable dwelling at an affordable rent. It is certainly not an easy thing to accomplish,” said Jerry Ichien, a city redevelopment specialist. “I really don’t know we can make a statement where people would be relocated. We hope the new project could be structured so some of them could be relocated there.”
Some mobile home owners worry that they will end up leaving the Westside.
“People are saying we’ll have to move out of state to find a comparable rent. I’ll be homeless -- I’m going to be out on the street,” said Sugar White, a 13-year resident of the park at 4071 Grand View Blvd. There, spaces rent for an average of $353 a month.
“They won’t give us a clear-cut answer. They say, ‘Some of you will be better off. Some of you won’t.’ ”
Eighty-four-year-old resident Betty Williams said that many of the mobile homes in the two parks were not all that mobile.
“Unfortunately, they’re older homes, from the 1950s and ‘60s. They’re not strong enough to be moved,” said Williams, whose single-wide coach already was parked in place on its pad when she purchased it seven years ago for $23,000. She said she bought it so she could live close to her church.
At the park at 4025 Grand View Blvd., Beano Agundez said he was uncertain what he would do with the circa-1968 mobile home where his mother lived before her death a year ago.
Families are welcome in the park, which has 20 coaches and about 60 residents. Monthly rents are about $490.
“We’re in limbo. Nobody can fix their place up. Nobody can sell,” said Agundez, an actor who also runs a nearby comedy club, Marv & Mary’s Bar. “I can’t sell it. I can’t rent it.”
For now, the residents’ fate seems to lie in the hands of the parks’ separate owners, Roy Matsuoka and Frank Teng.
Teng, who with two partners has owned his park since 1981, said he was waiting to see what kind of offer Olson Urban Housing made.
Matsuoka could not be reached for comment. But his tenants said that his family has owned its property for more than 100 years. They said Matsuoka is a hands-on owner who closely watches out for his elderly residents.
When resident Cecilia Kurtz’s husband died suddenly last year while she was visiting relatives in Costa Rica, Matsuoka spent half a day tracking her down to deliver the sad news, she said.
“He looks out for us. He has an emotional attachment to this park,” said the 66-year-old Kurtz, who has lived there for a decade.
Neighbor Noreen Tate, 70, a retired airline reservation clerk, said Matsuoka had not raised the rent in 11 years until he reluctantly boosted it 4% last year.
“He’s the best landlord any of us have ever had.”
