“It used to be beautiful here, with tree-lined streets, white fences, shrubs,” says Linda Ogden, looking around the Golden Lantern mobile home park in Pinellas County where she’s lived with her husband Butch for 23 years. “It’s been awful watching it go downhill, not knowing what’s going to happen.”
Linda and Butch raised three children in their tidy double-wide. But this once-vibrant neighborhood is now being systematically dismantled. Last summer, the bulldozers came, tore down vacated trailers and carted off the debris — well, most of it, at least.
As a result, Golden Lantern, located on Park Boulevard across from the Wagon Wheel Flea Market, is now a very strange-looking place. The trailers are spread out, separated by long expanses of scrubby grass pocked by sandy patches where mobile homes once stood, like fading scars from old wounds. Some of the remaining trailers are vacant, inexplicably spared by bulldozers, their windows broken and interiors empty save for trash.
“It’s kind of like being on farmland,” jokes Butch with a wan smile. “We should plant a garden, grow corn out here.”
He’s 65, retired for three years, and his bad heart has found him in and out of Bay Pines Veterans Hospital over the last year. He hardly seems like a rebel. But along with 30 or so other homeowners, that’s what he is.
They are the holdouts, the folks who have fought the efforts of the Golden Lantern’s current owner to raze the aged park in hopes of building a condominium/retail project.
They aren’t supposed to do this, these holdouts. They are supposed to capitulate, to take the lowball offer like their former neighbors, about 150 of them, who accepted $3,500 each to pack up and leave their trailers behind.
As mobile home parks in the Bay area have been torn up to make way for subdivisions or condos or shopping centers, developers have counted on residents to cave in and clear out. These developers have banked on the notion that mobile-home dwellers are ignorant of their legal rights as property owners, that they won’t unite, pool money, hire a lawyer and fight back. In short, they’ve expected the residents to act like trailer trash.
Mobile home residents are vulnerable because most of them own their dwellings, but merely rent their land. For a new park owner bent on redeveloping what is often prime real estate near water or a high-traffic intersection, though, it’s not as simple as evicting everyone and calling in the contractors. Florida law says that in order to qualify for land-use rezoning, these new owners must show that displaced residents can find adequate and suitable housing alternatives.
And at Golden Lantern, the remaining residents know their rights.
On a weekday night, under the muted glow of a streetlight outside one of the trailers, about two dozen Golden Lantern homeowners have gathered for a meeting. Joe Magri, their attorney, stands before them discussing the residents’ pending lawsuit against new owners Triax Properties and Mas Verde Mobile Home Estates, the prior owners. The Jan ’07 lawsuit charges that Triax reneged on an agreement with the homeowners to buy their trailers for $18,382 apiece and that a subsequent eviction notice was a further breach of that agreement.
“The more divided you are, the more he conquers,” Magri says of Triax headman Kevin Voss, drawing a murmur of affirmation. A woman bellows from the crowd, “They think we’re all drug addicts and drunks, and that we’ll take $6,000. Well, we’re not, and we won’t.” A louder murmur of affirmation.
[At press time, the dispute between the homeowners and the developers had gone to mediation, the outcome of which has yet to be determined.]
As their numbers have diminished, the holdouts’ resistance has strengthened. Besides facing down eviction notices and backdoor buyout offers, they charge in the lawsuit that the park has reduced services and upkeep.
Butch Ogden offers to show me. He fires up his big diesel pickup and slowly drives to what once was the center of recreation at Golden Lantern. The pool, surrounded by a locked fence, is now empty except for a few inches of scummy rainwater. The building that once housed the laundromat stands nearby — nothing remains inside except litter and a small, soiled mattress. The central pond, once enlivened by a fountain, is so blanketed with emerald-colored algae it looks as if you could run wind sprints across it.
And still the holdouts hold out. To be sure, some of their resolve is bolstered by pragmatic concerns. Most are retired, disabled or among the working poor. Many of them have no place else to go. Their mobile homes are too old to move to another park. Even with buyout offers creeping upward, it would still be risky to relocate. Golden Lantern denizens own their homes and pay $335-a-month lot rent. Where else can they live for that kind of money?
“I can’t find anywhere else to go,” says Christie Dennis. “I looked everywhere for another place, and to find an apartment with the same square footage I have, it’s $1,200 a month.”
That’s not to mention first and last month’s rent, security deposit and activation of utilities. The Golden Lantern holdouts have heard horror stories about some former neighbors who took the $3,500 and ended up all but broke after paying their way into a new place. “I personally know people who wound up homeless,” says Shera Darlington, who lives with her husband Nick and 4-year-old daughter Anastasia in one of Golden Lantern’s more populated sections.
About 50 yards away, catty-corner, stands the home of Djemal Marakovic, a Bosnian refugee who has lived in Golden Lantern for four years with his wife Alija and ever-smiling young son Dino. Djemal would like to be a truck driver, but his marginal English has prevented him from landing a job. So he buys and sells stuff at the flea market and scrapes by. Alija gets a $550-a-month unemployment check, but that’s about to expire. On an overcast Friday afternoon, Djemal invites me to sit down in the small living-room area of his single-wide. Alija silently sets a slice of store-bought cake and a glass of orange soda in front of me.
Dino complains that when he and his friends set up a mobile basketball hoop in a deserted street, the general manager drove by and told them to remove it — it was against park rules. “Park rules?” Dino wonders, shaking his head. Djemal sold the basketball rig at the flea market.
The Marakovic family has no plans to leave until the dispute with the park owner is settled. But make no mistake — they’re ready to go. Djemal blurts something in Bosnian to Dino, who looks at me and translates: “Let them pay us and we’ll be out in 24 hours.”
Razing old mobile home parks and turning them into something nicer makes sense in a lot of ways. Why not replace those cramped rows of “tin can” trailers, some of them built as far back as the 1950s, with gleaming new condos? Improve the aesthetics. Raise the tax base. Besides, trailer parks are particularly vulnerable to hurricane devastation. Mobile home residents and advocates generally feel that local governments would just as soon see these communities leveled.
“In recent years, property values have gone up to the point where counties and cities and towns see that land is worth a helluva lot more with condos, houses and so forth,” says Charlie Gallagher, president of the Federation of Manufactured Home Owners of Florida. “When developers have applied for rezoning, most of the time they haven’t had much trouble getting it.”
Statistics show that the number of mobile homes in Pinellas County is steadily declining but not exactly going the way of the Oldsmobile. In 1997, the county had 56,305 mobile home units located within mobile home parks. The most recent numbers, estimates as of October 2007, find slightly more than 49,500 such homes. That’s a 9 percent drop.
Why do these totems of rundown Florida survive? Many of the parks have been around for decades, have been well maintained and managed, and have fostered a sense of community that transcends that of cookie-cutter subdivisions. But probably the biggest reason for the durability of mobile-home living is that it provides plenty of low-income housing, especially in a county as built-out as Pinellas. There are very few ways to live around here this cheaply.
“What provides affordable housing for people who are doing jobs in a community that no one else wants to do?” says Allan Wallis, a professor in the School of Public Affairs at University of Colorado Denver and author of the book Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes. “Overwhelmingly, mobile homes provide that housing.”
Even with the current real estate slump, developers see prime-location mobile home parks as desirable acquisitions. Lately, they’ve been adopting a rainy-day attitude: Obtain the property and wait until the boom times return.
But new plans for an old park ultimately lead to a major issue: Where are the displaced people to go?
Unlike apartment dwellers, who can be summarily evicted if the owner decides to go condo, mobile home residents’ relocation needs must be addressed, in keeping with state law. Florida statute 723 covers all issues related to mobile homes. One provision prohibits any government body from rezoning a mobile home park “without first determining that adequate mobile home parks or other suitable facilities exist for the relocation of mobile home owners.”
Seems straightforward enough. But developers, responsible for providing the information, have come up with techniques to circumvent this protection. They often submit lists of available relocation sites that, on closer inspection, turn out to be neither adequate nor suitable — like an apartment complex that charges $1,000 a month or another mobile home park with much higher rents or little to no available lots. Several trailer dwellers interviewed for this story said they had searched extensively for new housing, and none could find anything of similar size that remotely fit their budget.
Well, one did — more or less. Stacy Hochstein, 47, now lives in a 1,500-square-foot apartment above a hair salon on Central Ave. in St. Pete with his two kids and longtime girlfriend. Rent is $675 a month.
Early last June, with Golden Lantern and his trailer crumbling around him, Hochstein accepted the owner’s $3,500 offer to move out. He spent his month’s grace period searching for places — to no avail — so he checked his family into a La Quinta Inn as a stopgap, for a night or two. Not quite two weeks later, he’d spent $600 of his payout but had found a $950-a-month rental home in Gulfport. By the time the Hochstein family had set up in their new digs, all the settlement money was gone.
“I realized there was no room for error at that rent,” Hochstein says. “One mechanical problem with a vehicle and we’d start to go under.”
Within three months, he’d sold his truck, then had a cheap car blow up on him and was laid off from his telemarketing job in Clearwater. He broke the Gulfport lease and scrambled to find the Central Avenue flat.
His living situation is momentarily stable, but, he says, “I’m still real nervous. Money’s tight.”
Ultimately, he regrets bailing out of Golden Lantern, no matter how untenable life there had become. “For $3,500, I traded roofs and I’m broke,” he says. “All I’ve done is secure another dwelling with a higher rent, so I’m in a worse situation financially than I was before.”
It seems clear that most developers don’t consider the consequences for mobile home owners when buying them out. Another gambit new owners use is to simply issue eviction notices to residents. Some homeowners just pack up and go, accepting the state-mandated $1,375 for a single wide and $2,750 for a double wide to leave their trailers behind.
Others might hold out for a bigger settlement but one that doesn’t approach market value. “What developers are doing is just ignoring the homeowners’ right not to lose their home unless the statute is satisfied, and evicting them,” says Magri, the attorney for the Golden Lantern holdouts. “Most homeowners are unfamiliar with their rights, don’t have the wherewithal to fight back and are afraid of a court system that they perceive as not being responsive to people without money. Developers don’t go to the county [for rezoning] until they’ve cleaned out the park.”
That way, they don’t have to concern themselves with the relocation of residents and are apt to more easily be granted a change of land use.
Magri contends that the state law should be fine-tuned to strengthen disclosure requirements to mobile home owners about their rights, especially the part where they can’t be blithely booted into the street. “Everything ends up in court,” he says. “Court is the sword over the residents’ heads.”
The Golden Lantern imbroglio is a convoluted saga that involves the courts, the County Commission, the Florida Department of Community Affairs and other bureaucracies. Neither Triax owner Voss, based in St. Louis, nor his St. Petersburg lawyer, David Bernstein, would comment for this story, so I’ll re-construct an abridged version of the dispute via court records, interviews with residents and Magri, and newspaper accounts.
It began, as these matters often do, when Voss became interested in the 19.6-acre parcel with a well-traveled thoroughfare on one side and water on the other. The water isn’t visible from the trailers, but condos could conceivably boast a panoramic view.
In early 2005, he set up a deal with then-owner Mas Verde Mobile Home Estates to purchase the land for $4.75 million, but it was contingent on being able to successfully rezone the property. Voss submitted a mixed-use plan that included 333 affordable apartments and high-end condos, and a small retail center.
Triax took over the rezoning initiative. The company’s first application was denied — in large part because it did not meet the requirements for resident relocation in the state law. “Unbeknownst to him, he was dealing with a park that had a whole lot of feisty people,” Magri says. “They were very smart. So much for ignorant trailer trash.”
The homeowners, who were not represented by legal counsel at the time, effectively convinced the commission that there were not, in fact, any adequate and suitable places for them to go.
Meanwhile, the current lawsuit alleges, the park experienced a “reduction in services” that compromised park security. “Criminals have been allowed into the park, criminal activity has been allowed to increase,” the suit states. Homeowners say that gangs of roughneck teens roamed the streets starting fights. Crack dealers set up shop on corners. Gunshots rang out.
Butch Ogden bought a pistol and kept it under his bed; he installed heavy deadbolt locks for the first time. Shera Darlington says she began sitting vigil late into the night protecting her home and once had to chase a crack dealer off her stoop with a baseball bat. Even though the bad element is gone, Shera’s body clock still keeps her up until 3 or 4 a.m.
Triax submitted another rezoning application. To help facilitate matters, the county passed an ordinance that said the new owner would have to provide two years of rent subsidies for uprooted residents.
This time, Triax tried a different tack with Golden Lantern holdouts, negotiating with the homeowners’ association to pay its roughly 80 members $18,382 each for their trailers if the county agreed to the land-use change. Save for a handful, residents accepted and backed the developer in his efforts to rezone. The county approved it.
But hurdles still remained — the main one being whether Golden Lantern was in a Level 1 or Level 2 hurricane evacuation zone. The County Commission, the Florida Department of Community Affairs and the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council tussled for more than a year over the issue, disputing which flood map would prevail. If the land was deemed Level 1, the developer would only be permitted to build a project with a much lower population density, calling its feasibility into question.
Even with this snag, and with an escape clause, Triax went ahead and purchased the acreage on Oct. 30, 2006. Two days later, the company issued eviction notices to residents, which the homeowners’ suit contends was a breach of Triax’s agreement to buy the trailers.
Why did Kevin Voss consummate the purchase of a property whose rezoning had not been fully completed? And why did he agree to pay homeowners a tidy price for their trailers and then quickly move to evict them?
In a deposition taken on Nov. 4, 2007, Voss said that Pinellas County “basically totally screwed up our zoning.” He contended that he was caught up in red tape generated by the various government agencies involved, and was upset when his zoning application was denied and he had to reapply. In his mind, that voided the buyout deal with the homeowners. He explained that he and his partner had invested two and a half years and between $650,000 and $800,000 in the deal and were not willing to just walk away.
The residents’ lawsuit offers another explanation: profits.
According to a claim in the suit, Triax was worried that, “under the current economic conditions,” paying the agreed-upon price for the trailers wouldn’t generate the kind of profits the company had been hoping for.
Agencies eventually decided that Golden Lantern was in a Level 1 evacuation zone. Last August, the county commissioners voted unanimously to overturn their original approval of the land-use change. Before doing that, though, they apologized profusely to distraught residents of Golden Lantern.
A lot of factors have fueled the Golden Lantern dispute, but the core issue is that the residents have no realistic housing alternatives. None of the holdouts I talked to expressed a burning desire to remain in the park. They are willing to leave but need a viable place to move. And they insist upon being treated fairly.
“What infuriates me is that we have no right to do these things on the backs of the poorest people,” Magri says. “We cannot make the poorest people in our community support developers and increase taxes for local government by selling away their rights. There is plenty of money to go around for developers and park owners and homeowners to end up being treated fairly. You take their property, you ought to pay for it.”
It’s been known to happen.
Hometown America, a Chicago-based company that owns and operates manufactured-home communities in 19 states, acquired the Shady Lane mobile home park in Largo as part of a large portfolio of properties. When Hometown America deemed Shady Lane too obsolete for company standards, it agreed to sell it to a developer that planned to change the use.
Tasked with closing the community, Hometown America offered each of the 100 or so Shady Lane homeowners fair market value for their trailers and negotiated with them if there was a disagreement. The company paid out a reported $6,000 to $20,000 per unit.
The process went smoothly. Besides the belief that offering fair value was the right thing to do, Hometown America has concluded that, all told, it made economic sense as well. “We felt that the direction we chose to take was going to be both the fairest and involve the least amount of conflict,” says Greg O’Berry, Hometown America’s president and chief operating officer. “At the end of the day, we didn’t waste the money on lawyers and courts. Instead, the money went to the residents.”
Road Houses: A brief history of mobile home living.
This article appears in Feb 20-26, 2008.
