End Gate Trailer Park was not the sort of place you'd live if you had a choice. It was a squalid dump with raw sewage and dilapidated trailers, some of which didn't even have electricity or water.But the people who lived there didn't have many choices. Some had been forced to move twice in the past two years after parks they were living in were sold and closed. But as ugly and dirty as it was, End Gate was their home. "We wasn't living the best," says 69-year-old Emory Solomon, "but we was comfortable."
There are several versions of what happened after Mayor Pam Iorio visited the park on Sept. 11, 2003, and, horrified by the conditions, gave orders to close it down.
The five former residents I spoke with say they were treated disrespectfully by code enforcement officers, given conflicting information, had their water and power turned off even though they had paid their bills, had their trailers destroyed by movers and their possessions stolen by looters, and now live in conditions no better than the ones they left.
Park owner Wilbur Gifford says he was working with code enforcement to correct problems, and that the city made sanitation problems worse by running over and breaking sewer tanks, releasing raw sewage onto the property. He says he received violation notices with deadlines that had already passed. He has appealed the citations he received and will likely end up suing the city.
Code enforcement officials say they treated everyone respectfully, often working on their own time and at their own expense to help ease the burdens of moving and remedy existing health and safety hazards.
Solomon, a retired masonry contractor, scrapes by on $500 a month plus $35 in food stamps. He owns his trailer and was paying $210 a month in lot rent at End Gate. That included the cost of parking his pontoon boat and RV and keeping his six pit bulls.
He says his electricity and water were turned off without warning, and he was told to vacate his home in 24 hours or face arrest. After being told he would receive $500 for moving expenses, Solomon got quotes ranging from $1,500 to $2,500 to move his trailer. Instead, the city found contractors to move the trailers and paid his first month's rent in another park.
Solomon says the contractors didn't disconnect water and sewer pipes before moving the trailers. At least one was completely destroyed and others were badly damaged. The floor was torn out of Solomon's bathroom, walls were cracked, the seal was broken, doors no longer close properly, his water heater was damaged, and he was without water and electricity for a month after moving as a result of the damage. Contractors also did not properly set up trailers on their new sites, says Solomon, leaving owners to pay an additional $200 to get them leveled and just live with the rest of the damage.
Residents said the city promised to patrol the property while they moved their possessions. Instead, it was left largely unattended, and looters stole pretty much everything that wasn't nailed down — and some stuff that was. Among the list of possessions stolen: televisions, kitchen appliances, tools, lawnmowers, food and furniture. Looters even stripped the aluminum from the exteriors of the trailers.
Seven months after its closing, End Gate is strewn with trash and stripped trailer carcasses. Neither Gifford nor the city is cleaning up the eyesore.
Not one of the former residents I spoke with said they were better off now than before the city moved them.
Solomon pays $300 a month to rent his new lot at Fort Brooke — a nearly 50 percent increase — and can't park his boat or RV on the property without paying additional fees.
Herman Jackson Jr. still does not have electricity, water or sewer. His 15-year-old son is living with his minister until Jackson gets those basic services.
Still, Fort Brooke looks neat and clean. The trailers are freshly painted with tidy flower beds, and the grounds are trash-free.
"Yeah, they made it look better on the outside," says Solomon. "But inside it's no different."
I did see an extension cord leading from one trailer to another, indicating that people here may be sharing electricity just as they did at End Gate. Solomon showed me where raw sewage runs from an adjacent trailer, just a few feet from a vegetable garden. The smell is so bad at night and in the morning he has to stay in his trailer with the door shut.
But the hurt goes deeper than loss of money and property, which are scarce enough for Solomon. It goes deeper than having to live without water and electricity for months. Deeper even than the loss of his brother who died in a hospital, unable to return to a home that no longer existed after his trailer was torn in two by movers. It's the loss of choice that galls him most. "It was the way we was forced," he says. "I've been a taxpayer all my life, and that's the way they treated me."
The code enforcement staffers I spoke with seemed genuinely concerned with the plight of the End Gate people and disturbed by allegations of mistreatment. "We went the extra mile for these people," says Diversion Services Coordinator Barbara Bunting, adding that staff was on site every day and often on their days off to help residents find new homes, solve logistical problems, fill out paperwork, obtain needed services and even personally help people move. "No one was ever told they had to leave in 24 hours — and they were never threatened with arrest."
As for moving the trailers, "We killed ourselves trying to find someone to move them," says Bunting. "We found someone to do it for $250 … these guys basically donated part of the cost." She says some trailers were already in such bad shape that owners were told they might not survive the move, but they opted to try anyway. Movers told owners at least twice, says Bunting, that they must disconnect pipes themselves, and that movers assumed it was done when they arrived.
Bunting says some people received more than $500 in moving assistance. Jackson got $500 for his first move and another $500 when he was evicted and had to move again. She says the city, not the owners, paid $250 to level the trailers and that Code Enforcement Officer Mike Williams used his own money to buy a $75 jack and helped do the work on his own time.
For every complaint I heard — and there are far too many to specify here — code enforcement had a plausible explanation of the circumstances surrounding the problem and measures they took to ease the suffering. "It's amazing how you try so hard to help someone and they slam you for it," says Bunting, clearly hurt by residents' complaints.
Code Enforcement Manager Bill Doherty says he's proud of how hard his staff worked to relocate the residents. He faults the owners of the property, Ferida Mohammed and Wilbur Gifford, with letting the property become unsanitary and unsafe. "I've been with the city 18 years, and this was right up there with the worst I've seen." He says Gifford made no repairs at all and that the place deteriorated immensely after he took possession of it. "He just took the [rent] money and let the place get worse." It should be noted, however, that Gifford owned the property only one month before code enforcement effectively closed the place down and started demolishing trailers, cutting off most of his income, and adding to the general mess. As for tardy notices, Doherty says Gifford neglected to pick up his certified mail on time and often dodged inspectors on site.
When asked why code enforcement allowed conditions to get so bad, Doherty cites the department's massive workload: 28,700 new cases per year. He stops short of blaming previous administrations for a shortage of support but does credit Iorio with beefing up department resources. He expects to have 34,000 new cases next year with a staff of 35 inspectors, four supervisors and 12 to 15 support staffers.
The people I spoke with seemed genuinely to care and to have worked hard to ease the trauma and hardship of the largest emergency code enforcement operation in their history.
Still, I'm troubled by what happened at End Gate. People suffer when their choices are removed, when they are moved from their homes against their will, and when their community is obliterated — no matter how awful it may look to someone else. No matter how kindly it's done or how well intentioned the reasons, they will feel angry, powerless and frustrated — not grateful. If we harm people in the name of helping them, then all we're really doing is trying to make ourselves feel better about their plight.
The city has created a task force to learn from what happened at End Gate. Let's hope they pay attention to how destructive displacement can be to people's lives and sense of well being, no matter how well it's done. Let's hope they find ways to help people truly improve their living conditions without removing their choice and destroying their homes.
Otherwise, we're just making things look better on the outside, but the inside doesn't change.
Contact Contributing Editor Susan F. Edwards at susan.edwards15@verizon.net.
This article appears in Apr 22-28, 2004.