The mobile home owners who previously toted signs proclaiming “STOP THE GREED” and “HUMANITY YES!! EVICTION NO!!” to a City Council meeting last June are planning to protest again tonight.
City officials will meet tonight to discuss the environmental impacts of a developer’s plans to turn the land currently used for the Mission Valley mobile home park into a site for about 445 apartments. Archstone-Smith, that developer, purchased the land under the mobile homes last February.
And the mobile home park owners have promised to show up in force to protest for a half hour before the 6 p.m. meeting at the Church of the Nazarene in Mission Valley. “We cannot let corporate greed rob San Diego’s senior citizens and low-income families of this critically needed option of affordable housing,” the park’s HOA chief, Homer Barrs, said in a press release.
Here’s some background from the story I wrote last year about the issue:
“Our park is more than just a bunch of homes situated together; we are a family,” said Homer Barrs, the community chief who has organized a homeowners association for the park and has filed a lawsuit against the former owner. Barrs said the deal was a secret sale that circumvented the residents’ right to purchase the land before it was sold.
The residents had figured out a way to purchase the land and become its collective owners. They’d offered to buy it several times since 2005 from Cal-Am, the property manager for the Carolyn Artis Trust that owned the land. Even as recently as last fall, the previous owners assured them the property was not, and would not be, for sale, Barrs said.
The park’s 170 residents pay about $725 in rent for the spaces where their manufactured homes sit. Many of them have paid about $100,000 for the homes they inhabit. But the homes are worth far less than that removed from the spots where they now sit. And even if they can find another place that will take their “coach,” as the residents refer to the manufactured homes, this park isn’t alone in its situation.