Displaced from home

BAYVIEW, Idaho – In her empty living room, Barbara Weekly reminisced about how 44 Christmas carolers once squeezed into her modest mobile home.

“We were wall-to-wall, everybody holding a bowl of soup, if you can imagine,” said Weekly. The hospitable 65-year-old also has fond memories of seating 30 for family dinners, and hosting grandchildren’s sleepovers.

Last week, however, only a vacuum cleaner remained in the once-crowded space. Weekly and her husband, Max, are moving out. View of the Bay Mobile Home Park will close on Sept. 30, 2007. When the 1960s-era trailers are gone, the site will be redeveloped into condominiums with panoramic views of Lake Pend Oreille and the Bitterroots.

The prospect distresses Weekly. “This is so stressful, I’m physically shaking right now,” she said. “These aren’t trailer parks, this is our community.”

Rising land costs are taking a toll on North Idaho’s smaller, older mobile home parks. In a trend facing fast-growing areas of the West, developers are buying up the parks and converting the acreage to more profitable uses.

In Kootenai County, parks have been razed for offices, commercial development, townhouses and parking lots. Eleven parks have closed in the last four years, according to the county assessor’s office. Others, like View of the Bay, lie in the path of development.

The trend alarms affordable housing advocates in a state that’s experienced rapid appreciation in housing costs. In Kootenai County, the average sales price for a home has jumped 50 percent over the past two years, to more than $238,000. Apartment rents are also rising.

Mobile home parks are weighted heavily toward senior citizens and disabled tenants, said Tom Lay, executive director of Neighborhood Housing Services, a Boise nonprofit.

“Typically, they’re of modest means, and the mobile home is the only asset they own,” he said. “Suddenly, you’ve got to move it, and it can cost $10,000.”

In southern Idaho, five families were on the verge of homelessness last month, when a mobile home park closed in Garden City. At the last minute, a state block grant provided emergency funds of up to $90,000 to help the families update their older mobile homes to meet current codes, so they could be moved to other parks. In some cases, the homes weren’t worth moving, so the block grants paid for apartment-rental deposits.

“Certainly, this is an issue we’re going to see more of,” predicted Susie Davidson, community development specialist with the Idaho Department of Commerce.

The Weeklys count themselves among the displaced, not the destitute. The couple ended up buying a home in a Coeur d’Alene subdivision. But not all of the park’s tenants can afford that option, Barbara Weekly said.

Some are still paying off mortgages on mobile homes that are too old, or too fragile, to move, she said.

Weekly and her husband have about $45,000 invested in their 1969 mobile home and a second, smaller trailer that they rented out at the park. They aren’t sure they’ll be able to recover that equity.

“We don’t want to just walk away from it,” Weekly said. The trailers’ age, however, is working against them. Older homes must go through a series of inspections before they can be moved, to make sure they meet health and safety standards.

View of the Bay Mobile Home Park is a prime example of the type of park being converted to other uses. Hayden developer Bob Holland paid just over $1 million for the 36-space park two years ago. The land is too valuable to remain as a trailer park that generates monthly rents of $250 to $300 per space, he said.

“It’s an emotional issue,” Holland acknowledged. However, he said he was frank with tenants two years ago, alerting them that the park would eventually close. Tenants also got a year’s written notice, instead of the six months required by Idaho law. “That’s a gracious scenario that we get no credit for,” Holland said.

View of the Bay has a high proportion of trailers owned by Spokane residents, who use the park as their summer getaway, Holland said. “That’s a little different than displacing people from their primary residence.”

The Weeklys, however, were year-round Bayview residents. Barbara Weekly said she knew she was living on coveted ground. Park residents had tried twice to buy the park, offering $525,000 to a previous owner about five years ago, according to Skip Wilcox, another park tenant.

Vista Bay Mobile Home Park, which Holland also owns, closed earlier this year. Park tenants Gary and Nancy Finley didn’t want to leave. When they got their notice, they went to see an attorney.

“He told us, ‘You’re fighting a battle you’re not going to win,’ ” Nancy Finley said.

The couple ended up selling their trailer, which they valued at $30,000, for $3,500. Their son, who rented a space in the park, received $500 for his. The former Vista Bay property is now being advertised as nine custom home sites, with prices starting at $399,000.

Coeur d’Alene attorney Steve Wetzel has represented about six developers who’ve closed mobile home parks in the past two years, including Holland. He warns each that the publicity surrounding closures can be unflattering, particularly if the developers are perceived as forcing poor, elderly residents out of their homes.

But the parks’ closures have gone quite smoothly, according to Wetzel. Tenants moved voluntarily, without developers having to play the bad guy and remove them through court evictions, he said.

“It’s a very stressful situation for the developers, too. They’re not nearly as hardhearted as the people make them out,” Wetzel said. “We advise them to what the law is… and warn them about how this will look.”

In each closure, the land had become too valuable to continue as a mobile home park, Wetzel said. That was particularly true in Bayview, he said, where waterfront values have skyrocketed.

Housing advocates note that smaller, older mobile home parks are most vulnerable to development pressures. Given the widespread conversion of parks to other uses, states are scrambling for ways to help displaced tenants.

In 2003, Washington state established a fund to assist tenants with moving costs, paying out $7,500 to $12,000 per move. However, nearly 150 park tenants are on the waiting list, representing about $1.1 million worth of payouts.

“Given our current revenue flow, it would take about three years for them to be reimbursed,” said Steve Payne, managing director of the home improvements and preservation unit for Washington state’s Community, Trade and Economic Development Department.

In Nevada, which already has some of the nation’s toughest laws for park closures, housing advocates are lobbying for stronger regulations in fast-growing Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas. Under state law, developers must pay to relocate mobile homes to another park within a 50-mile radius, or pay tenants fair market value for homes that can’t be moved. Clark County commissioners are considering an ordinance that would extend the relocation costs to a 100-mile move, and require a 270-day notice of park closures.

Lou and Audrey Rubertt say they’re resigned to View of the Bay’s eventual closure. Seven years ago, the Spokane couple bought a trailer there, making it their summer getaway. They installed homey wicker furniture on the patio, and hung up wind chimes. When the park closes, they’ll pay someone to cart the turquoise-and-white trailer away.

“It’s been fun, but all good things come to an end,” Lou Rubertt said.

“We live on a fixed income,” he added. “It pretty well prices us out of property around the lake.”