MIDFIELD: ONE YEAR LATER
Evicted residents remain bitter
Rudy Prediger couldn’t bring himself to watch as a city wrecking crew tore down units in the Midfield mobile home park one year ago.
The outspoken resident of the park had lived there for 47 years before bulldozers demolished the homes, bought out by the city for “pennies on the dollar,” Prediger said.
“I’ve got good memories from the place, but that’s the only memory that I’d have if I watched that,” Prediger said of the demolition.
The last of the Midfield homes was knocked down last February after months of frustration and pushback from homeowners, ending in a failed legal action against the city.
Longtime Midfield resident Lori Sperling’s unit was the last one standing. She also stayed away from the park as her home of 14 years was destroyed, though she did watch a few other tenants’ trailers come down.
“That was the most devastating experience I’ve ever had in my entire life, living in there like that,” she said of the community’s battle with the city to keep their property.
“You don’t understand, that was like a civil war; They didn’t use machine guns, they used machines.”
In May of 2014, residents of the 180-lot community awoke to eviction notices taped to their doors and a broken promise of a brand-new mobile home park on city-purchased land.
Residents were offered $10,000 from the city to cover demolition expenses, plus up to $10,000 to cover the cost of moving trailers.
In 2017, lawyer Mathew Farrell was hired by some residents to try to reverse the eviction, but a judge ruled the residents’ equality rights weren’t violated under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Sperling said the legal action never stood a chance. “Those people treated us just so disrespectful, like we were the enemies of the state … that is not how we live in this country, it’s definitely not how we live in Calgary,” she said.
Sperling, who is on disability and deals with post-traumatic stress, now lives in an affordable-housing complex in the northeast.
She said her Midfield trailer should have been “home for life,” but now feels “in prison under someone else’s thumb, again through no wrong action on my part.”
For Jelena McAliden and her husband, Tim, Midfield offered the young couple a chance to become homeowners in an unfavourable market.
The McAlidens bought their mobile home in 2014 and made the move to Midfield only to be greeted by TV cameras and news crews.
It seems move-in day for the McAlidens was also eviction-notice day at Midfield.
“(The city) gave everyone else around us a notice except us, and then the day after they gave us the notice because they ‘didn’t want to ruin our move-in day,’” she said with a sarcastic laugh.
“How considerate, hey?” Nine months pregnant with their first child, Jelena and Tim moved their unit to the Calgary Village mobile home park in the summer of 2017.
McAliden said buying their trailer has been “a curse and a blessing.”
“How are we supposed to get our money back as a young couple with a kid?” she said. “You’re stuck. If we wanted to move, we’d almost have to go bankrupt.”
Some other Midfielders also live in Calgary Village, McAliden said, but added the sense of community and camaraderie didn’t follow the residents to the new park.
Previously located in Coun. Gian-Carlo Carra’s Ward 9, boundary changes after the 2017 municipal election put Midfield in Coun. Druh Farrell’s Ward 7.
Farrell said the city has begun an area redevelopment plan pilot project, which will look at how “not just Midfield, but the inner northwest, and how it all knits together.”
She said the evictions were “a very difficult situation” and came down to “a choice to make on whether we spent tens of millions in repairing the deep utilities or finding new uses for the site.”
Carra couldn’t be reached for comment.
As for Prediger, he now lives in the Chateau Estates Manufactured Home Park in northeast Calgary.
He says his current home is “no different” from the one torn down by the city in Midfield, adding the current market value of his new trailer is $110,000 — a far cry from the $10,000 he was given by the city a year ago.
“They gave everybody $10,000 and it didn’t matter if you had a three-bedroom or a one-bedroom or a two-seater outhouse — everybody got $10,000,” Prediger said.
He said some Chateau Estates residents — including other former Midfielders — have formed a co-operative in case their new park suffers a similar fate to Midfield.
“It boils down to politics and the almighty dollar, but I’m not worried,” Prediger said. “The city knows were organized and we’re going to fight them.”