U.S. families fight eviction as mobile home parks disappear
MANASSAS, Va. — Nightfall at East End Mobile Home Park means dinner cooking in renovated kitchens, children staring at homework or television, parents returning from jobs that pay hourly wages.
Outside, crumbling underground pipes leak sewage in some spots and swallow up groundwater in others, costing the city of Manassas tens of thousands of dollars a year at the wastewater treatment plant and jeopardizing the existence of this community, one of a decreasing number of mobile home parks across the country.
Nearly a year ago, city officials agreed to purchase the land and shut down the trailer park, having concluded there was no feasible way to fix the privately owned sewer system.
But the mostly Latino residents are fighting to remain. They say they can’t move their trailers elsewhere or afford traditional homes with comparable space in the pricey Washington region, where about 1 in 5 renter households spends at least half its income on rent, according to 2015 census data.
Mobile homes are vanishing even as the cost of living in major metropolitan areas creeps steadily upward. In the early 2000s, there were 8 million manufactured homes in the country. Today, there are about 6.3 million, according to census estimates. The disappearances come in clusters.
In Richmond, Va., 24 families were forced out after a 2014 housing code-violation sweep, prompting a federal discrimination lawsuit that resulted in new policies geared toward protecting mobile home communities. In Palo Alto, Calif., nearly 400 mobile home residents are fighting to keep the city from shutting down their park to make way for condos and apartments.
“We see these cases every week,” said Rick Robinson, general counsel of the Manufactured Housing Institute, which has launched a task force to combat what it believes are local government efforts to regulate trailer parks out of existence.
Many East End families saved up money to buy their trailers while sharing cramped space in overcrowded houses and apartments. Selfo Sosa, a leader in the fight to stop the sale of the park, purchased his four-bedroom trailer for $17,000 five years ago, after crowding his family of six into a two-bedroom unit in a nearby trailer park.
“None of us can afford a house anywhere else in this area,” said Sosa, a construction worker originally from Mexico who has organized community cleanups in a effort to win the favor of local officials. “We are all poor. … The cost of living is too high.”
Mobile homes began as symbols of luxury, according to the Affordable Housing Institute. In the 1920s, families riding the postwar economic boom hauled what were then known as “travel trailers” on camping trips. During the Great Depression, thousands were used as permanent housing, clustered in what came to be known as “trailer parks.”
The first true mobile home was a 22-foot-long trailer that included a kitchen and bathroom, produced by oil tycoon J. Paul Getty’s Spartan Aircraft Co. for workers at defense plants, coal mines and steel mills during World War II. The innovation drew disdain from some local officials, who relegated mobile home parks to mostly isolated areas on the outskirts of town.
John Clarke, a bail bondsman in Manassas, bought East End park in 1961. He left the property to his daughter, Helen Loretta Clarke, who turned over responsibility for it to her attorney, Timothy Cope, in 2005, as her health declined. At some point, said Oren Rose, a resident since 1975, “they started to let things slide.”
The pipes flooded raw sewage after rainstorms, leaving a strong odor and attracting the attention of city officials. The porous lines also allowed up to 200,000 gallons of rainwater a day to drain toward the Upper Occocoquan water treatment plant in nearby Chantilly, eating up capacity that officials say will be needed for new development.
The city spent six years trying to force Cope to fix the system. Then, in 2015, the city offered to buy the land, contingent on the residents being evicted.
Since receiving their eviction notices in August, the East End residents have been on a rollercoaster ride of hope and worry.
Meanwhile, life at the trailer park has continued its routines. Each weekday, around 4 p.m., parents wait for their kids at a school bus stop in a nearby shopping strip parking lot.
Among them is Evelin Zavala, a single mother of two who works as a school custodian.
She has spent $15,000 to fix the roof, floor and other parts of the dilapidated single-wide trailer she bought for $11,000 in 2011. Before that, the family lived in a single room about five miles away.
“We can’t go back to renting a room,” Zavala said one recent day, after ushering 6-year-old Brandon and 13-year-old Katherinne home from the bus stop. “I’m afraid this is going to turn out well for the owner. But not so well for us.”