Buena Vista residents tout cleaner, safer park months after its sale

City’s last mobile home community set to be completely redesigned in next two years

PALO ALTO » These days, Buena Vista Mobile Home Park residents no longer wake up each morning worrying whether they’ll be evicted before the day is through.

And, they no longer have to deal with so much blight, vandalism and broken equipment.

Once a place where nonresidents dumped old furniture and other large trash items, Palo Alto’s last mobile home park is finally cleaned up.

Buena Vista park, which is home to roughly 400 mostly low-income and mostly Latino residents, was saved last September when the Santa Clara County Housing Authority, the city of Palo Alto and Santa Clara County contributed $40 million to purchase the 4.5-acre site from the Jisser family. The Housing Authority owns the site and The Caritas Corp., a nonprofit that operates more than 20 mobile home parks in California, manages it.

After buying the mobile home park, the agency added speed bumps to deal with speeders, repaired common bathrooms, showers and a laundry room that were no longer in service because they had been vandalized or used by transients to sleep. And for the first time, security guards now monitor the park overnight and the resident association is creating rules for the park.

Erika Escalante, president of the Buena Vista Residents Association, said the Jissers stopped maintaining the site well before they announced they were going to sell the park in 2012.

“The laundry room wasn’t getting maintenance or the bathrooms and showers,” said Escalante, 32, who has been a resident since she was 11. “People were breaking in, breaking doors.”

Escalante helped spearhead the movement to save the park back in 2012, which began at a City Council meeting where a number of residents spoke about their plight just a few days after the announcement of the sale. Reluctant to get involved at first because she’s shy, she became instrumental in the effort, acting as a translator for residents who couldn’t speak English and later voted in as first president when the residents association was formed in 2014.

“I grew a lot, I learned a lot through this process,” she said.

Winter Dellenbach, a nearby resident who formed the Friends of Buena Vista, was at that council meeting and helped residents hire an attorney. She said she joined the effort simply because they were her neighbors and it would have been a disaster for the city to displace so many low-income families. The park dates back to the 1920s when it was opened as a tourist camp.

“It was a miracle that it was saved because mobile home parks are rarely saved, particularly in this land market because they’re being sold hand over fist because of land value,” Dellenbach said.

County Supervisor Joe Simitian, who joined the effort to save the park in 2015, said it’s a testament to what can be done when a community comes together.

“The takeaway for me is, if you can partner with others, there’s almost no limit to what you can do,” Simitian said.

He said he is hopeful that rents for the lowestincome families could actually come down after the Housing Authority completes an overhaul of the park, which is estimated to cost between $10 million and $20 million.

Renting space at the park is relatively affordable at an average of $1,200 a month, with a maximum of $1,400, according to association member Maria Martinez. Rents will remain frozen until the redesign and a clubhouse is completed and new sewer and electric lines are installed. Between 2012 and when the park changed ownership, rents had been going up by 9 percent each year.

The new park design, which Housing Authority Executive Director Katherine Harasz estimates will take another year to finalize, involves demolishing all current mobile homes and studio units, purchasing mobile homes owned by families, and bringing in new mobile homes. Their goal is to keep costs affordable.

The Housing Authority paid for improvements to many mobile homes that were experiencing health and safety issues.

The biggest challenge ahead will be finding space off site to move some families off-site while the park is being rebuilt in phases, which could take another year once the city approves the plans.

Escalante and others are crossing their fingers that there will be enough space in the new design for a playground and maybe even a swimming pool.

“It would be great to have a pool,” she said.