Victory for mobile home residents, developer
They spent hundreds of hours pouring over legal documents, entire campaign seasons lobbying for candidates who promised to back their cause, and more than seven years pursuing every avenue they could to hold their community together.
For the 150 or so current or former residents of the Winchester Ranch Senior Mobile Home Park, the past seven years have been a constant state of stress, anxiety and uncertainty. At least 32 of the park’s aging residents have died since word first spread in 2013 that the park could soon close.
But this week, the community members are finally breathing a slight sigh of relief.
Culminating years of continuous disputes and extensive negotiations, city leaders have approved a plan that will allow the residents of the senior mobile
home park to stay on the property even though their homes will soon be razed to make room for nearly 700 luxury housing units.
“There were a lot of compromises and difficult conversations that needed to take place,” Vice Mayor Chappie Jones, whose district includes the park, said after Tuesday’s City Council meeting. “People on both sides of the table had to be able to give and take. But they were willing to do it and it’s very heartening that everyone was able to come together.”
The council’s decision gives the developer, Pulte Homes, the green light to begin construction, forcing San Jose’s first mobile home park to shutter because of redevelopment plans. But it also offers park residents — most of whom are retired teachers and public workers in their 70s to 90s — the assurance that they will be able to live the rest of their lives in the same place they’ve grown accustomed to.
Even so, the project’s approval marks the latest example of how the Bay Area’s skyrocketing rents and limited housing supply have threatened the viability of mobile home parks, one of the last bastions of affordable housing in the region.
But unlike when the residents first heard about the park’s potential closure, the council’s final approval of the redevelopment proposal was met with a sense of celebration.
“This is a win for all of us,” said Mari Jo Pokriots, a retired educator who has lived in the park since it first opened in the late ’70s. “Pulte Homes has given us the ability to remain here in San Jose and keep our community together and that’s the basic takeaway.”
The mobile home community, which is reserved for seniors residents who are 55 years of age or older, sits on a valuable plot of land within the Santana Row/Valley Fair Urban Village, about a half-mile from the bustling, ever-expanding Santana Row and Westfield Valley Fair malls and adjacent to the Winchester Mystery House.
When the park was built more than three decades ago, the idea for Santana Row had yet to be conceived. But as more businesses set up shop and developers’ interest in the area grew, the value of the mobile home property — along with land values across the Bay Area — skyrocketed.
After watching the property value grow exponentially, the Arioto family, which had owned the property in West San Jose for nearly 90 years, agreed to sell the mobile home park to Pulte Homes in 2015.
Under the project plans, Pulte Homes will build a 2-acre public park and 687 units of housing — a sevenstory apartment building with 367 units, 19 fourstory condominium buildings and 11 rowhouses — on a 15.7-acre site in the heart of San Jose’s retail district.
The development — located at 555 S. Winchester Blvd. — will require demolishing the 111 homes in the Winchester Ranch Mobile Home Park.
But a landmark agreement reached in June 2019, gave the mobile home residents — represented by the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley — the opportunity to move into new, on-site condominiums at their same rental rates without the fear of facing rent increases of more than 3% a year.
The developer has set aside 60 rental condominium units on the site that are clustered together so that the mobile home residents will be able to keep their community intact. Those who have sought other housing options — such as buying a home elsewhere or moving into an assisted living facility — were provided with a relocation package that included moving costs, a years worth of rent subsidy and a fair payment for their mobile home.
“Closing a mobile home park is something that you all should take seriously and scrutinize,” Nadia
Aziz, directing attorney of the Law Foundation Silicon Valley, told the council Tuesday. “But I think tonight, we should acknowledge that this is a success and a win for our community.
“We are going to not only keep a community together, but we are building more housing.”
Residents first heard that the property owners were looking to sell the park through happenstance in March of 2013. They quickly began mobilizing.
Within a couple of weeks of hearing the news, the residents founded the Winchester Ranch Senior Homeowners Association, explored the viability of buying the park themselves, created videos to inform the public of their situation and spoke with any elected official that would lend them their ears.
“We looked up cases across the state until frankly, we knew more about it than the city,” Kent Greathouse, 81, a former president of the Winchester Ranch Senior Homeowners Association, said Tuesday after the meeting. “Then we politicized the whole thing because we understood that’s how decisions like these are made.”
By the end of 2013, the homeowners association had enlisted the help of the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, which ultimately brokered the displacement deal between the residents and the developer that went above and beyond city and state requirements.
Due to the residents’ lobbying efforts, the city council in 2016 put a moratorium on mobile home park conversions until it could update a conversion ordinance that had been on the books since 1986 that had never been used. The ordinance made it much more cumbersome for property owners to redevelop their mobile home parks, requires that council approve mobile home park closures and strengthened tenant protections, including establishing relocation benefit packages and giving residents a fair price for their homes.
Vice Mayor Jones said Tuesday that the advocacy efforts launched by the Winchester Ranch residents were unlike anything he had seen during his time on the council. In fact, he said, the residents could “write a textbook” on how to advocate for themselves.
Although the residents are happy to have passed a major hurdle, they are now focused on what comes next: Securing transitional housing promised by the developer during the construction phase, obtaining a fair appraisal for their mobile home from the developer and deciding what kind of unit they will move into once the project is complete.
The news about Winchester mobile home park comes just a week after more than 1,600 residents of Westwinds of North San Jose — the largest mobile home park in the city and fourth-largest in the state — received notices that they could be displaced by August 2022. There is no indication at this time that the owners of Westwinds are looking to redevelop the property, but the city is taking preemptive measures to rezone the land to a mobile home park designation and trying to figure out more details surrounding the eviction notices.
Winchester residents say they feel for the other 30,000 residents living in the 59 mobile home parks scattered across San Jose, including Westwinds, who could eventually lose their homes to redevelopment as well.
“I know it sounds silly, but I pray for them,” said Brian Darby, a special education teacher in Santa Clara who has lived in the Winchester Ranch Mobile Home Park for more than 25 years. “I feel their grief because it’s very scary. You don’t know if you’re going to be on the street or not and no one should have to go through that.”
Pulte Homes plans to begin construction on the nearly 700-unit Winchester Ranch housing development later this year with hopes to complete the project by the end of 2024.