Mobile Home Park Residents Rally Against the Domino Effect

By Iracema Navarro, Reporter

On July 15, the residents of Imperial Avalon Mobile Estates and their supporters rallied in front of Carson City Hall to protest the announced closure of the facility, which would leave more than 445 residents to fend for themselves in the wilds of an unaffordable housing market.

Three more mobile home parks are slated for closure after the Imperial Avalon Mobile Estates, bringing worry and uncertainty to the city’s remaining park residents.

Most residents of the mobile home park live on fixed incomes, are senior citizens, veterans and disabled people who had expected to live their golden years in the parks.

Eighteen-year Imperial Avalon resident, Peggy Apodaca, warned other Carsonites at the Thursday afternoon rally: “It can happen to you if you have a mobile home.” 

The dark side of Carson’s new developments have been discovered, but residents of mobile home parks are still looking for a fair shake.

Some residents have taken one of three offers made by the city from three options: Option A would help residents relocate to another park, option B would give owners a lump sum of money, and option C would relocate residents to interim housing and guarantee an occupancy at a Faring Capital development, the new owner of the Imperial Avalon Mobile Estates.

For the time being, Apodaca is going with her own option — waiting it out and to see what really is going to happen.

“They were supposed to give us interim housing, but they can’t find any interim housing because it’s closed up,” Apodaca said. 

Apodaca noted that the problem is rooted in supply and demand. She said she looked online and the cheapest rent she found was $2,250, not including utilities. She didn’t mention its location or its number of bedrooms. 

“I pay $412 for my particular space and they’re all about the same, give or take $20,” Apodaca said.

Apodaca observed that some mobile home dwellers took one of the three options offering money. For others, the park owners are allowing residents to rent the mobile home space for around $2,000 or so. Apodaca said the park owner is now making more money renting these spaces at the mobile home park.

“They [park owner] tried to call me the other day,” Apodaca said. “I didn’t even pick up my phone, because I thought, ‘Oh, they’re going to just try to intimidate me and get me to go in there and put my house in escrow.’”

Marcela Steiman and her husband Jeff Steiman, the new Imperial Avalon Mobile Estates Homeowner Association president, bought their home in 2015 and are worried about the mortgage they are continuing to pay.

“Rents are too high, we can’t afford the rent of over $2,000. I can’t afford that,” Marcela said. “If we can’t move the mobile homes, we can’t buy anything with the money that they’re giving us. It’s not good enough for a down payment.”  

In a moment of cynical reflection of both the city and the park’s developer, Faring Capital, Marcela said greedy people don’t care about seniors and there’s no compassion.

“What we want is the same-size house —three bedrooms or two bedrooms ­—whatever you have,” Marcela said. “To get the same. That’s all we’re asking for.”

Having a newer home than others, Marcela’s 2015 mobile home cannot find a space in Carson or Torrance; if space could be found, the rent would be triple. 

Residents in the three mobile home parks of Park Avalon Mobile Estates, Park Granada Trailer Lodge Mobile and Rancho Dominguez Mobile Estates are witnessing the same process.

“Join the fight, join the fight because it’s coming to them,” Marcela Steiman said.

Eddie Almeida moved back in with his 72-year-old mother after his father passed away to care for her in the Rancho Dominguez Mobile Estates park. He joined the protesters on that hot Thursday afternoon demanding affordable housing. “I just want what’s fair,” Almeida said. “I want to make sure that the seniors are taken care of because we’re not quite sure what they’re going to offer us yet.”

Almeida said when it first started, developers were offering less than what the park residents actually put down as a down payment — $18,000 to $20,000 for a mobile home with a purchasing price of $97,000.
“We’re not going to be able to afford anything around here,” Almeida said. “We’re going to have to live further away from our families and everything and it’s stressful just having to move.”

 The 81-space park community mobile home park was developed in 1962, before Carson was incorporated. The mobile homes are at least 20 years old and contain one to three bedrooms. More than half of the 81 mobile homes are owner occupied with a quarter of them being tenant occupied. The park owned by Carter-Spencer Enterprises, LLC submitted the application in 2019 to close the park, eight years after the LLC was registered to the state of California.

 “They’ve been trying to shut us down for a lot of years,” Almeida said. “They scare the people. It’s like a scare tactic to use or is going to get shut down. ‘You guys can’t sell; you guys can’t rent, but we’ll buy it from you,’” Almeida said. “Now it’s to the point where all these other parts are getting shut down and it’s only obvious that not only is it continued but they’re trying to shut down all the low-income housing.”

 On July 15, the city council held a public hearing on the relocation impact report for the Rancho Dominguez Hills Estates closure.

For new Imperial Avalon Homeowner Association president, Jeff Steiman, the fight now is to have a formal process to allow residents time to make a plan.

They are taking the lives of all the people that lived in that park, Jeff said. Most of the people who live in that park are in their 80s. They spent at least the last two decades there. So their lives are there. For their lives to go on, they’re going to have to move to Arizona or even with their kids or become a ward of the state. Public run housing is not nice, Jeff said.

Carson’s mayor pro tem Jim Dear attended the rally and spoke with the residents. Cognizant that the city’s efforts to protect mobile home residents was coming up short, Dear explained, “The idea behind that is that it will be more neutral and the residents would be more trusting and get reliable, accurate, unbiased information. That’s the idea behind it. Some of the residents have complained that it’s not working out the way they had hoped,”

Dear says he is pushing to create a mobile home park zone in Carson so that anyone who wants to buy a park with the intention of closing it (which has been happening over the years) would have to apply for a zone change with the city. This would make it more difficult for developers to flip the mobile home parks. 

“This will help future crises because this is going to be repeated,” Dear said. “I’m a history teacher. [I know] history [will] repeat itself if we don’t fix it.”