When chief executives of any municipality speak on the state of their city, it is the successes and the victories they lead with. If there are more challenges and losses, then they make sure to reframe their comments to reframe those challenges and losses in more optimistic terms, like “There’s no place to go but up!”
Throughout the March 21, State of the City address, Mayor Davis-Holmes surrounded herself and by extension the city, with past, present, and future titans of Carson’s economic destiny including Watson Land Company, Dignity Health Sports Park, Cal State Dominguez Hills, and Faring Capital.
The housing development portion of Mayor Davis-Holmes’ remarks came toward the end of the State of the City, punctuated by the video remarks of Faring Capital CEO, Jason Illoulian, who discussed briefly what his company has done for the city over the past 15 years.
His remarks, however, did not include the fact that the Imperial Avalon Mobile Estates Mobilehome Park was officially closed on March 15 ― four months after a superior court judge ordered both sides to come up with a plan to get the remaining 373 residents at the mobile home park into living situations comparable to the promises made them when they chose Option C.
Park resident and president of the Imperial Avalon Mobile Estates HOA, Jeff Steinman, told Random Lengths News that the remaining elderly, fixed-income residents moved in with their adult children while others were displaced into hotels.
Steinman noted that one resident in her 90s didn’t have anywhere to go and wound up in a hotel.
Steinman reported that a bunch of Imperial Avalon Estates residents and their advocates met with the special master, a representative from the legal parent of Faring Capital. In the end, most of the remaining residents got between $4,500 and $10,000, with most of them getting something closer to $4,500.
Steinman charged that the interim housing part of Option C was written to fail.
To recap, the city gave the residents three options in its negotiated deal:
Option A, residents would be given relocation assistance and fees to move to another park. Very few residents would be able to move due to the declining number of parks in the first place and very few spots in those parks remain. Additionally, most parks won’t allow mobile homes older than five years old. Only 10 of the 203 mobile homes were eligible to be relocated within 50 miles.
Option B, residents would be given a lump sum payment that would include the appraised on-site value of the mobile home in exchange for the mobile home title without any liens attached. If a resident still has a mortgage, Faring Capital would use that lump sum to pay off that mortgage or lien and the resident would get whatever is left, plus relocation costs.
Option C applied to residents whose households qualify as extremely low-income, very low-income, or low-income and want to relocate to an available rental unit owned by an affiliate of Faring Capital. The resident would receive 30% of the appraised on-site value of the mobile home in exchange for the mobile home title, lien-free. In addition, the resident would receive a guaranteed right to a tenancy at a Faring Capital-affiliated development for 10 years at affordable housing rent levels, consistent with the resident’s income qualifications based on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Most residents chose options B or C.
“[Option C] was never going to be able to help people survive, however long it was going to take them to build these new places,” Steinman said. “So the only thing that happened is that they got what they wanted at very low prices, at the offers they made.”
Councilmember Dear admits that there’s lots of confusion surrounding Option C to the detriment of the residents.
In an email, Dear explained that Option C, intended by him when he made the original motion, was to be a lifeline to the most disadvantaged residents, but it never materialized as it was intended.
“Faring Capital company, the new owner of the Imperial Avalon MHP, was loudly complaining that that option was going to cost them $7 million or more just because we voted to adopt the “Relocation agreement” with the city that included that Option C,” Dear explained.
“My original motion was to provide a twenty-five year rental subsidy. The Planning Commission recommended only a ten-year subsidy, whereas the displaced park residents would be able to live in a Faring company-associated market rate apartment with the same number of bedrooms as their mobilehome coach, and pay the same monthly rent there that they pay for their rental space at Imperial Avalon MHP.”
“His logic,” Dear explained, “was that the average age of the soon-to-be evicted residents was about seventy-five to eighty years old. They would have some sense of security for the future if they took that option.”
Councilman Jim Dear noted that when you look at the transaction on a financial level, because coaches in Imperial Avalon have substantially more value compared to MHPs outside of Carson in a non-rent-stabilized city, it means there is a substantial transfer of wealth from the owners of the 225 homes to the MHP owner.
“That trade-off seemed to be the best option for many at the time,” Councilman Dear said.
“The true intent of the city legislation (my motion) was to protect the most disadvantaged from financial and emotional disaster. Somehow over time, the process and the implementation of the council direction became convoluted by the responsible parties.”
Councilman Dear said he didn’t know how it happened.
Some of the displaced residents found living arrangements at great distances from Carson, away from their friends and their medical and social support network, some died (at least one, a man in his nineties, committed suicide, explaining he was ruined and hope for his future was lost by the abrupt displacement from his home of many years), others have temporary living arrangements.
Steinman recounted how he and another resident were told by City Attorney Sunny Soltani in 2020 not to worry about it and to just fill out the paperwork.
“The city’s got your back. We will make you whole,” Steinman recalled Soltani telling him. Then sometime later, he saw a video of Mayor Davis-Holmes on a stage at a Cal State Dominguez workshop a year and a half later, “She points to the city council and says, ‘they know they’re not going to be able to make you whole.’
“They were arrogant about it,” Steinman said. “They knew they were going to get it. I hate to use the term “rigged” but they must have planned it to bring it off the way they did.”
Steinman said he showed the video to the California Department of Justice but was told the city didn’t break any laws.
“Is this the kind of stuff you want going on in your city?” Steinman asked. “If you don’t, you got to get out and vote and make sure that she and [Councilman] Jawan Hilton are not re-elected.”
To add insult to injury, Faring filed an Anti-SLAPP suit against the Imperial Avalon Estates HOA, set to be heard yesterday April 3.
Just before that Faring Capital filed an Anti-SLAPP suit. A SLAPP suit is something that’s filed against groups, essentially protesters. Let’s suppose the city was doing something and we gathered in a lawful assembly to protest what they were doing. What the city sometimes does is file a SLAPP suit, a sort of gag order, intended to shut up the protesters. An anti-SLAPP suit is when the protesters come back and say, “You know, what we’re saying is free speech so you can’t tell us to shut up.”
“Faring,” Steinman argued, “is the one that is lying. They filed an anti-SLAPP suit against us which would essentially make their lies [examples of] free speech and therefore not something that could be sued for. So they use the law completely as it was never designed to be used.”
For the Mayor’s part, in a nod to Carson’s remaining mobile home park residents, she announced the city council’s approval to create a Mobile Home Park Overlay District. Going forward, owners of mobile home parks must now seek a zoning change for redevelopment and provide comparable and affordable homes.
The resolution is too little too late for the Imperial Avalon Estates Mobilehome park residents, but Carson’s future is looking so bright for the rest of the city’s Mobilehome-park residents that it burns.