A decade ago, the tidy Hollywood Park was a pleasant place to live, Johnson said. Its small lots were well-tended. All the trailers bore skirts. The handrails to front steps had paint. The washers and dryers in the clean laundry building worked.
About two years ago, all that changed. These days, abandoned trailers are open to the weather and anyone who wants to kick a few holes in the wall. One such trailer is next door to Johnson's. Mattresses lie on the dirt outside. Across the street, the permanently locked laundry building is a blight.
Just the name - “trailer park” - evokes ugly stereotypes. At best, mobile home parks can be a low-cost way to the dignity of homeownership, experts say. But Johnson's plight exposes the other side of the coin. A mobile home, for an owner who rents a lot in a derelict court, can feel like a noose.
“I've had mine up for sale, but no one wants to buy it,” said Johnson, who works at the nonprofit Western Montana Mental Health Center and waitresses on the weekends for extra money.
She thinks her home itself may be worth $10,000. But nobody has offered her more than $2,000. At that price, she can hardly afford to sell. The cartage and wear on the trailer make mobile homes like hers almost impossible to move.
Missoula's Hollywood Park has been owned by Fred Haruda, a medical doctor living in Lincoln City, Ore., for about the past eight years.
Trailer parks are a solid investment and a good housing option for low-income people, he said. Haruda isn't a hands-on landlord. The Dwelling Place manages Hollywood, yet Haruda visits his parks every few months. When he comes to Missoula, he stays in a home in another of his three Missoula trailer parks. He'd love to develop more.
Haruda likes trailer parks because the overhead is low, compared to an apartment house. Apartment units will easily bring three times the rent of a trailer lot, which is about $265 a month at Hollywood. But 40 percent of the apartment income will go back into maintenance, he said. With a trailer park, his load is light. Haruda provides the utilities and rents out the ground. That's it.
“If someone's faucet leaks, they've got to fix it,” he said. “Trailer parks are very appealing to me for that reason.”
Nationally, the mobile home industry has been mired in a slump for the past three years or so, but it seems to be poised for growth, said Paul Adornato, a New York-based industry analyst with BMO Capital Markets.
One of the bright spots in the industry outlook is the West, where high home prices may spark mobile home sales.
Market penetration in states like Colorado is deep, Adornato said. Nearby states provide more opportunity for growth. That explains why one manufacturer, based in the Midwest, recently built a new plant in Boise, Idaho.
Stuart Doggett of the Helena-based Montana Manufactured Homes and RV Association agreed. Last year, 650 manufactured homes (which include single- and double-wide manufactured mobile homes) came into the state for sale. The Montana numbers are up about 12 percent this year, Doggett said.
Yet one facet of the mobile home housing niche remains ever problematic.
“A lot of communities consider mobile home parks an eyesore. It's the stereotype - trailer trash - something they don't want in their communities as a general prejudice, if you will,” Adornato said.
The prejudice can significantly affect the health of the industry. Adornato tracks laws regarding how parks can be sold and redeveloped, for instance. The worry is that states will try to legislate trailer parks out of existence.
Zoning laws help protect home values. In areas zoned for single-family homes, a developer can't build a shopping mall or a pig farm, for example, but zoning can't make people maintain skirts around their trailers.
Adornato knows of resident associations that have taken control of quality issues in trailer parks.
But that tough-to-define social factor plays a big role, he said.
It sure has played a major role in Johnson's life.
She used to feel safe at Hollywood Park.
It was great when Johnson bought her trailer, she said. She had friends at the court. The rules were strict, and the low rent - $165 a month - allowed her to buy a new truck and pay it off in just a few years. For years, she has lived debt-free, she said. She's proud of that.
Then she began to awaken at night to the sounds of violence. Police officers began to regularly arrest vagrants and drug dealers. The suspects would be back the next day, she said. One woman allegedly beat a man with a set of nunchuks in July, about 20 yards from Johnson's parking space.
“The next day she was back,” Johnson said. “I called the Dwelling Place on her for six months. They never did anything. What is going on here?”
Johnson wrote a letter to the Dwelling Place. She took photos of scenes at the park and showed them to the property manager. Nothing happened.
On Friday, one of the co-owners of the Dwelling Place confirmed the intractable problems at the park and said the problems started when one owner bought more of the trailers at the park and began renting them to just about anyone. Sometimes the renters would trash the trailer, fall behind in rent and then leave in the middle of the night.
Haruda agreed. The management company makes efforts to keep the parks from looking crummy, he said. But Montana laws are cumbersome. It's difficult for the management company to remove abandoned trailers, he said. The process can take from six months to a year. In that time, transients can move in and out.
“It's hard for us to make people fix their trailers up,” he said. It's the same problem in neighborhoods of stick-and-brick, he said.
“Maybe that happens more often in trailer parks because it is low-income housing,” he added.
Johnson doesn't care about the subtleties of the problem; her focus is on the problems and why they haven't been corrected.
Vagrants knocked on her door at night and asked for money. The place depressed and frightened her. She took the photos and copies of the court's tenant policy - which details how trailers must be maintained - to Montana Legal Services and the Renter Center at the University of Montana.
“They just told me to write letters. I already did that,” she said.
It turns out that Johnson's situation is in a confused spot in Montana law. A task force around the state has been drafting legislation to fix the problem, said Klaus Sitte, a lawyer and head of the Montana Legal Services Association who wrote the book “For Rent: The Complete Landlord and Tenant Guide.” The task force includes a lawyer in Sitte's office, as well as Marilyn Foss of the Montana Landlord Association.
“This doesn't affect people who rent a place,” Sitte said. “It only affects people who own their own mobile homes and rent real estate to plunk it on. For those people, the regulations that affect them are scattered.”
Johnson is protected by existing law, Sitte said. Landlords are allowed to adopt or change rules governing trailer courts, but the rules have to meet certain tests. Those tests ask, for instance, whether the proposed change improves or protects the life, safety, convenience and pleasure of the tenants.
The law allows someone in some instances to sue for remedy in small claims court, Sitte said. A lawyer friend of Johnson's wrote letters on her behalf, but found the law wouldn't help.
Next, Johnson took the photos to the Missoula City-County Health Department. An official there sent a notice of violation and order for corrective action to the Dwelling Place.
“They did most of what I asked for in my first letter,” said Tom Barger of the Health Department. His letter was dated Sept. 1, 2006.
But last week, it was clear that every one of his violations remained easily visible to anyone passing through the court. Old vehicles littered the roadways, making access for vehicles difficult; old mattresses lie in the yards; and abandoned furniture and appliances were piled in yards and common areas.
“It's an ongoing problem,” Barger said.
Johnson hates the place, and speaks bitterly about the people who live there.
When contacted for this story, Haruda said he intended to call the Dwelling Place and tell them to clean the park.
“They're not doing their job,” he said. “I may have to change things.”
Officials at the Dwelling Place say they're doing the best they can while obeying the law.
Last spring, Johnson began taking classes for first-time homebuyers. She applied for special loans and saved for a down payment. She couldn't afford to pay more than about $130,000. The only homes in her price range were junked, she said, or condominiums. She has two dogs and can't imagine living in a condo. After her experience at Hollywood, she doesn't want neighbors to be able to ruin her new home.
About six weeks ago, she found a modular home with some promise. Listed at $121,500, it seemed like a good fit. But guidelines for the federal loan application declined the purchase.
The sellers worked with her, though, dropping the price $25,000. Johnson applied and got a commercial loan. She closed on the house about two weeks ago.
Standing in her new living room last week, Johnson looked around the spacious, carpeted space. A limited remodel was in progress.
“Obviously, it's a disaster. This whole thing has been a fiasco,” she said. Then she laughed. When she did so, she seemed close to tears.
Outside with her two dogs on the lawn, Johnson looked at the wooden fence and said, “I need privacy after where I've just lived.”
“Are you kidding?” she said, in answer to whether she would miss anything about Hollywood Park. “It's a ton of bricks lifted off my shoulders. Without my friends, I would never have made it.”
Reporter Robert Struckman can be reached at 523-5262 or rstruckman@missoulian.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)