‘It’s going to become a resident-owned community’

Kudos to Rachel Stark of The Oregonian for following up on an important story four years later: “Loss lingers for former residents of Thunderbird Mobile Club, four years after Wilsonville (Ore.) park closed.”

The last residents of the Thunderbird Mobile Club in Wilsonville can all trace a chaotic chapter in their lives to February 2007, when they were evicted at the height of the housing boom to make way for new development.

More than 50 Oregon mobile home parks issued mass evictions in the five years ending in March 2008. The Thunderbird closure was one of the largest.

Many of the residents were seniors on fixed incomes, some with homes too old to move or be accepted into other parks. Others could not afford up to $30,000 in relocation costs. … Nearly 200 people scattered to find new homes. They settled into apartment complexes, nursing homes, and family members’ houses. Some died shortly after the eviction. A few moved to other mobile home parks.

Here are some of their stories.

Stark then profiles seven of the former residents who were evicted in 2007, putting names and faces to an all-too-common story.

The disruption, financial loss and hardship that struck the 200 former residents of Thunderbird is something that can strike at any time for the millions of Americans who live in manufactured home communities, owning their homes, but not the land beneath them.

Such communities can never have real stability or security as long as the land beneath their homes can be sold out from under them. The path forward is demonstrated by a happier story reported by Jonathan D. Epstein in The Buffalo News: “Residents buy Marilla (N.Y.) mobile home park.”

The residents of a low-income Marilla mobile home community have taken matters into their own hands, using help from the state to buy the community itself from a Rochester-based corporation.

Marilla Country Village Inc. bought the 154-unit Bush Gardens property on Three Rod Road from KDM Development Corp. for $4.5 million, according to documents filed with the Erie County Clerk’s Office.

The goal is to ensure more local control and better responsiveness to their needs than they were getting from a large for-profit corporation operating in multiple states, said Dennis Jakubowski, the president of the new homeowners association that consummated the purchase as a nonprofit entity.

“It’s going to become a resident-owned community. We have control over it,” he said. “The problem we were having is the owners, when it’s a big corporation, they don’t care. They just raise your rent. They’re in it for the profit.”

… The Bush Gardens residents had been working on the deal for almost two years, Jakubowski said. They teamed up with a Concord, N.H.-based nonprofit finance company, Resident Owned Communities or ROC USA LLC, that specializes in helping resident corporations buy their mobile home parks from private owners. Since its founding in May 2008, it has helped 28 communities with 1,749 homes.