Soon-to-be-displaced trailer park residents ask ...
Sunday August 20, 2006
Story by Brook Griffin
Jen Saunders is trying to remain positive, even though she and her son could be forced to leave their mobile home at Bridger View Trailer Court.
Saunders, 39, is one of 92 residents whose trailers stand in the way of a new housing development planned for the Story Mill district on Bozeman’s north side.
“I’ve been through a tremendous amount of trauma,” Saunders said. “I’ve been polished, so to speak.”
Saunders moved into her trailer after losing her boyfriend of eight years to a drowning accident in West Virginia. She tried hard to stay in the house they had bought together, but it was no use.
“We struggled for a year to pay the bills and
keep the house,” she said. But the home was
repossessed, and she and her son moved back
to Bozeman.
They slept on friends’ couches for months. Then a relative gave them a mobile home at Bridger View, where Saunders maintains an art studio while working full time downtown.
“This provided me with affordable housing and a chance to get my life together,” she said.
The path of progress is about to plow under Bridger View Trailer Court to make room for new homes — a situation that makes trailer residents nervous, city officials uncomfortable and even puts the developer himself in the hot seat.
Matt Crocker, the man behind the Story Mill redevelopment, said there is little chance of another trailer court going up anywhere in his 90-acre project.
“It doesn’t really jibe with my goals,” Crocker said in an interview this week.
He is proposing a residential subdivision with homes that could go for as much as $1.5 million, he said, and while he would like to accommodate Bridger View residents, the price of “affordable” housing will likely be around $150,000.
Crocker said he would not want older model mobile homes like many of those in Bridger View to stay there.
“It definitely changes the opportunities I have to offer,” he said.
At this point, the 92-lot trailer court is home to about 150 people.
By comparison with the rest of the city, housing in Bridger View is relatively cheap. A trailer can be bought for less than $3,000, and many residents own their trailers outright.
But residents don’t own the land their trailers sit on, they rent it, paying about $335 a month for a lot. And Bridger View residents have month-tomonth leases.
That puts them in a precarious position. When those leases are up for renewal, the owner can simply refuse to renew. And there is nothing the residents can do about it.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that moving a trailer is expensive, and that some of the trailers are really too old or dilapidated to be moved.
“It’s just like a natural disaster to me,” said Ken Kraft, one of the most outspoken residents of Bridger View. “We aren’t going to get any FEMA, we aren’t going to get any federal assistance here.”
Bridger View’s woes are nothing new to Bruce Savage, the Manufactured Housing Institute’s vice president of public affairs.
The problem, Savage said, is that mobile home courts have been forced to the outskirts of town for decades. But as cities grow, they often wind up surrounding the older trailer courts and suddenly that land is attractive to developers who envision a completely different kind of housing going up there.
“Those are very desirable pieces of land,” he said. “We’re seeing more and more of this happening. That’s a huge issue for this country.”
Assistant City Planner Chris Saunders said recently that he was “frankly surprised” that the issue of displacing trailer courts had not come up before in Bozeman.
The pressures on Bridger View’s residents are starting to make other trailer court residents nervous, too.
Don Bruffey, who lives in Gallatin Village Trailer Court a little more than a mile west of Bridger View, is starting to wonder when it will be his turn to move out.
“This is worth some dough, this hunk of dirt here,” Bruffey said pointing to the ground outside of his home. “I’ve always said this is where the poor people come to die, but now you can’t even do that.”
Jean Robbins has lived in Bridger View for 22 years. She has raised kids and buried loved ones and now lives alone in the mobile home she bought when she moved to Bozeman to be closer to her children more than two decades ago.
“We liked it right from the beginning,” she said.
Robbins likes the neighborhood, she knows the other residents and said everyone watches out for each other.
Lately, however, she said she hasn’t been able to sleep much because of her anxiety about the future.
She is afraid she will have no place to go if she has to leave the trailer court. She is frustrated, but remains quiet and cordial, explaining that she understands the reality of her situation.
“Money talks,” she said.
Kraft, like many Bridger View residents, moved there because it was affordable.
“It is the answer to affordable housing,” he said.
Yet mobile homes have not gotten much attention in the city’s quest for an affordablehousing policy. The Bozeman City Commission has been struggling to find ways to keep housing costs low enough for people on low and fixed incomes, a category many Bridger View residents fall into.
Commissioner Jeff Rupp, who has made affordable housing his top priority in office, said he wants to talk to the Story Mill developer and try to find a way to keep people in those homes.
“I’m not going to make a decision about affordable housing and turn a blind eye to these people,” he said.
However, although Rupp’s fervor is beyond question, his power is limited.Chris Saunders said the city has few options for getting involved.
“If (developers) are following all the rules, it makes it difficult for the city to say no,” Saunders said. “There is nothing the city has in place that says, ‘You must allow this as a developer.’”
The owners of the trailer court could decide to raise lot rents significantly, which would effectively evict the residents there now.
Within the city, a singlewide or double-wide trailer or a manufactured home could legally be installed in any residential area of the city — as long as it met existing neighborhood criteria Chris Saunders said. Such criteria include historic overlay, neighborhood character and setbacks.
But historically, trailers have been clustered in courts, where lot sizes and utility hook-ups are designed to accommodate that kind of housing. Many of those parts of the city, including Bridger View, are zoned R-MH, for residential-manufactured housing.
That doesn’t mean everything within that zone has to be mobile homes or manufactured housing, Saunders said. Other permitted uses include community centers or group homes. And conditional uses — which require city approval — could include a golf course, for example.
Perhaps one way to address the situation could be to eliminate all other possible uses from R-MH zones except mobile homes, Commissioner Steve Kirchhoff said.
“I think if there is a chance the commission could play a role in retaining a traditional affordable housing type inside the city, we should,” he said.
Harold Alberez moved to Bridger View to be close to his granddaughter.
“She was 6 years old when I came up here to live,” he said.
Before that, he had traveled to Bozeman each year from his home in Baton Rouge, La., to spend three weeks with the little girl. He spent those vacations living in a motel.
When he finally moved here he immediately knew he wanted a trailer because of the cost.
“That’s all I could afford,” he said with a hearty laugh.
But his granddaughter is 11 now, and Alberez, a Southern gentleman who calls all the ladies who live around him “Miss,” is ready to move back home to Baton Rouge to live with his brother.
But he’s having trouble selling his trailer. As soon as anyone finds out what is in store for Bridger View, the buyers politely excuse themselves.
“Who wants to live in a trailer for only two years?” he said.
Crocker has said it will be at least two years before residents might have to move out of their homes.
At that point, many Bridger View residents will likely abandon their trailers rather than move them somewhere else, which could mean developers wind up with a hefty clean-up bill.
The cost of moving a trailer is considerable, said LeRoy Likness, president of the Montana Manufactured Housing and R.V. Association.
Likness estimated it would cost as much as $3,500 to move a single-wide trailer within a 50-mile radius of Bridger View.
The bigger factor, however, is where to put them.
“There is no where else in town that will allow something that old,” he said.
Likness said many trailer courts don’t allow trailers that are more than 10 years old. That leaves many of the models in Bridger View out in the cold.
A few other trailer court owners have indicated a willingness to make room for the residents from Bridger View, Chris Saunders and Crocker said.
But only time will tell what will become of the people living there.
As for Jen Saunders, she is trying to work with GoBuild, talking to them as much as she can, to find a solution that will keep her on her feet. She said without the developers help she will have few options for the future of her or her son.
“I’m working as an advocate in my neighborhood,” she said.
Still there is a bigger issue that haunts her, the issue of what is right and wrong and where people fit in.
“There is an ethical question,” she said. “Is development more important than the repercussions of putting someone out on the street?”
Brook Griffin is at bgriffin@dailychronicle.com
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