Fresno trailer park residents pleaded for city’s help. Now they fear becoming homeless | Opinion
Two years ago, residents of a north Fresno trailer park placed their hopes in local leaders to help them out of a bad situation.
Local leaders, namely the Fresno City Council and a Fresno Superior Court judge, only made things worse.
Today, roughly half as many people live in the former Trails End Mobile Home Park compared to before government “help” arrived. More than a dozen were evicted by new predatory landlords scheming to turn a quick profit off their plight. Those who remain also face eviction in less than a year, but not before being threatened with rent hikes and all sorts of unpleasantries in the meantime.
How did this happen? It happened because city leaders didn’t care, didn’t listen, thought they knew better, or some regrettable combination thereof.
“What it boils down to is every step of the way, and I mean that very literally, the people in power to make those decisions just ignored the tenants and assumed that we were wrong,” said Mariah Thompson, a staff attorney with the nonprofit law firm California Rural Legal Assistance.
“It was a long line of dominoes.”
In 2021, following a couple years of derelict management and multiple trailer fires, one that resulted in a fatality, residents asked the city of Fresno to place Trails End under third-party receivership.
The city agreed. However, the receiver that city leaders recommended to a judge, Mark Adams, came with a checkered history of shady dealings, overbilling and treating the people he’s supposed to be helping with disdain.
“Myself and another attorney who had worked with (Adams) previously, we literally begged the city to pick someone else,” Thompson said. “We told him the guy was really bad news, and they said, ‘Yeah, thanks for your opinion.’ Then as soon as he got into place he started doing exactly what we said he was going to do.”
Adams’ official duties involved cleaning up homeless camps inside the park and forcing residents to bring their trailers and yards up to code. For doing so, his firm received more than $500,000 in fees, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation.
As residents beg, city ‘chickened out’
More crucially, Adams steered the park’s eventual purchase by Harmony Communities, a Stockton-based housing management company known for jacking up rents and inventing a fake spokesman (with the name Heywood Jablóm) to dodge questions from reporters.
Once again, residents and Thompson begged city leaders for their help with an alternative solution. They went out and found an alternative buyer, one with a solid reputation, but that nonprofit firm needed a few months to assemble a bid. In the meantime, the city could’ve simply purchased the park and held onto it for a couple months.
A co-op option was explored, taking advantage of state funding and low-interest loans to help finance the preservation of affordable mobile home parks for conversion to ownership by resident organizations.
City leaders weren’t interested in those paths. They acted like all they cared about was finding the quickest, easiest solution and putting the matter aside.
“We needed just a little bit of time, but they chickened out,” Thompson said. “They didn’t even have the guts to support us, they just wouldn’t take meetings. And when the judge turned to them in the courtroom and asked, ‘What do you think I should do?’ they went, ‘Oh, we’re not going to have an opinion about it.’ And that was that.”
Over the passionate objections of residents, Trails End Mobile Home Park was sold to Harmony, for $1.7 million, and renamed La Hacienda Mobile Estates. Less than a year later, after enforcing draconian rules that resulted in mass evictions, the company listed the 5.2-acre property on Sierra Avenue near Highway 41 for $4.1 million.
That works out to a tidy $2.4 million profit — provided Harmony gets its asking price and succeeds in evicting the remaining tenants (each of whom own their trailers but lease the space) by April 2024.
‘Mariah knew the truth’ about Harmony
Standing in the way is Thompson, who is representing almost 20 of them in multiple lawsuits involving wrongful eviction, retaliation and illegal business practices. The company has yet to file a compulsory impact report on the park’s closure, ignoring letters from the City Attorney’s office.
“Harmony lied to the city, too,” said Patricia Shawn, a 59-year-old IRS retiree who has lived at the park since 1998. “But Mariah knew the truth about that company, and she told the city what was going to happen.
“She was told she was wrong because they had promises. Well, look at those promises now. We live in fear every day of being evicted.”
The latest evictee is a 77-year-old cancer patient named David with no family or place to go.
“He might be on the streets,” Thompson said. “I don’t know.”
City leaders, unsurprisingly, aren’t eager to take responsibility. Including Fresno City Councilmember Garry Bredefeld, who in a March 2022 visit to the park with Mayor Jerry Dyer, assured residents “Help is on the way.”
“The city absolutely did the right thing in intervening, but it’s unfortunate that Harmony did not follow through on its long-term commitment to keeping and maintaining the park,” Bredefeld said.
Unfortunate is one way of putting it.
On one hand, city leaders are willing (and eager) to pour hundreds of millions in state and federal funds into new emergency shelters and affordable housing in order to reduce homelessness.
On the other, they refuse to make a comparatively paltry investment — or take advice — to ensure affordable housing that already exists in Fresno stays that way.
“The city is trying to help the homeless while making a bunch of us homeless at the same time,” said 76-year-old Patsy Rajskup, who has lived at the park for 33 years. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Sure doesn’t.
