GLADSTONE, Ore. — Families at a mobile home park in Gladstone are looking to join together and purchase the land their trailers sit on, amid fears of a sale, rising rent, or displacement.
Many of the roughly 80 families who live at the Tri-City Mobile Home Court received a letter in January expressing the park's ownership intends to sell the property.
The letter and subsequent conversations brought fear of significantly raised rents or a new ownership group looking to force out residents for new development.
"Everybody just feels lost," said Maria Orozco, a 21-year resident of the park who raised her three children in the Gladstone community. "We fear of being homeless and nobody can afford to get any other place."
The mobile homes at Tri-City are more mobile in name, than in practice.
Peggy Seiler's mother moved into the park in 1979, and Peggy herself has lived there for 14 years.
"We own our own homes, but we do not own our own land," Seiler said. "That's the problem because my place would take at least $10,000 to pick it up and move, and if I were to pick it up and move it, would it stay together? And where am I going to move to?"
Per Oregon law, when a company notifies residents of its intent to sell the land of a mobile home park, residents have the opportunity to join together and form a co-operative, get funding, and make a bid to buy the property.
Orozco stepped up and translated the letter and the current situation to many of the Spanish-speaking residents at the Tri-City park — she estimates about 60% of the people there speak Spanish.
Starting with an outdoors meeting during the ice storm, residents decided to pursue a co-operative to hopefully take ownership of their community into their own hands.
"It would ensure that I don't have to worry about where I'm going to live the rest of my life, that I can comfortably live where I'm at," Seiler said.
The residents are working with Community and Shelter Assistance (CASA) of Oregon, a nonprofit that has helped preserve 26 mobile home parks throughout Oregon since 2009, according to Rose Ojeda, CASA's manufactured housing and co-operative development center director.
"We believe that through our program residents are able to stabilize their housing costs and there's a lot of self-determination in this effort as well," Ojeda said.
The pursuit of a co-op is not a novel idea. Just down the street from Tri-City, residents at an adjacent mobile home park formed a co-op in 2019. Seiler and Orozco said new roads and improvements quickly followed for their neighbors, along with housing stability.
"It would be a benefit to all of our community," Orozco said. "Hopefully, you know, we'll get the same and one day be able to celebrate it."
Ojeda said there are still legal questions about the ability for the park residents to form a co-op. Lawyers are reviewing a potential error in the intent to sell that could end the current sale process and close the resident group's opportunity to provide a competitive offer.
However, Ojeda said the mobilization has been a positive, regardless of the outcome of CASA and the legal review.
"I think homeowners in manufactured dwelling parks remain vulnerable to park closures, and I think we're all in agreement that we do not want to add to our homelessness crisis here in Oregon," she said.
The experience, Orozco said, has united her community.
"We just feel more like family and we don't want to fall apart, this family," she said. "This is our home, we don't need another home."
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