The Snug Harbor RV Park just off Gandy Boulevard in St. Petersburg shouts neglect. The grass is weedy and tall. The road is rutted, poked with holes. The mobile homes, one after another, need painting.
But don't hold your breath. You don't fix things when the bulldozers are coming and a way of life is ending.
This little park, long home to fishermen, waitresses and retirees, is coming down to make way for another pricey bayfront development.
The notice came in the mail just three weeks ago.
The residents have six months, until just before Christmas, to get out.
"I didn't believe it," said 80-year-old Lucienne Campbell, who has lived in the park 47 years. "I thought I would finish my days here and just move on home - wherever God was going to put me."
Mrs. Campbell is like many people here. She has no savings and lives month to month on her government check. She has no relatives. When her six months are up, she has no idea where she'll be.
She has trouble sleeping now.
Over and over, that is the story at Snug Harbor. Life is like a series of dominoes collapsing one after another.
People make little money. Because they have no savings, they have no money for a down payment some place else. Their mobile homes may be too old, too decrepit to move, even if they had the money to move them.
So they may be forced to abandon their homes. If that happens, the state would pay Mrs. Campbell perhaps as much as $2,500 for moving expenses, but that won't buy much when it comes to the starting over costs of finding a new home or putting down deposits on rent and utilities.
Her home is a double wide. There is a terrible patch in the ceiling on one side, meant to fix a leak, made of plastic sheeting and tape. Every inch of her sofa is covered by an afghan. Around the corner is another living room, in much better shape. It even contains an electric fireplace and a concealed bar and a stereo system.
But Mrs. Campbell doesn't conceal the fact that she is losing interest in keeping up the looks of the mobile home, now that she knows her time in it is coming to an end.
What does she do with all that she owns, the objects accumulated across the years, forgotten gifts, beloved treasures? She has an entire room of stuff. It seems to add to her burden, her worry. She won't have to find just a place to live, but a place to hold all this, unless she just gives it away.
The demise of Snug Harbor is not a new story. It has happened before. It will happen again. Everybody wants to live on the water. The poor people who for years had their paradise in the mobile home parks that lined Florida's coastline are now, cruelly put, in the way.
In a real estate market where nobody blinks at paying $300,000 for a house, the plight of somebody being driven from a beat-up mobile home - where the monthly costs, between lot rents and payments on the home, total about $450 - barely causes a stir.
I think of a man like Ronald Yarger, 44, another unlucky occupant at Snug Harbor. No one can call him a slacker. He works in plastics manufacturing. He is also the guardian of a mentally retarded woman who lives with him. He, like the others, has no savings.
His mobile home is too old to move. He has no clue what he'll do when he has to leave in six months.
"I'm kind of between a rock and a hard place," Yarger said.
This is a man who prefers to speak in understatement.
He faces a very plain question: Where will he find a place to live that he can afford? Why should this all be so hard?
