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Lessons can be seen in mobile home parks

Residents of the Anchor North Bay mobile home park just outside Oldsmar thought they had an understanding with the new owners of their park.

They thought Alex Sullivan and Adam Schoenbaum, who paid more than $3-million for the park in December, intended to keep the park and manage it, even upgrade some of the dilapidated areas. They said the owners told them so in multiple conversations.

But as Times staff writer Nicole Johnson reported this week, it appears that the new owners were at the same time meeting with government officials and figuring out how many townhomes could be built on the 7.8-acre mobile home park property.

On March 10 the residents of Anchor North Bay, many of them struggling to live on low incomes, found eviction notices on their doors. They have until Sept. 5 to vacate so the land can be cleared for construction of townhomes.

The residents feel misled, and no wonder. From all appearances, while Sullivan and Schoenbaum were assuring residents they had no reason to worry about losing their homes, they were weighing development opportunities on the property that overlooks Old Tampa Bay. Sullivan and Schoenbaum, for their part, say they were just visiting government officials to say hi, and that they changed their minds about managing a mobile home park.

That is no solace for Anchor North Bay residents whose lives have been thrown into turmoil. There are no new mobile home parks opening in North Pinellas, and there is so little site-built affordable housing that some residents may have to leave the area. That means looking for work somewhere else or figuring out a way to work here and live elsewhere.

These are life-altering decisions that residents have only five months to make. Had Sullivan and Schoenbaum been up front from the beginning, residents would have had several additional months to plan a survival strategy.

There is a lesson in this for residents of other mobile home parks in Pinellas County. Redevelopment of built-out Pinellas is rocketing along, with would-be developers of commercial and residential projects seeking land anywhere they can get it. Since there is virtually no vacant land left, developers now are competing for property that has been developed, but not to what the codes would call its "highest and best use." Mobile home parks are on all of their maps. Residents of those parks should think now about what their options would be if their park was purchased and they were told to leave. Thinking ahead now may lessen the trauma then.

There is also a lesson here for Pinellas local governments that have not yet gotten the message about the desperate need for new affordable housing. When a mobile home park closes, or an old apartment building or public housing complex is razed, some of the displaced residents may leave the area. However, others will stay and rely on public assistance and social service agencies to help them survive.

Local governments need to create incentives to encourage construction of affordable housing, provide land to nonprofit agencies that build housing for people who make low incomes, and partner with the development community to make sure that Pinellas residents of all income levels have access to decent and safe housing. And they needed to do that yesterday.

[Last modified March 23, 2005, 00:55:18]