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The human side of development

One casualty of mobile home park demolition wonders if she can ever afford stability.

By ANNE LINDBERG
Published June 11, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG -- Dressed in her pink Crab Shack T-shirt, Peggy Rogers stood at the side of Gandy Boulevard, squinting into the sun and watching four lanes of traffic whiz past.

Behind her was a high-rise in midconstruction. Beyond that, more of the towering condos that have sprouted among the mangroves along Gandy in the past few years.

"I can remember when this was just a two-lane road," said Rogers, 52.

Now "more wildlife comes out on this road and gets hit because they're getting squished out of their home. They have nowhere to go," she said. "They're just like the people. They're getting squished out of their homes. They've got nowhere to go."

Rogers ought to know.

The vacant chunk of land to her left used to be her home. Now a sign in front of the former Snug Harbor Mobile Home Park proclaims: "List Group Developer ... Signature Mortgage ... Savarino Construction."

Rogers is one of an increasing number of mobile home owners forced from their homes because of development. Many are poor, elderly or disabled. Most scurry for shelter to other parks, where they do not own the land, because it's all they can afford.

But they're just steps ahead of the developers. Then the downward cycle begins again.

"The rich get richer. The poor get homeless," said Rogers, who makes less than $15,000 a year working three jobs: server and hostess at the Crab Shack, part-time babysitter, and caregiver for an elderly man.

Like an increasing number of mobile home owners, Rogers tried to fight.

She and her boyfriend joined a class-action lawsuit filed by residents of Snug Harbor and the adjacent Pirates Cove Mobile Home Park in an attempt to keep their homes or at least get a fair settlement.

Rogers also fought in other ways. She joined her neighbors picketing along Gandy, holding up signs protesting the unfairness of the rules that seem to favor developers over individual homeowners.

She and her boyfriend were the last to leave Snug Harbor. They stayed as the trailers around them were dismantled. As landscaping was plowed under. As neighbors, including other Crab Shack employees, moved away. As the electricity was cut off.

She was tossed off the property. She returned. She was tossed off again.

When the workers came, Rogers and Crab Shack co-workers crossed the grassy strip behind the restaurant, opened the weathered wooden gate and watched as her trailer was demolished.

"They'd ram a sledgehammer into it ... They'd raise their hands like they were at a hoedown," Rogers recalled. The workers, she said, screamed obscenities at her and cheered as they slammed the hammers into walls. "It's unfair, very, very unfair. That was my home."

Rogers was unable to hold back tears as she talked about the loss of the home that she bought for $5,000. She said she put another $7,000 into renovations.

"I lost everything," she said. "I just wanted to break even. I just wanted to be able to start over. That was all the money I had in the world. Part of it was an inheritance from my dad."

Rogers would not talk about the lawsuit because she was bound by a confidentiality agreement. But she said that when they settled, "we did not come out good."

"Emotionally, I never recovered either," she said. "It was very traumatic."

She was unable to come up with enough money to pay nonrefundable pet fees and the first and last months' rent to get an apartment. So Rogers opted to spend $2,000 for a mobile home in Riviera Harbor on Tampa Bay, the park next door to Pirates Cove and Snug Harbor. It, like Snug Harbor, is only a few steps to her job at the Crab Shack.

She moved into the waterfront park with her boyfriend, four cats, three cockatiels and a parrot.

But life hasn't headed in the happily-ever-after direction.

In the past three or four weeks, Rogers and her neighbors have watched in horror as empty trailers are towed off, others are demolished and large palms are dug up and removed.

Workers on the property say it's being done to solve building code issues. They say they've been told new mobile homes will soon be moved in.

But Rogers does not believe that.

"It's going to happen again," she said. "I'm going to be 53 years old and I'm going to have to start again."

Riviera-Pinellas Partners LLC owns Riviera Harbor. The company's managers and founders are Aram Guluzian and John Lum, who are listed as president and vice president, respectively, of the List Group Inc. with the Florida Department of State's Division of Corporations. That's the same group turning nearby property on Gandy into condos.

Neither Guluzian nor Lum returned phone messages asking for comment.

Rogers wants to fight but cannot afford a private attorney.

"I live from paycheck to paycheck. Penny to penny. Dollar to dollar," she said. So she plans to complain to state Attorney General Charlie Crist.

"He's my last hope," she said. "You can't lay down and not shout. Somebody needs to do something."

Her concerns are not only with dispossessed mobile home owners. She also worries about the loss of wildlife habitat and talks passionately of the high-rises that block the view of the beach from Gulf Boulevard.

She worries about nearby Weedon Island and the effect the increased number of boats will have on the area. She wonders why environmental activists are not protesting.

"They took the beach and now they're coming here," Rogers said. "They call it progress. I call it pollution."

[Last modified June 11, 2006, 08:36:15]