They’re calling us trailer trash, undesirable.
Leave us alone. We’re not bothering anybody.
We’re paying our rent. Nobody here is a criminal.
One in 20 Americans live in mobile homes or trailers.
Many of them
could face eviction at any moment.
We already knew that we couldn’t afford to go rent or live anywhere else.
Why should we have to go rent when we own our home?
Investors all across the country are buying up mobile home parks.
And these new owners can choose to drastically increase rent
or repurpose the land without warning.
You’re talking about families,
and you’re talking about elderly that are on fixed incomes.
Mobile home parks are the most affordable housing that there is right now.
I hope you can help me to get more time to find a home
for my five brothers and my mother.
As one investor put it:
“Affordable housing gets hotter when the nation gets poorer.”
My mom didn’t have to rely on the government for housing.
If they move her to a place
where she has to pay $1,300 rent for a two-bedroom,
for the rest of her life, she needs government assistance
where she didn’t before.
For low-income residents, there is often nowhere else to go.
What am I going to do?
Where am I gonna go?
And the guy puts a hot water heater and he said,
“You gonna take that with you?”
I said, “What street corner am I gonna put it on?”
When Alondra Ruiz Vazquez and her husband
bought a home at Periwinkle Mobile Home Park in Central Phoenix,
they had no idea that they could be forced to leave.
Many of her neighbors have lived in their mobile homes for decades.
Everybody has their own little space where we live.
This is our home. We own it.
We own the mobile home,
but we don't own the land that it sits on.
I just don't feel that we can,
we could and we should go rent somewhere
where we own a home already.
But unfortunately, the truth is that we don't own the land.
More than 70% of mobile home residents own their homes,
but they still have to pay rent for the lot they sit on.
And when rent prices spike or the parks close,
residents can’t just up and move their homes.
Because mobile homes aren’t really that mobile.
It can cost thousands of dollars to move them
and they might even fall apart if you try.
When we bought the place, we thought it was never going to be taken away from us.
We were thinking we were going to be here many, many years.
Grand Canyon University, or GCU,
bought the Periwinkle Mobile Home lot six and a half years ago.
But residents were not served a notice to vacate the land until April 2022.
Alondra and her husband originally moved to Periwinkle
to be closer to their volunteer soccer club,
which serves refugee children in the neighborhood.
This is my kitchen.
We have a bathroom over there and we have one bedroom.
These kids, like, they're really special to us.
They are from Burundi and they are refugee kids here to the United States.
And they are members of our soccer club.
When their parents became homeless, they were evicted.
We were able to bring the kids here.
We’ve been able to help a lot of people.
Many residents in the park worry their only option
will be to live in the streets.
Alondra’s next-door neighbor, Jerry, has no idea where he will go.
It’s good to see you. You scared me the other day.
I bought this place when I was 55 years old
so it’d be the last place I have to go for the remainder of my life.
That was 28 years ago. I am 83 years now.
I’m in and out of the hospital on account of heart problems.
And my doctor said if I'm stressed,
when I told him what the problem was -
he said, “Try not to stress out over it.”
It doesn’t matter whether I try not to or not.
I wake up in the middle of the night and...
That’s what I do all night.
What am I gonna do?
Where am I gonna go?
They treat us like we’re nonexistent.
Why the government don't step in and do something about this?
Fight for us.
I started to worry about Jerry.
Cause I know I had a solution. I know I have family or friends,
but I don't know where Jerry would go.
I started to worry about my neighbor that lives right in front of me.
She's a single mom.
I started like losing sleep and staying awake at night,
just thinking, you know, about the families that live here.
Phoenix has historically been known as one of
the most affordable major metropolitan cities in the U.S.
But that seems to be changing.
For over two years during the pandemic,
Phoenix suffered from the fastest-growing home prices in the country.
And even before the pandemic,
100,000 households couldn’t afford their rent.
We have a lot of mobile home parks here in the city of Phoenix
that is currently allowing low-income people to have affordable housing.
They’ve been paying rent for years and years.
They pay their property tax on this as any other homeowner.
This is Pamela Bridge, a lawyer with Community Legal Services.
In January 2023, the Phoenix City Council authorized a $300,000 budget
for the firm to provide assistance to mobile home tenants
at Periwinkle and two other parks.
But they are not permitted to represent undocumented residents,
who are often the most vulnerable to housing insecurity.
We are getting mobile home calls every single day at Community Legal Services,
from different mobile home owners and tenants
who are worried, who have been getting notices.
We are seeing the same situation over and over again of
the increased rents or the landlord who is deciding to sell.
I think a lot of out-of-state investors
think that they can do great business in Arizona
and that is what we are seeing, not just in the mobile home world,
but throughout all types of property owners.
In October 2021, the average rent in Phoenix reached nearly $1,500,
which is triple what some residents pay in mobile home parks.
Carmen Prieto is one of these residents.
She lives in a mobile home park called Weldon Court in north Phoenix
where she owns a two-bedroom mobile home.
She pays around $500 a month in rental fees.
But Carmen and her neighbors were given an official deadline to leave.
- Good morning.
I've been living here for 11 years at this mobile park
and it's been like you see it, friendly.
A lot of people don't know what to do,
especially if they have six children, five children.
They gotta get a what? Four-bedroom, five-bedroom?
Can they really afford that?
Trailer parks is only $500 because we own our trailers.
We paid off our trailer. We bought it cash.
Carmen receives around $1,100 a month
through social security due to a disability.
She first moved to the park because it was the only rent she could afford.
But now, she can’t relocate her home.
Mine's a 1973 trailer and they won't be able to move.
They already said they won't be able to move.
Due to federal housing regulations,
mobile homes built before 1976 often aren’t eligible to be moved.
In fact, any mobile home built after 1976
is technically called a “manufactured home.”
But among residents, the name didn’t stick.
Even if you are allowed to move your home, it can be prohibitively expensive.
Arizona offers some relocation funds for mobile home residents being displaced,
but it often isn’t enough to cover moving costs.
To move it, it costs $7,800 of their pocket that they help with the state.
But it costs us more to move.
And the bottom of the trailer,
you move all these sidings in the bottom
and then they have tires.
See, this is the hitch.
The hitch is already on there. I never took it off.
I think if we move it, it’s gonna be destroyed.
It will fall apart.
Carmen’s daughter, Patty, says park management and city officials
didn’t provide information about Arizona’s relocation fund in Spanish.
- You don’t have no papers for us in Spanish
and you say you want to help us.
This is clearly majority Latino people here.
- I will come to another meeting with those forms.
- On the 29th, he is going to bring them in Spanish.
And he never did.
The Arizona Department of Housing is not legally required
to inform tenants about the relocation fund.
But they say they have bilingual staff available
to assist tenants
who contact their office.
Still, Carmen says that she and her neighbors
only received the original letters from their landlord in English.
They see me in the streets or they come to the door.
And they asked me clearly, "What does this say?"
I had to translate it to them.
While it isn’t illegal to only provide the documents in English,
it makes much more difficult for tenants to understand their rights.
Then it felt like this monster is targeting these people
that don't understand what's happening because it's not in their language.
I think it's our community in general, that is...
First of all, we're not informed of our rights.
And secondly: in fear.
Fear that’s in the back of all these people’s mind.
Like, “Oh sh*t, they’re just gonna call the immigration
and round us all up and just shoo us to Mexico.”
How do we fight that?
All we have is our voice.
For Carmen, her trailer is a lifeline for her family.
She is the guardian of her two granddaughters,
who she helped raise in Weldon Court.
She even helped deliver her grandson in the bedroom of her home.
- And my little girls do consider this safe.
This is where they play, they know all the neighbors.
All the kids grew up together.
My little girls consider this my mom’s house.
So this is my mom’s house and I am going to fight for my mom.
Sylvia Herrera is a community organizer in Phoenix.
She and her husband, Salvador,
have been helping mobile home park residents
fight evictions for a decade.
You can see the gentrification here
and this is all part of the plan
to get rid of low-income communities in the core of the city.
So you see central Phoenix
and these areas that have mobile home parks
are totally going to be literally demolished.
Mobile home parks are purchased by investors for a variety of reasons -
sometimes to build apartment buildings or businesses
and sometimes just to revamp the parks and charge higher rent.
In 2018, Sylvia and Salvador helped residents of a nearby park
connect with lawyers after they were given notice to leave.
Some residents were able to negotiate to stay in the park,
but they say rent spiked dramatically.
- Hello.
You are all an example of how when you fight,
you can accomplish things.
It doesn’t matter that they raise the rent,
but we want to stay here.
We’re happy here.
And the reality is that in other places,
the rent is becoming unbearable.
Everywhere, the rent is [so high].
That’s right. There aren’t places.
This is the only place that you can rent.
- Initially, we paid $250 dollars in rent.
And now we pay $750 plus utilities.
And the old owner always had green spaces.
Groundskeepers would come, they did cleaning.
We always had services.
Now, we don’t have them and we pay more.
Sylvia and Salvador are now helping mobile home residents connect with pro bono lawyers.
In many cases, the only thing these lawyers can do is buy time.
They can attempt to have cases dismissed based on technicalities,
like not providing adequate notice for the eviction.
In Las Casitas, dozens of residents pack into a mobile home
to hear updates about their case.
- The city is saying that they can’t do anything about it.
We have limited time to put pressure on them.
And tell them that you have all looked for places to go and no one has found anywhere to go.
Tell them that there isn’t anywhere for you to go.
Members from all three parks have spoken numerous times
at Phoenix City Council meetings to ask for help.
One of their main concerns is their children.
My siblings and I were raised and born here in our mobile homes.
My parents as of right now do not have the funds to get a new place for us.
Just as it is affecting us, it is affecting our children too.
And it’s possible they aren’t expressing it.
An 11-year-old child cried and cried while I was talking to him, for almost two hours.
It left me really sad.
If they can’t find new homes by their deadline,
residents of Las Casitas, Weldon Court and Periwinkle
could end up unhoused.
For them, it’s nothing more than a trailer.
And these are our homes that are within our reach.
I don’t want to be another one on the list of people living on the street.
Because they have already demonstrated
that they don’t care about the people living on the street.
Despite the hardships they are enduring,
residents are committed to working towards a solution together as a community.
We are united as Latinos, right?
Yes, we’re poor - that’s why we live here.
But we have to keep going and not falter.
Trailers! United!
Will never be defeated!